Building a ladder to Hershey Heaven

Abstract

When Alfred Hershey, one of the founders of molecular biology, was asked to describe his idea of scientific happiness, he said that it would be "to have one experiment that works, and keep doing it all the time". By this he meant that it would be ideal to be able to conduct every experiment using the same tools and methods, and yet always generate new and interesting data (see Creager, 2001). However, molecular geneticists have not yet reached this "Hershey Heaven". Today, when researchers want to discover more about a protein in an animal – for example, which tissues and cell types express the protein – they usually have to rely on antibodies that bind to the protein of interest. Unfortunately, good antibodies do not exist for most proteins, and it is time-consuming and expensive to generate and characterize new antibodies.

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