‘A timeout from your regular life’
As a molecular genetics professor, Benny Shilo has spent much of the past three decades in a lab. He heads his own research group at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and has had findings published in Nature, Science, Cell, and other scientific journals. He has been Weizmann’s dean of biochemistry and chair of the Department of Molecular Genetics. Despite those scientific credentials, Shilo traded his lab coat for a camera bag this year, which he is spending at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Instead of peering through a microscope or reading the results of a genetic screen for the last year, Shilo has been peering through a camera lens, working on a project that uses scientific images and photographs of everyday people to explain concepts in developmental biology to the public. Shilo is pairing the images in a public outreach effort that seeks to better explain what he does. One...