The brains behind research on the brain
While studying physics and electrical engineering as an MIT undergraduate in the late 1990s, Mehmet Fatih Yanik managed to avoid taking any biology classes until his final semester, when he was forced to sign up for a course.“I believed that biology was very boring, and just about memorizing facts,” he says.So having no choice but to attend the course, Yanik sat at the back of the lecture hall, expecting the worst. But as time went on, he found he was getting more and more interested in the course, which was run by professor of biology Eric Lander, one of the leaders of the Human Genome Project and founding director of the Broad Institute. “I started to sit closer and closer to the front of the classroom,” he says.By the end of the semester Yanik was hooked, and had decided he wanted to study biology.But how could he pursue his newfound...