How did you end up using zebrafish to study developmental toxicology?
When I was an undergrad, I was really fascinated by developmental biology. You start with all the DNA in one cell, and once it’s initiated, the cell knows how to turn the right genes on at the right time to make cells differentiate, and start talking to the right cells to form a body plan and grow. And that’s just amazing. At the end of my graduate work, I was studying development in plants. We stressed the plants with heat or light. Then the plant turns on a battery of genes that normally aren’t on, and also turn off a bunch of other genes. I thought that it was interesting that with just one little stress, you can impact a large number of factors. I think that’s how I started thinking about environmental influences on gene expression. When I decided to look for a post-doc, I wanted to do something in development and I wanted to cross over to a vertebrate. So I started reading Science and Nature and other journals. I read a story about a group in the University of Oregon was promoting
