Ellen Wright Clayton takes a fresh look at genetics

In the mid 1970s scientists and the government were at odds over new recombinant DNA research techniques and their unknown potential effect on public health. It was at ringside of this protracted controversy that Ellen Wright Clayton found her path.

SHE WAS STUDYING at Stanford toward her master's in biochemistry, and it happened that the professor teaching first-year graduate biochemistry was at the center of all the ruckus. Paul Berg didn't discuss the public controversy much in class, yet it was all over the press. (Berg later won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids with particular regard to recombinant DNA.)

"I just realized that was where my heart was, in the social response to science," Clayton said. continued..

Students pursues
medicine and law in
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