A CHANGE OF MIND

摘要

When Mike McConnell decided what he wanted to spend his career working on, he was 29, inspired to begin his PhD-and flat broke. He'd learned from his biology classes that immune cells in the body constantly rearrange their own DNA: it's what allows them to protect us by making receptors in the right shapes to bind to invasive pathogens. Ashe wrapped up a master's degree in immunology in Virginia in the late 1990s, he'd obsess about it over beers with his roommates. "Suddenly this idea kind of clicked," McConnell recalls. If gene rearrangement helped the immune system function, where else could it happen? What about the brain? "Wouldn't it be neat if neurons did something like that too?" he thought.