Geneticist Gerald Fink has a thing for yeast. "I've worked on yeast since 1962," he says. "My younger daughter was born in 1966, so I've known the fungus longer than I've known my daughter."
The familiarity shows. He casually refers to these microscopic, single-celled members of the fungus family as "our guys" and states, without exaggeration, "I've seen millions of 'em. When people in the lab show me something unusual, I always tell them, 'Well, yeah, you might think you have something new, but trust me. . . .' " All the more reason to appreciate the recent turn of events in Fink's lab at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Not only did this familiar organism give him a whopping surprise, but--quite by chance--it may have shed light on how to deal with its many obnoxious fungal relatives.
Fungi are everywhere in nature--in the water, in the soil, on rotting vegetation. And they love to make themselves at home in our bodies. They cause mucous-membrane infections, skin infections such as ringworm and athlete's foot, and a variety of persistent lung diseases. In the otherwise healthy, these problems can be a mild to serious nuisance, but in those with faltering immune systems--people with AIDS or TB, transplant recipients, cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy--fungal infections can turn into an unmitigated disaster. They can spread corrosively through the body and brain, causing profound disability and death.
