It's useful for dealing with the National Institutes of Health, for
instance. Since she started the lab, Bassler has applied for an NIH
grant many times. For the first several years, she could guess why
she was turned down: The idea of quorum sensing had not really
caught on.
Bacteria communicate? Oh, yes, that's
interesting, but it's hardly a cure for cholera. Application
rejected.
But when the NIH turned her down again in 2002 - after
the MacArthur came through - Bassler decided to pick up the phone.
"I explained the situation," she says politely. "And my
qualifications." Whatever she said, it worked. She got funding from
the NIH a few months later.
Now, grabbing the telephone in her office and speaking into the
receiver, she jokes, "They think I'm a genius! So what's your
problem?"
GETTING FUNDING MAY be routine now, but for years, Bassler
ran this lab on tiny grants collected a few at a time, like coins
in a cookie jar.
Bassler flew to Princeton 13 years ago with all her belongings. Her
sole companion was a cat. She was fresh off a postdoctoral
fellowship at the Agouron Institute in
La Jolla,
California, where
she studied with the godfather of quorum sensing, Mike Silverman.
When she moved, she had nothing but empty rooms in the Lewis Thomas
Laboratory building on the Princeton campus and a budget for
filling them.
For several years, she filled her budgetary cookie jar grant by
grant. She cobbled together enough money to operate the lab and to
fund her students' work, and slowly her team grew: She added a lab
assistant, a PhD student, another PhD student, a postdoc, and then
another postdoc. By the time they discovered the gene for AI-2 in
1999, seven people worked at the
Bassler Lab, and no one outside
microbiology had ever heard of them.