Yes. This was MIT. So, I published all this. The first paper I published in the worm was actually as a professor at MIT is showing there was a dosage compensation, and then I found the link between dosage compensation and sex determination. So, I found there was coordinate control. Those were the first two papers; they were both Cell papers. Then my technician was growing up a vat of this dosage compensation mutant that was killing off hermaphrodites. And all of a sudden, the culture reverted and all of a sudden, instead of having only a few hermaphrodites, there started to be a huge population of hermaphrodites in this liquid culture. And he was throwing it down the sink. He said, oh, my mutation reverted. And I screamed across the room, save the culture. And so, I ran over and got the nematodes out of the culture and started analyzing them and discovered that the mutation that caused these animals to live was actually the primary sex determination genes all one that control both sex determination and dosage compensation.

And then I realized my dream was going to come true, that that gene was required for male development. If you mutated that gene, the males died. The reason there were actually animals in that culture was that they were XO animals and the zol-1 mutation would've killed them, but the mutation we were trying to grow, the dosage compensation mutation, suppressed the lethality of the males. And so, we were able to have this culture which had the primary sex determination gene that controlled both sex determination dosage conversation. That took a while to figure out, but that was my third Cell paper.

And so, then it became obvious, if you have this mutation in zol-1 and it kills males, all you have to do is mutagenize the culture and look for males to come out. And that should give you all genes in the dosage conversation pathway downstream in zol-1. And that's how we discovered all the rest of the genes.

Dr. Barbara Meyer is a genetics, genomics and development professor in the molecular and cell biology department at University of California, Berkeley. She also serves as an adjunct professor in the biochemistry and biophysics department at University of California, San Francisco’s School of Medicine and an HHMI investigator. Dr. Meyer completed her undergraduate studies at Stanford University and began her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and finished at Harvard University. During her post-doctoral work, she researched how chromosomes determined sex of C. elegans at the Cambridge University Laboratory of Molecular Biology with Dr. Sydney Brenner.

Dr. Meyer received her Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Stanford University in 1971, her Master of Science in Molecular Biology from the University of California-Berkeley in 1975, and her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard University in 1979. She then began post-doctoral research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology to research how chromosomes determined sex of C. elegans. After completing her work at the MRC, she established her first lab at MIT to further analyze sex determination mechanisms.

Dr. Meyer was a tenured professor at MIT until 1990 where she became a genetics, genomics, and development professor at the University of California-Berkeley. In 1995, she became a member of the American Association of Cell Biology and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also became an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1997, where she and her lab successfully identified the master gene involved in sex determination. This breakthrough has helped advance research on chromosome repression and X chromosome dosage compensation.

Dr. Meyer has received many awards for her work, including the Genetics Society of America Medal in 2010, the Francis Amory Prize in Medicine and Physiology by the American Academy of Arts and Science in 2017, the E.B. Wilson Medal by the American Society for Cell Biology’s highest honor for science, the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal, and was also elected to the National Academy of Medicine all in 2018.