Lewis Tilney has always had a gift for looking for biology in strange places. His publishing history, he says, reads like a “Rogue's gallery” of plants, fungi, parasites, and plenty of unusual invertebrate creatures. “It's just ridiculous, and nowadays I couldn't get away with it.” His colleagues say it is part of his genius to look in unusual systems to answer fundamental biology questions, but Tilney shrugs off that idea.
“I have the attention span of a five-year-old,” he says. “It's always wonderful to start a new project that's curious and interesting. Then something else attracts my attention and I move on—it's a lack of commitment on my part.” So it's no surprise that one of Tilney's major contributions—proposing actin polymerization as a method of force generation within the cell—came through two landmark papers characterizing unorthodox systems: the acrosomal reaction in both starfish and sea...
