7. The prologue

Rarely does one find Maxine Singer outside a public place without a lit cigarette. Once, a scientific colleague described Maxine walking up the winding road near the Carnegie Institution building, named after her, on the edge of the Johns Hopkins campus as “a diminutive white-haired lady surrounded by a cloud of smoke.” Yet she can survive hours on end in a conference room or a meeting hall without a cigarette.

I first met Maxine when Alan Scott invited her to Hopkins to present a seminar on her work on repetitive DNA. It was the early 1980s, and Maxine had immersed herself in a new field. She had been universally recognized as a world-class nucleic acid biochemist, working on RNA enzymes. Recently, she had begun an effort to understand the structure and function of repetitive DNA (DNA present in many, many copies of very similar sequence) in human and primate genomes. She was a very quick mind, dedicated to Science with a capital S, but loved talking about her family almost as much as discussing nucleic acids. In her seminar, she pointed out that her lab had found that one kind of repetitive DNA was present in the human genome in roughly 100,000....lineGrimaldi et al., 1984