In 1998, Robert Insall abandoned his own lab and set up camp in that of his wife, cell biologist Laura Machesky. For three months, the pair slaved into the night at University College London. Their goal was to confirm a tantalizing link between biochemical signals entering a cell and the proteins that direct the cell's movement and division. The reason for the researchers' urgency: the fear that one of two competing labs would stumble on the same findings and 'scoop' them. In the end, the effort paid off. Competitors cursed as Machesky revealed her findings at that year's meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) in San Francisco. At the poster summarizing her talk, someone whipped out a mobile phone and started reading the methods to researchers in their lab. Machesky and Insall were the first to publish their findings, but within months, four other papers had appeared describing similar results.
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