FEATURE
Written By: Lee Clippard
Illustration By: Sana Ali
Directing
Evolution
Andy Ellington creates new therapeutics,
trains the next generation, and asks questions
about the origin of life.
hen Andy Ellington
looks at the living
world, he sees what
There is nothing else in the
most of us do: giant trees
entire universe like DNA. It’s
of green, birds chirping,
dogs walking and people
a marvelous material.
smiling. He also, however,
sees the world from the bottom up, as col-
lections of millions of cells, made of billions
of molecules and gazillions of atoms. Mostly, fresh off of the High School Musical boat—har-
he focuses his attention on the miraculous vest the power of evolution to engineer new
double-stranded molecule buried within all of molecules that can do things as diverse as locate
these cells, capable of replicating itself and ulti- tumor cells or reveal the presence of ricin, a
mately responsible for cranking out all of the toxin used for biological warfare.
living matter we see today.
“There is nothing else in the entire universe Associate Director, Evolution
like DNA. It’s a marvelous material,” says The technique Ellington uses to engineer new
Ellington, a research professor in biochem- molecules in his lab at the Institute for Cellular
istry. Marvelous, because it’s through DNA and Molecular Biology is known as “directed
that the world has inheritance, variation and, evolution,” but this is actually somewhat of a
ultimately, evolution. misnomer. Ellington will be the fi rst to tell you
Ellington and his students —from graduate that he likes to think of himself as the “director
students all the way down to fi rst-year students of nothing and the associate director of every-
focus on science 15
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