She went to Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., and majored in chemistry. Growing up in the post-Sputnik era, she benefited from the emphasis then on good science education. Elgin continued to pursue that interest, first as a graduate student with Bonner and a postdoctoral fellow with Leroy Hood at Caltech in Pasadena, then in her own laboratory at Harvard University and, since 1981, at Washington University. We currently are studying a protein called 'GAGA factor,' which appears to play a critical role in organizing the nucleosomes in such a way that gene expression can be initiated. Using the fruit fly, Drosophila, as a system, Elgin and her team recently have concentrated on a region of chromatin called heterochromatin, a gene-poor, relatively inactive part of the genome found in the center of chromosomes.
Genes placed in or near the heterochromatin tend to be inactive or silent much of the time.
There are clues that this silencing also is due to the way DNA is packaged, and recent work with yeast indicates that the silencing of certain genes is critical in aging. Humans have 50,000 to 100,000 genes, and it only takes a small subset of them to run a cell. All the rest are involved in special functions in particular tissues. Keeping things off, then, is just as important as turning them on. If the ability to maintain silencing disintegrates, that may be the key to inducing senescence.