Chung was attracted to Wallace's laboratory because of its reputation for groundbreaking microbiological research. He's fascinated with how an embryonic cell transforms itself to meet its specialized function, such as extruding its own nucleus to become a red blood cell. Chung's microbiological searches began when he accepted one of Georgia Tech's first President's Scholarships in 1982. His mind was on Tech even before he was offered the scholarship. Georgia Tech is a no-nonsense school.
Students are very serious about what they're doing.
To him, the subtle interplay among genetic factors to regulate gene expression is like the interplay among electronic digital signals through which a compact disc player turns binary data into music. While at Tech, Chung wrote poetry, co-edited the campus literary magazine, and jogged. For now, he's absorbed with exploring the oxbox element's significance. The nucleus and the mitochondria are not going to stay together for almost two billion years and get along as well as they have without having any way of coordinating and communicating with each other, so that's a very exciting area of research. Wallace isn't bothered that Chung's research is quite different from the body of Wallace's anthropological work.