This Week's Citation Classic

One of the expensive, but worthwhile, book purchases I have every made was Sambrook and Russell's Molecular Cloning, 3rd ed. I figured if I was going to be a professional biologist, I needed this because I haven't visited a good wet lab that doesn't have a dog-eared copy lying around somewhere. Clocking in at $259, it has a hefty price tag, but for sheer utility I don't think it can be beat. For pretty much anything you want to do in molecular biology, you can find clear, lucid instructions here.

Joseph Sambrook is a tumor virologist internationally renowned for his studies of viruses and the molecular biology of normal and cancerous cells, which effectively changed the ways in which scientists now approach cellular development of many forms of human cancer. In 1969, he was hired by James Watson to work at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, where his group developed much of the technology which was later used to produce genetic and physical maps of the entire human genome. For that, he got a building named after him at CSHL.

David Russell is the Eugene McDermott Distinguished Chair in Molecular Genetics at UT Southwestern. Dr. Russell's research interests are in cholesterol metabolism, in particular the enzymatic pathways that dispose of cholesterol. His laboratory has isolated over a dozen genes that encode enzymes involved in cholesterol breakdown, and has identified the molecular bases of six human genetic diseases characterized by abnormal cholesterol metabolism.