Paradigm, the Whitehead Institute’s quarterly magazine, has a short piece in the Spring 2006 issue (scroll down to page 20) about the paper from the Weinberg lab that was published in the journal in September 2005. The paper described a new mouse model of metastatic melanoma, showing that Slug, a regulator of neural crest cell migration, is required for metastasis in this model. The Paradigm article by Eric Bender briefly outlines the origins of this work in the Weinberg lab, and traces its ultimate success to timely help from collaborators:

In the summer of 2002, graduate student Piyush Gupta came up with an idea about the mechanisms that might drive the growth of melanomas, an often deadly form of skin cancer. In September 2005, he and his colleagues published a paper in Nature Genetics that validated the idea. His three-year journey demonstrated how biological research thrives on informal collaborations inside and outside a home laboratory…