“When I first started the research, my boss at the time objected to it,” she said. “[I was told] even if you do such research that nobody reads, it won’t land you a job.”

At the time, Hagino was having trouble finding a position at a university. At the same time, she was taking care of her young kids. And she was moving to a new city where her husband had found work. Everything in her life seemed to be sending the clear message that she should just drop it and find something else to study. But Hagino just couldn’t do that. For whatever reason, there was something about this algae that just absolutely fascinated her, and she wanted to learn everything about it. Even if that meant studying it on her own.

So Hagino and her daughter started taking trips to the beach, collecting samples of seawater in the hopes of finding this elusive algae. Over the years, they ended up taking hundreds of these trips. They did this so often that her daughter genuinely didn’t know that people went to the beach for other reasons, like to go swimming.

“‘The ocean — isn’t that the place to collect seawater?’” Hagino recounted her daughter saying.

…

Hagino and Zehr had both spent their careers trying to solve a scientific puzzle, with no idea that they each held the other’s missing piece. Now that they had a culture, they had the chance to unravel a mystery that would end up going deeper than they’d ever imagined.

Together, they would reveal a level of cooperation that would rewrite a fundamental rule of biology.

…

“This experience has shown that we don’t know which research will be useful and when,” Hagino said.

— Jesse Nichols, "The tiny cell that broke a big rule of biology"

This is one of the coolest, most exciting science stories I've read in a minute 🤓

#Grist #Science #Biology