Twin tracks
by Barry Teater
When college coeds Anne and Erin Spillane arrived in Bar Harbor, Maine, for The Jackson Laboratory's Summer Student Program in 2001, their excitement was tempered by pangs of intimidation.
Their assigned mentor, faculty member John Sundberg, D.V.M., Ph.D., was a principal investigator with decades of experience who took his science seriously. His lab was studying genetic skin diseases in mice as models for human diseases.
The Spillane sisters, rising juniors at Cornell University that summer, had little knowledge of skin and no particular interest in it. Anne was looking into oncology, and Erin was considering neurobiology.
But under the methodical tutelage of Sundberg and his lab staff, Dawna Boggess and Kathleen Silva, the identical twins soon grew comfortable in their own skin research.
"John was very patient with us and would sit down at a microscope and go through the five layers of skin with us," recalls Anne.
"He had thousands of pathology slides," adds Erin.
Anne did phenotyping research and Erin gene-mapping research, both on a mutant mouse model for chronic proliferative dermatitis, an inflammatory skin disease. Their summer culminated with papers on their research and formal presentations to their peers, parents and Jackson faculty.
