One gets the sense from virologist Stephen P. Goff that his achievements are the result of good timing and good company. With a woodworking father who restored antique clocks, an elder brother who studied phage genetics with James Watson at Harvard University, and Nobel Prize-winning mentors who saw the possibilities of manipulating DNA, perhaps Goff is right. Stephen P. Goff and his wife, Marian Carlson. Stephen Goff, Higgins Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at the Columbia University Medical Center since 1990, and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1993, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2006. His career can be measured in nearly 300 publications, with almost 50 in the Nature journals, Science , Cell , and PNAS. As a student, Goff made pivotal contributions to the development of recombinant DNA technology and its promise for gene therapy. As a graduate student, he studied SV40 gene structure and function. As a fellow and in his own laboratory, he explored the life cycle of retroviruses. Much of his work defined the viral enzymes that later became the targets of drugs in modern-day combination therapies against HIV. In addition to his natural talent at the laboratory bench, Goff has a knack for being in the right place at the right time. He was a graduate student at Stanford University when researchers realized that a great many cancers are the result of mutations in protooncogenes—genes activated by mutation or during their acquisition by retroviral genomes. While a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he cloned and characterized one of the earliest known oncogenes, v- abl , in the context of the Abelson murine leukemia virus and its corresponding mouse protooncogene, c- abl . Years later, when the human version of the gene was …