Rob, with his two daughters. © R. DeSalle

Wilson worked closely with Kary Mullis, the inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method of sequencing DNA, for which Mullis later won a Nobel Prize. "I actually witnessed PCR being born," Rob recalls. Wilson's students were among the first to use the technique, and Rob remembers seeing people moving tubes from one water bath to the next, by hand, because the process was not yet automated. "It was really kind of funny to watch them," he recalls. "I didn't know what they were doing. But it turns out it was the technique that has revolutionized all of molecular biology."

Rob continued his research on Drosophila and taught at Yale University from 1986 to 1991, when he accepted a position as assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History. By joining the Museum staff, Rob had come full circle, because museums had kindled his original interest in genetics.

At the Museum, he continues to study flies, but also uses his expertise in molecular genetics to explore a much wider range of creatures. "Coming to the Museum was a really important move for me," he says. "Here, there were beetles, there were lemurs, there were crustaceans, just all kinds of interesting stuff." With his own team of graduate students and postdocs, he could explore several different questions at once. "It allowed me to say to a student, 'If you need antelope tissue, I know where to get it'"—usually just by walking down the hall and talking to a colleague.

In a university setting, the work of individual researchers often has little in common, and the people just down the hall from Rob might be doing work so unrelated to his that they would have little to talk about. But at the Museum, all the biologists were committed to studying biodiversity, and while one might specialize in spiders and another in leeches, Rob found he had something to talk about with all of them. Best of all, he discovered his new colleagues were very willing to collaborate.

Rob's research began to branch out in exciting new directions, and a few years later, Yale University tried to lure him back. But he decided to continue working at the Museum because of its resources and focus on organismal diversity. "I sincerely believe that if I was at a university, I'd still be studying just Drosophila," he explains.

One of the most satisfying of his many collaborations was a study with Dr. Howard Rosenbaum of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which allowed him to fulfill his youthful ambition to study whales. During the great whale hunts of the 19th century, one of the most severely depleted species was the right whale. It was easy to catch because it skims the surface while feeding and its body floats after death, making it the "right" whale to hunt. Right whales live in the South Pacific, the North Pacific, and the North Atlantic, and traditionally the northern and southern groups had been considered two different species. Rob, Dr. Rosenbaum, and an international team of cetacean biologists analyzed DNA from animals in each group and found that the two northern groups are genetically different. This means there are actually three species of right whales, not two. Their discovery has important policy implications, because each endangered species needs to be protected individually and a change in species status may afford increased protection.