A summer job in the Minnesota laboratory of cell biologist Joseph Gall rerouted 2006 Gairdner Award winner Joan Steitz from medical school to the lab.

After that fateful summer, Steitz decided to forgo her acceptance into Harvard University's medical school and, at Gall's urging, took a spot instead in Harvard's graduate program in biochemistry and molecular biology. She never looked back.

"All of a sudden I got completely turned on," she told the Star in an April interview. "It really, really got me and I couldn't believe how much fun it was making discoveries."

A top scientist in her own right, Steitz is best known for discovering the function of small nuclear ribonucleoproteins (snRNPs), which could lead to breakthroughs in auto-immune diseases like lupus.

In the 1970s, scientists realized one of the forms of ribonucleic acid (RNA) - called pre-messenger RNA - contains stretches of nonsense called introns that interrupt the coding parts of genes. Messenger RNA contains the "recipes" for making proteins, critical for carrying out all of the body's most basic biological processes.

Steitz, who works at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine at Yale University, discovered that snRNPs take out the introns from the pre-messenger RNA and put back together the correct or good parts, which are then made into proteins.