Elizabeth Engle used to wait in peoples’ driveways until midnight, hoping to enroll them in her genetic studies of eye-movement disorders. She landed there by chance: during her neurology residency, she saw a little boy whose eyes were frozen in a downward gaze. Wanting to find a solution to a disorder that others had written off, she talked her way into the muscular dystrophy genetics lab of Alan Beggs and Lou Kunkel at Children’s.

Why muscular dystrophy? That tragic muscle-weakening disease somehow spares the eye muscles. Engle thought if Beggs and Kunkel took her on, she could answer two questions at once – what was protecting the eye muscles in muscular dystrophy, and what had caused the little boy’s fixed gaze and droopy eyelids. Plus, she needed laboratory training to study the samples she’d started gathering. “I didn’t have a PhD and was never officially trained in the lab,” she once said. “I didn’t even know how to make chemical solutions.” …