In 1991, Bruce Baum was stuck in the audience of a lecture at which the speaker was just droning on. To kill time, the dentist-biochemist began to sketch out an idea he had for treating dry-mouth syndrome. The idea came to fruition last year as the first successful human clinical trial to treat the syndrome with gene therapy was published.

Jeremy Nicholson of Imperial College London is heading up the U.K.’s government-funded phenome center, which will undertake population-scale metabolic phenotyping and profiling.

The results from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology’s survey of young biochemists and molecular biologists are now out. The respondents, who were between ages 20 and 39, ranked intellectual freedom as the most influential factor in choosing a career.