“My first postdoctoral job was with Christoph de Haën at the University of Washington, where I studied hormone receptor binding. Christoph was unable to renew his funding and had to close his lab, and that’s how I learned about the importance of grants! He ended up great anyway, eventually becoming director of preclinical research at Bracco and director of the Milano Research Center. I then moved to the lab of the late Edwin Krebs for a second postdoc, where I was among the first to describe MAP kinases and MAP kinase kinases. That started my career in signal transduction.”