A fascination with fixing bodies
This is one in a series of profiles showcasing some of Harvard’s stellar graduates. Joshua Wortzel busied himself in his basement lab as a boy, becoming a kind of scientific matchmaker to a group of mice, breeding them in an effort to alter their fur. He was in the sixth grade and was inspired by a classmate’s experiment that taught mice how to navigate a maze. Wortzel, now a graduating Harvard College senior, recalled that her efforts were cool. But what would be even cooler, he thought, would be mice with “crazy coat colors.” His fuzzy critters ended up with “some really cool coat patterns.” Then some of them escaped. “In retrospect, my mom was completely right in asking me to end the experiment,” he said, “and so I moved to guppies for a couple of years.” Wortzel’s longtime fascination with cell manipulation and genetics — he saved his birthday money over the years to...