Carlo Croce, director, cancer genetics programme, Ohio State University

Carlo Croce lives for the rush from a discovery, which might explain why he can't think of anything else he would rather do with his life. His obsession is a cure for cancer. His career, always focused on that singular goal, has left dozens of discoveries in its wake. (see CV).

While at medical school in his native Italy, Croce turned his growing interest in oncogenic viruses into a fellowship to study in the United States. But a freak event — his mentor Karl Habel's contraction of encephalitis from a monkey B virus infection — diverted his fellowship from the Scripps Clinic in San Diego, California, to the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There, he mapped the first viral integration site on a chromosome — and started down the uncharted road of cancer genetics.

Within two years of coming to the United States, Croce had built a lab at the Wistar and in the early 1980s, he delivered dozens of high-profile papers illuminating the role of genetics in cancer. “Nobody was thinking cancer was a genetic disease,” he says.

Croce went on to detail the role played by genes in lymphomas and tumours, and he recently defined the part that microRNAs play in cancer development.

“Essentially, all of my work is to try to identify the earliest genetic changes that occur in many different human cancers,” Croce says. His major challenge has been to exploit the results from fundamental science to develop novel therapies. “Without fundamental discoveries, we'll never cure cancer,” he says.

Building an environment to churn out such discoveries — which prompted his move to Ohio State University — is his latest endeavour. Besides his new role as the director of the university's human cancer genetics programme, he is also developing an Institute of Genetics. “I want the university to be a world leader of cancer research,” he says. And he wants its discoveries translated into treatments.

By August 2006, Croce will have more than 30 faculty members in his new building. A risk-taker at heart, he anticipates that the centre will allow him to continue scoring monumental discoveries. “You get high only if you make a really exciting discovery, the usual kind of stuff doesn't work,” he says. Spoken like a true addict.