A Reflections article provides an opportunity to focus on key findings during a career from a personal and historical perspective. As a graduate student in the late 1960s at Berkeley, I was introduced to the Xenopus oocyte by John Gerhart, who shared his fascination with the work of John Gurdon, who had pointed out the unique and powerful features of the oocyte and egg, particularly the ability to microinject biochemically significant amounts of material into them while they carried out complex biological events.
