Guoping Feng never gives up. In or out of the lab, as a teenager in China or a successful neuroscientist in the US, healthy or in debilitating pain, Feng has approached every obstacle in his life with dogged persistence.Perhaps that's because he has faced so many obstacles in his life."He is sort of infinitely optimistic and infinitely energetic. Because of those two features, he has an extremely low barrier to trying out new projects, new techniques, and learning what needs to be learned," notes Joshua Sanes, Feng's postdoctoral advisor and director of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University.Feng's perseverance has proven a boon to the hundreds of neuroscientists who rely on his most celebrated scientific achievement: two dozen mouse strains engineered to have brightly colored brain cells, allowing scientists to choose from a library of animals that each light up a specific component of the cell. In the past couple of years, Feng's efforts have also made waves in the autism field. By creating the first robust mouse model of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), Feng has found a way to study the genetic underpinnings of repetitive behaviors, one of the three core characteristics of autism.Even these successes came only after years of failed attempts.Read more at...SFARI, January 2010.