As in most areas of life, mistakes in cells happen all the time. Luckily, the human body has built-in systems to eliminate potentially harmful slip-ups. Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) is one of those systems, but before RNA biologist Lynne Maquat came on the scene, no one could come up with a logical explanation for how it worked. At a time when many scientists abandoned ship, Maquat stuck with it, and slowly made significant advances.