Ben Drapkin*

B.S., Yale University
Peak Mitotic Cyclin Permits Mitotic Exit
presented by Frederick R. Cross

Ben Drapkin, a student in the M.D.-Ph.D. program, decided to carry out his Ph.D. work in my laboratory, with the aim of carrying out quantitative studies on the control of mitosis, the final step in cell division. Ben’s work was most notably characterized by three features: first, rigorous accuracy in all his experiments, and second, an insistence on keeping the big picture in sight. These two things don’t often fit together so well, since great accuracy frequently is accompanied by a complete loss of perspective on why it was so important to be accurate in the first place. The way Ben kept these things together relied on the third key characteristic of his work: almost superhuman persistence. He worked on a series of projects that were bedeviled with a truly remarkable series of misfortunes, including horrifying and bizarre artifacts, unreliable published information and just general lack of cooperation from the experimental system. These barriers would have stopped many people. But Ben was motivated not just to carry out some experiments, make some measurements and graduate; he was really interested in the biology, and he wanted to make a serious contribution to understanding it. His project was originally expected (at least by me) to confirm a comfortable, widely believed but untested theory of mitotic control. In the end Ben largely cut the legs from this theory, along the way providing a superior alternative. In doing so, he developed methods and posed problems that have provided approaches for several other graduate students in the laboratory. He is now going on to further medical training, where his rigorous approach will be further challenged by the vagaries not only of experimental research, but of work on human patients. As with his graduate work, I expect that the obvious difficulties of carrying out truly rigorous clinical research will be forced to yield to Ben’s obdurate insistence on learning something important, and learning it right.