Prof. Mark Ptashne (Memorial Sloan-Kettering) knows a thing or two about genes. You might even say he wrote the book. Two books even: A Genetic Switch (now in its 3rd edition) and Genes & Signals (written with Alexander Gann).
Mark is also this year’s receipient of the Thomas Lamb Eliot award, an award given by the college in recognition of “distinguished and sustained achievement by a Reed College graduate” (this marks two years in a row that Reed chemists have won the Eliot award), and he will be delivering a lecture on “Genetic Switches” on Thursday night, Feb. 4, in Vollum Lecture Hall.
So how did a Reed chemist become one of the world’s top experts on genes and gene regulation? I never thought you would ask…
Mark studied biology at Reed. Being a talented, as well as ambitious, student, he obtained (through the University of Oregon) an NSF summer undergraduate fellowship to conduct research at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Crested Butte, Colorado. This work was so successful that Mark was able to write a single-author paper, “The Behavior of Strong and Weak Centromeres at Second Anaphase of Drosophila Melanogasteri” which he sent to the research journal Genetics in early October of 1959, and which was published a few months later in April of 1960: Genetics, 1960, 45(4), 499-506.
Naturally, Mark would have regarded this research project, and the publication that he wrote, as having more than satisfied Reed’s requirements for a senior thesis, but some biology faculty apparently said “no.” They insisted that he do another project back at Reed to satisfy the thesis requirement. [Note: the details of some of these events have come to me via 3rd and 4th-hand telling of stories from 55 years ago so don’t push me too hard on my fact-checking – I did what I could on very short notice].
I don’t know what the rules governing senior thesis projects were back in the day, but Mark’s parlay of summer work into senior thesis would certainly run into several problems today: the work wasn’t performed during the senior year [Mark would have been a rising junior in summer 1959?], it wasn’t done during the school year, and it wasn’t conducted while the student was enrolled in 4 other Reed units.
So what was Mark to do? As I understand it, he found a sympathetic ear in Prof. Michael Litt, an untenured biochemistry professor, and Prof. Marsh Cronyn, organic chemist and future Reed provost. Litt agreed to serve as Mark’s nominal thesis adviser, the chemistry faculty agreed that Mark’s thesis could be submitted as a chemistry thesis and Mark’s coursework could be accepted as having met the requirements for the chemistry major, and the division of Mathematics and Natural Sciences accepted Mark’s thesis upon recommendation from the chemistry department. And, voilá, Mark Ptashne ’61, Reed chemist, is now considered one of Reed’s most distinguished scientist alumni.
A strange set of circumstances, you say? If you think that then you just don’t understand Olde Reede.
And for those who might accuse me of being a teller of tall tales, I asked the Reed Library to show me the copy of Mark’s thesis that it keeps in its Special Collections. It is thin. Paper-thin. There is a single typed title page that looks like the title page of any thesis. And behind it? Eight shiny pages containing the complete Genetics article.
Congratulations, Mark! You’ve earned it.