© LIZ LINDER PHOTOGRAPHYNeil Bence loves science so much that after nearly eight years of working toward his PhD, “I had to throw him out of the lab,” says his graduate advisor, Stanford University cell biologist Ron Kopito. Never before, Kopito says, had a graduate student taken such joy in his project that he just kept working, well beyond amassing enough data to finish.
As an undergrad at the University of California, Davis, Bence studied DNA damage repair pathways in plants. “That’s where I cut my teeth in terms of doing bench work and learning the work ethic, the 24–7 mentality of doing research,” he says. Bence thought he would continue working on plant biochemistry as a graduate student, but after a rotation through Kopito’s human cell biology lab in 1996, he changed his mind. METHODS: At the time, Kopito’s lab was refocusing its efforts from endoplasmic reticulum–associated protein degradation in cystic fibrosis to the relevance of misfolded protein aggregations to neurodegenerative diseases. “Just as I was getting comfortable with studying the secretory pathway and ion channels, all of a sudden we were turning into a neurodegeneration lab,” Bence ...
