Faces of IICD: Ben Wesley, Graduate Student

Ben Wesley is a fifth-year doctoral student in Drs. Jellert Gaublomme and Simon Tavaré’s labs. He explores ways to leverage single-cell sequencing to understand how genomic perturbances affect the transcriptome. In the latest “Faces of IICD” blog series, Ben shares how his lifelong fascination with mechanics has shaped his unique perspective on research.

There’s a running joke in my family that my love of mechanics started because my uncle pulled my bedtime stories from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Machinist’s Handbook. It’s probably true because I’ve always had a deep curiosity about the inner workings of the devices we use. As a child, this curiosity—combined with my dad’s well-stocked toolbox—caused the premature death of many poor alarm clocks and toys. Fortunately, my skills and ambition grew as I aged, helping me develop an intuition for the transparent mechanisms at hand—a gear shift on a bike easily traces to a simple cable pull, or the whirring sound of a laptop to a hard drive spinning up.

This all changed when I got my first car, a Honda Accord. Despite its relatively basic engineering, the car relied on so many hidden mechanisms with opaque interactions that driving almost felt like interacting with a primitive life form. While driving up a steep hill, I felt the engine chug against gravity and gain an aggressive tone as the variable timing engaged. Conversely, on the way down that same hill, the car adopted an easy, loping cadence, automatically selecting higher gears like a runner extending their stride. This tangle of interactions felt intimidating, so for a long time, I didn’t try to open up the car for fear of unintentionally breaking something.

Eventually, though, my curiosity got the better of me, and I opened the valve cover, only to find a transparent series of simple machines looking back at me. This made me realize that the life-like complexity of the car was just the result of many small, simple devices acting in concert. The intimidating tangle of cables, hoses, and linkages was just the functional consequence of sticking all these simple machines together.

This idea—form defined by function—is the defining rule for all non-aesthetic parts of a car. For example, turbochargers adopt a snail-shell shape because they are subject to the same design requirements as snails: a compact, volumetrically increasing tubing system. Similarly, the rocker arms in the engine adopt a Gothic-esque arch shape due to the same load-transferring demands on the original stone arches. This principle can also be reversed—in the 1940s, early hot-rodders, in search of a way to pump more air into engines to boost power, took ventilation pumps from mines and repurposed them into the first superchargers. The Roots-style supercharger featured in muscle cars today is still derived from these coal-era air movers.

While this is extremely car-focused, I’ve found that the principles of form defined by function have increased my appreciation for the natural world around me. For example, a bison’s spine resembles the towers on a suspension bridge, hinting at the enormity of the supported load, while the massive sternum on birds gives their enormous pectoral muscles the leverage needed for long-distance flight. Outside of anatomy, the waxy coating and relatively small surface area of leaves on succulents stave off water loss in arid environments.

Even on the microscopic scale in biology, I’ve found my day-to-day work informed by this basic principle. While proteins aren’t as transparent in their function as a piston, they still perform the functions they do because their physical properties make them suited for it. This means that previously unannotated interactions are likely possible because we haven’t explored a protein from that angle. In the Gaublomme Lab, this directly impacts my interpretation of our high-throughput screens, which may pick up on unexpected interactions between proteins.

Ultimately, I’ve found that this principle has become more than just a maxim—it’s a way of exploring the world around me. The things around us have the shape they do for a reason. Sometimes the reason isn’t all that interesting, but other times—especially in the world of art and literature—this line of questioning has expanded my perspective. This mindset, grounded in curiosity and the pursuit of understanding, has made me a more thoughtful scientist. 

By approaching problems with a holistic perspective, I’m better equipped to uncover connections that may not be immediately obvious. Whether I’m investigating the mechanics of a biological system or collaborating across disciplines, this habit of asking 'why' and 'how' allows me to understand the intricacies of both science and life. My hope is that this curiosity-driven approach doesn’t just enrich my own understanding, but inspires others to see the world through a similarly inquisitive lens.