Genetics, Vol. 148, 1403, April 1998, Copyright © 1998

Mutation and Repair: Special issue of GENETICS in honor of JOHN W. DRAKE Editor of GENETICS, 1982–1996

Jan Drake served as editor of GENETICS for 15 years, three years longer than Franklin Roosevelt was president, which, in its time, was the real-life equivalent of forever. Before his editing days Jan had already been working—reading, writing, thinking, experimenting—on mutation for many years. When he started, mutation was a sudden, explosive transformation from one stable state to another by a gene of unknown structure and content. In other words, it was pure magic. (To be accurate, Jan was still a junior at Yale in 1953 when Watson and Crick removed the fantasy from our picture of the gene.) Genetic repair was unknown. Jan's career has seen a profound evolution of our picture of the gene in mutation. Today we know that mutation is only one possible result of a two-step process that is going on in all living cells: 1) damage to a gene (or a replication error); 2) processing of the damage by a repair system.

It is a fitting tribute to Jan Drake's service to GENETICS to honor him with this special collection of papers on this exciting field in which he has played a central role.

Editorial Committee

Scott Hawley

Robert Haynes

Elizabeth Kutter

Michael Resnick

David Stadler, Chair