University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

The lighter side of dental school

Erin Topley sold her first book of cartoons at the 2008 Buffalo Niagara Dental Meeting.

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By JUDSON MEAD

Published: June 17, 2009

Erin Topley sees the world from a slightly odd angle.

You may remember that tumor protein 53—p53, for short—regulates the cell cycle in multicellular organisms and functions as a tumor suppressor. It’s known as the “master watchman” or, as Topley’s microbiology instructor called it, “the defender of the genome.”

That’s just a line in most students’ notes, one more fact to remember. For Topley, D.D.S. ’09, it was bait. She went to a Halloween party as the superhero p53 Defender of the Genome. (p53 is also known as the “guardian angel of the genome,” but that’s for another Halloween.)

When she isn’t catching the one-liner no one else heard, Topley is a kind of cultural anthropologist. After closely observing dental students for two years, she devised a recipe for making a dentist that calls for, among other ingredients, 10 gallons of book smarts, ½ cup street smarts, 1 tsp of people skills, 1 ounce of social life and 2 tons of ego, seasoned with sexual tension.

Topley is an editorial cartoonist or, in other words, a subversive. She started poking fun at the world in the pages of her high school newspaper in Fargo, N.D. (she won a national award for her work). She took time off from cartooning when she was an undergraduate at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She started again in her second year in dental school when she was about to collapse under the weight of the work. She drew caricatures next to her lectures notes. It improved her concentration. When something amused her, she’d pin it down on paper—the drawn version of stand-up comedy. Staff and students started collecting Topleys; they appeared on the walls in the dispensary and elsewhere.

After a while, she’d seen enough of dental school for a whole book of cartoons—so she produced a whole book of cartoons. She borrowed seed money, found a printer, wrote the text, laid out the pages and had volumes ready for sale at the 2008 Buffalo Niagara Dental Meeting, where she did good business.

She says she’s not entrepreneurial at all—“I’d rather just give things away”—but she is enterprising. She found a small business advisor and set up a Web site to sell the books and individual cartoons.

She branched out, cartooning for the American Student Dentist Association’s national newsletter—for which she was honored with a national journalism award at the ASDA annual meeting this March— and for the UB student newspaper, The Spectrum. She broke the gender barrier in the Buffalo Dental Bowling League, renovated a house, played hockey with the boys and was a class officer. She says she likes to keep busy.

Topley was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where she lived until she was 12. She’s a hockey player and she got interested in dentistry only after losing two teeth playing for RIT.

“I was treated over a couple of years by two wonderful young women dentists, Roxanne Lowenguth and Mary Ann Lester, and that was the first time it occurred to me that young women could be dentists,” she says. She traded in her graphic art major for premed study. And she spread the word: Her sister, Carly, followed her into dental school (class of 2011).

Erin Topley is headed for a general practice residency at a VA hospital in Minneapolis. After eight years in the East, she wants to try the upper Midwest again. She has ideas for two projects: a book for children that explains going to the dentist, and what she says would be a kind of illustrated Cliff notes for dental students.