The dedication booklet, written by Nathaniel Comfort to commemorate the 81-year history and reopening of the building in 1993, points out that for most of its existence McClintock Laboratory was known as the Animal House. Interestingly, the course of the history of the building parallels the history of modern genetics research itself. When construction began in 1912, it was only twelve years after the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of inheritance and just eight years after the Station for Experimental Evolution was established at Cold Spring Harbor by the Carnegie Institution of Washington. By the time the booklet was written, transcription factors and cell cycle research had been done in McClintock Lab. In addition, Dick McCombie was working on the "Pombe Genome Project" to sequence the yeast genome, which was a pilot for the nascent Human Genome Project.