Ashley Dunn on Bruce Stillman
  Ashley Dunn     Biography    
Recorded: 15 Jan 2003

Well, Bruce Stillman came to Cold Spring Harbor as a postdoc working with Mike Matthews at the time I was there and Bruce and I became colleagues and quite good friends. I must say I did not recognize in Bruce at that time someone that I thought one day would rise to the lofty heights of directorship of Cold Spring Harbor Lab. I did not see that and he came as a surprise to me after I had left Cold Spring Harbor and heard that Bruce had risen through the ranks very, very quickly. I really wondered whether Bruce had the full repertoire of skills that it would take to be a successful director. He clearly had everything that it took to be a leading scientist and had shown that to everyone’s satisfaction. But to be a director and particularly to try and follow in the footsteps of James Watson was a tall order. And in looking back on it I can only say that Bruce has done an amazingly good job. And I judge that not just from a personal view point of what’s happened, but also having had the opportunity to speak to a lot of people who were my peers and friends at Cold Spring Harbor at the time or even people that were not at Cold Spring Harbor but have done very well in science. And in considering their views of how Bruce has done at Cold Spring Harbor, the answer is brilliantly both as director and as a scientist. So he’s done amazingly well. I’m immensely proud of him.

Ashley Dunn is currently a Senior Consulting Scientist and member of the Scientific Advisory Board at the Cryptome Pharmaceuticals Ltd., an Australian biotech company. He also serves on Australia’s Gene Technology Advisory Committee. He is the former Head of Molecular Biology in the Melbourne Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.

He came to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1976 to work with Joe Sambrook as a postdoctoral fellow and eventually became a junior faculty member.

His research has been concentrated on mammalian growth factors and the regulators responsible for the production of white blood cells in mice and men. He co-invented a mammalian blood cell regulator (GM-CSF), and his lab was the one of the first to establish gene targeting in the development of human diseases such as cancer.