Gerald Rubin on Future of CSHL
  Gerald Rubin     Biography    
Recorded: 30 May 2003

Well, the difficulty in predicting that is that a place like Cold Spring Harbor is, I mean less so now than when Jim took over because of his fund raising abilities, but is largely depend upon external forces. You know how much money the government will give for grants. Whether it can be donors and so. I like to think that Cold Spring Harbor has a unique role, one as a summer camp for scientists in the way that people, you know, come here for the meetings and interact and it’s really, those of us who have been here, you know, obviously think of as a sort of coming home in a way every time we come here. And think about, oh, I remember when this happened here, or that happened here. And you walk around, its’ like, you know, all these memories come flooding back of people and things. So for some of us, it’s going to be unique like that, whatever.

And as a place to do science, it has a very different feel from a university. It’s going to be very—so I think it will continue to do great things. I’m not sure what direction it will go on, what will be the next thing after. You know, when Jim came here it was tumor viruses about the whole lab , cancer research, what will be the next thing I think is unclear now, but will come out, you know. If you come back here in ten years will it be mostly neurobiology or will it be mostly human genetics, I don’t know. But I’m sure it will be good.

Gerald Rubin is a geneticist, molecular and cell biologist. As Director of the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project, he led the sequencing of the entire fruit fly genome. Currently, as Vice President and Director of the Janelia Farm Research Campus at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia, his research focus is on developing the biological and computer tools that are capable of analyzing and displaying the vast amount of information available from the genomic DNA sequencing of the fruit fly. He uses these advanced techniques to decipher gene regulation and expression at a genome-wide level in Drosophila and determine the function of certain fruit fly genes.

Gerald Rubin is also a professor of Genetics and Development at the University of California, Berkeley. He came to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as an URP (Undergraduate Research Program) in the early 70’s working under Lionel Crawford and Ray Gesteland before moving to Cambridge to earn his Ph.D. in molecular biology. He did postdoctoral work at Stanford University School of Medicine and became an assistant professor of biological chemistry at Harvard Medical School prior to commencing his genetics professorship at Berkeley in 1983.

Gerald Rubin is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. Among the awards he has received is the American Chemical Society Eli Lilly Award in biological chemistry.