REVISED

Chemical engineers are very interested in yeast. We make ethanol from yeast to use in gasoline. Here at MIT, we have whole buildings of people trying to take corn and turn it into ethanol. And those are different kinds of experiments, but I think they're going to be very important for the future. In molecular biology, you want to see a big effect of something. If you don't get a fivefold effect, people say it's not important. But in chemical engineering, if you get a 1% increase in the amount of ethanol you get from corn, that's a big deal. And so, I would hope to attract people from the chemical engineering field. Personally, I've collaborated with people here at MIT and they have a completely different point of view. They don't actually care how you get from A to Z; they just want to make more Z. And so that way of thinking, which is really important, I think would be useful to incorporate into a course.

Gerald Fink, geneticist, changed the field of molecular yeast biology. He is a professor of genetics at MIT, a founding member of both the Whitehead Institute and the American Cancer Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1981). After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale University, he was a part of the Cornell faculty for fifteen years and also served as president of the Genetics Society of America.

In 1976, Fink’s lab succeeded in performing yeast transformation. Gerald Fink currently researches baker's yeast and explores critical pathways in cell growth and metabolism; applications include cancer research and the development of new anti-fungal drugs. He also directs a plant research group heralded for new insights into root growth and salt metabolism.

Although Fink grew up on Long Island, it was not until he attended the 1966 Symposium that he visited Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. In 1970, he began teaching the CSHL course on yeast molecular biology and continued doing so for 17 years. In 1999, he received the first honorary doctorate awarded by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.