REVISED

One year, Ira Herskowitz and David Botstein were lab partners in the course. And it was very amusing because both of them were phage geneticists, and they were used to the tempo of a phage experiment in which you could get an answer within a few hours. And so, when we did one experiment where we were looking for temperature sensitive mutants one set of plates at room temperature, one at high. David, who was used to getting quick results with a phage experiment, would open the high temperature incubator every hour or so to see whether he had a mutant that couldn’t grow at high temperature.

And Ira finally lost his temper because the yeast experiment would take at least overnight and by continuing to open the incubator the high temperature David reduced the high temperature in the incubator to room temperature thereby ruining the comparison.

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.