REVISED

What would've happened if there had been no Yeast Course? The other organism that people worked on at the time was Neurospora and at the time it was not feasible to do the kind of experiments that molecular biology was moving into. The idea of correcting defective genes by homologous recombination was the goal of human geneticists for decades and is now possible using CRISPR. The idea genetic replacement technique is not a modern invention. Once my lab discovered transformation in yeast in 1977, it made it possible to insert genes and alter them in any way---this is 20 years before CRISPR was discovered in animal cells. So, gene manipulation in yeast really preceded CRISPR by several decades. Much of what is currently possible with CRISPR was possible in yeast in the last century. The kind of gene manipulations so facile in yeast for years had been the goal of human geneticists for years and Is now possible with CRISPR technology.

What I think yeast, and the course, did also was to provide a platform where people could test gene function no matter what organism they worked on. So, if you had a deletion in yeast for some yeast gene and you knew what it did in yeast, and you could complement that function with a mammalian gene as Paul Nurse did to win a Nobel Prize, then you could say the gene had comparable function in your favorite organism. So, one contribution was to provide a model for testing gene function. The other is, yeast turned out to be a good model for cell biology since the structures in the yeast cell were very similar to those in all organisms, so many cell biologists today use yeast as a model.

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.