REVISED

The students in the CSH yeast course turned out to use that knowledge to further science and their remarkable careers. There were three Nobel Prize winners and 30 members of the National Academy of Science who were former students in the CSH yeast course. Again, many of them were much older than I. Clint Ballou was Chair of the Biochemistry Department at Berkeley. Gottfried Schatz was eventually Director of the Biozentrum in Basel. Julius Marmur was another famous scientist who took the first Yeast Course. I think there was only one young person. There was a lot of excitement because the course emphasized not only genetic analysis, but also molecular aspects.

We always had a lot of applicants, but the type of applicants changed over the years. At the beginning, I was often the youngest person in the yeast course, even though I was the instructor, because many people had read Jim's book, where he said that yeast was going to be the next E. coli. So they decided they would switch fields. And so, they were older members of the faculty at many places. Frank Stahl was probably twice my age when he took the course. So here I was, a very young assistant professor teaching some of the big shots in the field.

During the first few years, many of the students were senior scientists who were thinking of changing fields. That was one group. In addition, there was a group of people who had worked on E. coli, which was the model organism for doing molecular biology, and were looking for another organism to work with. They saw yeast as a possible organism to work with. And there were others who were just curious as to, I think, why people would shift from E. coli to yeast. This was certainly true for people who worked with phage, Frank Stahl being the prime example of that. My personal feeling is that in the later years of the course we stopped getting as many of the elders in the field and started getting younger scientists who had heard that it was a good way to get into a field that wasn’t too crowded. And, of course, once people focused on yeast in their own labs, they produced students who then spread the word. So what used to be only a few labs working on yeast, suddenly changed into hundreds of labs working on yeast.

Generally speaking, we did not take graduate students over the 17 years we taught the course. There were only a few exceptions. For example, Gerry Rubin was recommended by Sydney Brenner and so we accepted him as a student in the course. But in general, students in the Yeast Course were all PIs.

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.