REVISED

Fred Sherman had a very strange sense of humor. Since we had 16 students in the course, there were eight pairs; they doubled up. Fred and I wondered: What would be the attitude of the students? What would be the atmosphere in the course? As it turned out, the atmosphere was simultaneously serious yet humorous. I can give you an example of a typical Fred Sherman introduction, which was: “In this course we're going to do yeast genetics and you have to pick a partner, and you should pick someone who is in a different field from you so you learn from your partner. If you're a geneticist, you might pick a biochemist, or if you think you're smart, you might pick somebody who's stupid.” It was this hilarious icing on the cake that I think people remember from the course. If you ask them, they remember some of the ancillary humor that accompanied each lecture. The other thing that I still remember about Sherman was how he started when it was his turn to give a morning lecture. We always had a morning lecture. Students didn't work. Then we had an invited speaker in the afternoon, and then they worked till 10 o'clock at night in the lab. Anecdotally, we tried to teach the course in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where Fred and I were invited to teach. The students there worked till three in the afternoon and then went dancing, unlike the atmosphere at Cold Spring Harbor where the students somehow knew they had to work till late at night and get up early in the morning and see what the results were. But Fred would always start off his talks by saying, “I have some brief remarks.” And then three hours later, he got finished with his “brief” remarks. So ever since then, I've had a feeling of fear when a speaker says, I only have a few things to say, or I will speak briefly. You know that this is going to be a talk of long duration.

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.