REVISED

I had been a postdoc at the NIH in Bruce Ames's lab. Of course, I had heard of Cold Spring Harbor when I was a graduate student at Yale, but I had never gone there. But what's interesting to me is how I got chosen to teach the yeast course. At the time, I was an assistant professor at Cornell and, in retrospect, I wonder how Jim Watson chose me to be the first teacher of the Yeast Course. I don't even know how he had heard of me, but I've put the facts that I know together, and I think it was actually through Matt Meselson. And the reason is that I was working on yeast at the time and went to a Gatlinburg meeting on recombination. And at that time, it was very popular to make models of how DNA recombination occurred. There was a Meselson-Stahl-Radding model that they proposed. I gave a short talk at this meeting about gene conversion of a deletion, which we had done. At the end of my talk, Meselson walked up to me, (I'm sure he had no idea who I was before then), and he said, “You realize that there is a debate about which is the best model for genetic recombination and your results completely destroy our model!. ” I said, “No, I never understood your model. In fact my experiment was done for a completely different reason.” He carefully explained how I had just destroyed what was then the favorite way of thinking about genetic recombination. I was flattered that Meselson, who was a star, spent so much time with me especially since my experiment was done without knowledge of the controversies about which model of recombination was correct.

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.