REVISED

I think is not well appreciated the importance of yeast for medical science. A good example of is the number and variety of vaccines that are produced in yeast today. Just for example hepatitis B (Recombovax) and cervical cancer (Gardisil) Forty percent of the people in China at one point carried hepatitis B. The hepatitis B vaccine is made in yeast and has turned the tide against the virus both in China and in the rest of the world. It turns out that it's easy to make in yeast for a variety of reasons.

Yeast is also important for chemical engineers. So standard yeast labs, standard molecular biology labs, everything is done on a micro scale, but with chemical engineers, they're doing things in big, a hundred-thousand-liter fermenters and yeast because of its long history in the brewing industry is perfect for industrial size fermentation.

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.