We were trying to get international students. We were trying to get students. So we put advertisements out. And I’ll never forget. I think it was Bill Tansey, Deborah Barnes and myself; we sat in James Library trying to distill what the graduate school was about in little bullet points. You know, one of them was like, four-year program, global leader in the biological leader in the biological sciences, some other things. Then the byline, which I believe was my idea, sort of at the top was “A Graduate School Unlike Any Other at a Place Unlike Any Other.” And, of course, which was trite because any graduate school was going to be unlike any other by definition and any place was going to be unlike any other, but I think it really rang true with Cold Spring Harbor. And then, of course, this was 1999; at the bottom it said “Biologists for a New Millennium,” which now is a bit….

Winship Herr, director of the University of Lausanne School of Biology and member of EMBO. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of California in 1974 and Ph.D. for studies on recombinant retroviruses in leukemogenic mice with Walter Gilbert from Harvard University in 1982. He completed his postdoctoral research studies in Cambridge (England) with Frederick Sanger and with Joe Sambrook in Cold Spring Harbor. After that he joined the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory faculty in 1984. From 1994 till 2002 he was an assistant director of the Laboratory and founding dean of the Watson School of Biological Sciences from 1998 till 2004. He is a professor of the Center for Integrative Genomics at the University of Lausanne.