Ashley Dunn on Jim Watson, Personality & Influence
  Ashley Dunn     Biography    
Recorded: 15 Jan 2003

Jim, I always thought, was a master at being able to sense the fact that he was pretty famous And I know in some of the talks I went to he said certain things during his presentations that I think I would certainly not have said. I remember him describing Clyde (??) Hutchinson 3rd who was a pretty famous guy at the time in the early days of cloning as looking a little bit like Charles Manson. And I thought you probably need to have discovered the structure of DNA and have a Nobel Prize for it before you could stand up and get away with something like that. So I did not try to emulate Jim’s style there because I reckoned I wasn’t quite as famous as Jim Watson was to say the very least. But Jim is a wonderful articulator of science both in the spoken word and also with his written contributions.

Ashley Dunn is currently a Senior Consulting Scientist and member of the Scientific Advisory Board at the Cryptome Pharmaceuticals Ltd., an Australian biotech company. He also serves on Australia’s Gene Technology Advisory Committee. He is the former Head of Molecular Biology in the Melbourne Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.

He came to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1976 to work with Joe Sambrook as a postdoctoral fellow and eventually became a junior faculty member.

His research has been concentrated on mammalian growth factors and the regulators responsible for the production of white blood cells in mice and men. He co-invented a mammalian blood cell regulator (GM-CSF), and his lab was the one of the first to establish gene targeting in the development of human diseases such as cancer.