Ashley Dunn on Working with Joe Sambrook
  Ashley Dunn     Biography    
Recorded: 15 Jan 2003

Well, it was a lot of fun. I mean I like to think that Joe and I were not only professional colleagues but good friends and remain so to this day. The only way that I—in looking back on those days, the only opportunity I think I ever had to outperform Joe was to play our daily squash game or our weekly squash game out at Stonybrook. And Joe and I used to go out there and I used to give him a bit of a trouncing and feel very good for it. And then when we got back to the lab he would give me an intellectual trouncing and so it was “even-stevens.”

So I was a little bit frightened of Joe. And I think that’s probably quite natural being a student and young as I was then and being mindful of Joe’s achievements. But I think I probably was able to hold my own and stand up to the barrage of insults and sarcasm that Joe dished out to me in his inimitable style.

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.