REVISED

At Yale, I decided to work on this operon question, and the largest and most obvious operon in bacteria was the histidine operon that Bruce Ames was working on. I discovered a cluster of yeast histidine genes that appeared to be organized operon-like---several steps in the pathway encoded in one locus on a chromosome. So the question that I addressed was: Was this cluster of histidine genes one gene encoding a large multifunctional protein or three separate co-transcribed genes? I didn't know it then, but at the same time David Baltimore was working on the operon question in animal cells.

What I hadn't realized in my enthusiasm to get started on the project was that in order to answer the operon question I had to assay the histidine enzymes encoded by this yeast gene cluster. To do this you needed the substrates for the enzymes. I was naive enough as a first year student not to realize that they weren’t commercially available. Bruce Ames, who had worked out the steps in the histidine pathway had synthesized all these substrates in his lab. So I was stuck: I couldn’t buy them I had to make them. Their synthesis was tricky and I was not an organic chemist. And the reagents to synthesize the compounds were expensive. I needed a gram of PRPP which cost over a thousand dollars. When I went to my thesis advisor, Giles, and asked him if I could purchase it, he said: “ I can't spend a thousand dollars on a first-year graduate student with no experience in biochemical synthesis.

Desperate, I called up Bruce Ames and asked him if he could send me a sample. He said they no longer had any. He said, invited me to come down to his lab at the NIH where he would guide me in their synthesis. I told him I had no PRPP. No problem -- we can give you a gram of PRPP and if your synthesis is successful you will share half of the products with us. So, I went down and I actually spent a week and stayed at Bruce's house with Bruce and his wife, Giovanna. They were unbelievably gracious and I made the desired substrates. Bruce’s generosity accelerated my graduate work enormously. In fact I would never made any progress without Ames’s help.

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.