REVISED

After my sabbatical, soon after returning to my lab at Cornell, I decided that there must be a yeast virus. We discovered a very unusual one, a double stranded two component one that made a toxin that killed yeast cells My search for this virus is how I met David Baltimore because he was working on double stranded RNA in animal cells at MIT. I knew nothing about how to manipulate double stranded RNA at the time. So, I called David and he gave me the information I needed to isolate and manipulate double stranded RNA. We never had a formal collaboration, but he was very helpful in solving this project. We hit it off on the telephone so I wanted to meet him so then I invited to come to Cornell to give a talk. He stayed at my house and met my family. We talked a lot about science literature and many other things and I realized that he was a deep intellect.

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.