REVISED

I had published my graduate work from Yale in two papers--one in Science, another in Genetics. They described the operon problem that I worked on but did not solve it. And when I was in Bruce's lab, I worked on Salmonella typhimurium, which was a bacterium, not yeast. I published five or six papers on the Salmonella histidine operon regulation in so the operon question in yeast and other eukaryotes lay fallow.

Bruce presented a paper of our work on Salmonella at Cold Spring Harbor at the symposium [The Genetic Code] in 1966. CSH wasn’t in good shape back then, If you leaned too hard on some of the buildings, the old wall kind of moved. The lab buildings were not in great shape in those days. The meeting was exciting, but then I went to Cornell and realized that since I hadn't really solved this problem of the question: Do higher organisms have operons? It was still an open question. So the operon question in yeast was my first grant at Cornell. It took two years but I solved the problem: yeast had no operons. Remarkably it remains one of the clear distinctions between bacteria and all organisms with a nucleus. Nucleated organisms don't have operons--multiple gene messenger RNAs.

At that time, before I had tenure at Cornell, around 1969 I got a call from Watson. I was an assistant professor, and I don't know how he even knew who I was. But Jim Watson called me.

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.