REVISED

My first sabbatical from Cornell was at Cold Spring Harbor in 1974 with my friends John Roth and David Botstein. I got a Guggenheim Fellowship and Botstein, Roth, and I conducted experiments in Davenport Lab. That sabbatical year I worked at CSHL for 14 months. My wife Rosalie, our daughters Julia and Jennifer, and I lived in Osterhout. Jim and Liz Watson had lived in Osterhout right before us. So, my family and I became part of the community. In those days, everybody lived on campus except for a few renegades who lived elsewhere.

For my sabbatical, John Roth, David Botstein, and I decided we would try to make a yeast library at Cold Spring Harbor. It was the early days and at the time, no one had made a good yeast library yet. We wrote an NSF Grant and got support and had a technician, which was great. It was an exciting year for me; having two smart colleagues to share a lab with was really good. Watson said that we could have Davenport Lab to ourselves in the wintertime. I asked Jim if he would write me a recommendation for a Guggenheim, which he did. And I got a Guggenheim Fellowship, which made the transition to CSH financially easy; it was terrific to have support from my Guggenheim. We promised that were going to clone the yeast genome. And we did it. It wasn’t a great library, but we made it and we had a very good time.

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.