REVISED

My joy in experimentation was realized by success at the bench which explained why I finished my degree in three years. Also, I had a family to support and the $1500 graduate stipend made it difficult to support my wife and daughter, Julia. There was a question about operons.

I was mesmerized by the work of François Jacob and Jacques Monod, who had published a seminal paper in 1961 showing that bacterial genes of related function were organized into operons. For me raised the question: Were genes organized into operons in eukaryotic organisms? I felt I needed to ask this in a microorganism that I could compare with E. coli and I chose yeast.

My decision to work on yeast was a bit idiosyncratic. I was in Norman Giles’ lab at Yale, and Giles was working on the fungus, Neurospora, which was the preferred eukaryotic organism at the time. George Beadle had moved from Drosophila to Neurospora, which stimulated considerable interest in this organism. Although Giles’s lab was one interested as to whether operons existed in fungi, I didn't like Neurospora for my operon question because it grew as filaments not colonies like E. coli, whereas yeast grew in colonies similar to E. coli. Someone was growing yeast down the hall and I liked the smell of yeast that permeated his lab, so I told Giles I wanted to do this project in yeast, and he encouraged me to go ahead with yeast. And so, I was the only one in Giles’s large labroratory working on yeast.

Mila Pollock: So, your long and distinguished career in yeast genetics started because of its smell?

Well yes, but it also seemed a good choice because it grew in colonies on Petri dishes like E. coli.

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.