REVISED

The call from Jim came out of nowhere and he said, “Do you want to teach a yeast course at Cold Spring Harbor?” I have no idea how Jim got the idea of asking me, because I wasn't one of the young Boston crowd known to him and I wasn't on the map. Not only that the the yeast field at this time was not very molecular. One scientist even claimed that yeast’s genetic material wasn’t DNA. So DNA did not play a big role in yeast in 1969. Furthermore, there were little silos of yeast work all over the world: The University of Washington in Seattle, Berkeley in California, Gif-sur-Yvette in France, Tokyo, Japan. But communication between yeast labs then was very slow. The best example I can give you is this: In my early days as a graduate student at Yale, I wrote to Seattle for some yeast strains they had published about. But I didn’t receive the strains when I needed them; I didn’t receive them until the day that I got my PhD--- not when I needed them. Communication among yeast geneticists was poor in those days. Moreover, there was an old guard of people; they even named themselves after the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. One was anointed the Pope; another was anointed the Cardinal. At meetings, it wasn't like 10-minute talks or 15-minute talks. The big shots in the field, Pope and Cardinal etc. could talk for an hour, hour and a half, two hours, as long as they felt like talking. When Jim called me to invite me to teach the Yeast Course, I thought that it was an opportunity to change the yeast field and make meetings like the CSH meetings where students and big shots got the same amount of time for a talk. And the other person he called was Fred Sherman, who was much more senior than I. Actually, Fred was one of the few molecular biologists working on yeast. So, I thought this was a great opportunity. I had a good background in chemistry, so I said “Yes” and that was the beginning of the Yeast Course in 1970.

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.