Officers & Trustees President's Essay Alfred Day Hershey Manny Delbrück Director's Report Highlights of 1997 Administration

Board of Trustees

Several valued trustees completed their terms in 1997. Scientific trustees Günter Blobel, M.D., Ph.D., Gerald Fink, Ph.D., and Eckhard Wimmer, Ph.D. have departed, as have individual trustees Wendy Russell and Douglas A. (Sandy) Warner III, who is taking the requisite 1-year interval after two successive 3-year terms.

At the close of the 1997 term (February 1998), John Cleary concluded his term as President of the CSHL Association and as Trustee. We are most grateful to John for his outstanding service to the Association and to the Laboratory in general and will continue to seek his valuable advice and guidance. We look forward to working with Vernon Merrill who has now assumed the position of CSHL Association President.

Wendy Russell has been named Honorary Trustee. Wendy began serving on the Board in 1984, has served four 3-year terms, and was Secretary in 1985­1987 and 1992­1997. She has served on the Development, Executive, Finance & Investment, Banbury, Building, and DNALC Committees, as well as the CSHL Association.

Wendy is a superstar in raising financial support for the Laboratory and was instrumental in starting the Corporate Advisory Board (CAB) for the DNA Learning Center. She was also a vital and wonderful part of the Laboratory's initiative to establish on-site child care. Her tireless efforts toward that end, as well as on behalf of the CSHL Association Annual Fund, are deeply appreciated.

The Laboratory's continuing success is due, in large part, to the outstanding leadership and support of the dedicated people who volunteer their time in support of an excellent cause. We offer heartfelt thanks to each of these individuals for their contributions and active participation and look forward to continuing our relationship in the future.

Our new scientific trustees, whose terms became effective in 1997, are Edward Harlow, Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital; John Kuriyan, Ph.D., a prominent X-ray crystallographer studying signal transduction and DNA replication among other things as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor at Rockefeller University; and Lorne Mendell, Ph.D, Distinguished Professor and Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at State University of New York (SUNY) Stony Brook and President of the American Society for Neuroscience. Ed Harlow's return to CSHL is particularly meaningful: Ed was on our scientific staff from 1982 to 1991. His demonstration here in 1989 of a relationship between the retinoblastoma (rb) oncogene and the E1A tumor suppressor have won him much well-deserved acclaim. Ed studied oncogenes for a decade prior to this important discovery and has had a stellar career in science since. In addition, he is also co-author with David Lane of our very successful laboratory manual Antibodies. Ed is currently Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Director for Science Policy at the National Cancer Institute. We are honored and grateful to have the participation of these and other scientists in charting the course for continued scientific success at Cold Spring Harbor.

In November, the Board of Trustees voted to approve the Laboratory's plan to establish a CSHL graduate program. This has allowed us to begin the application process for becoming a degree-granting institution. Our intention is to initiate a small program of approximately five Ph.D. students per year to be run in conjunction with our existing program of graduate education for students of SUNY Stony Brook. The planning and application process is being handled by Assistant Director Winship Herr, who will also be the first Dean of the graduate school.

A Friend Lost: Mary Jeanne Harris

In November, we were deeply saddened by the death of a very special friend, Mary Jeanne Harris. Mary Jeanne and her husband Henry U. Harris, Jr., have been members of the CSHL Association since 1980, and over the years, they have been extremely generous in their support of a wide variety of projects at the Laboratory. In 1982, Mary Jeanne joined the Laboratory's Board of Trustees, on which she served for six consecutive years. She served on the Building Committee; the Robertson House Committee, through which she helped to decorate the guest accommodations at the Laboratory's Banbury Center; the DNA Learning Center (DNALC) Committee; and as Vice Chairman of the Education Committee. The Harris' support was instrumental in the establishment of the Laboratory's DNALC in 1988, and in 1991, they funded an architectural study and made the lead gift toward construction of an addition to the DNALC.