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 For now more than 50 years, the postgraduate courses at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have been without equal. The first one, the famous Phage Course, offered for 26 consecutive years, was initiated and taught in the waning days of World War II by the German-born theoretical-physicist-turned-biologist Max Delbrück. He saw his course-offered for three weeks during the summer-as a lifeboat for his six talented students, academic scientists who might otherwise begin to grow stale. The course gave them the opportunity to use bacterial viruses (phages) to come to grips with the essence of what was then still very mysterious: the gene. Although no long-term converts emerged from the first-year class, the Phage Course in subsequent years had many real payoffs. The summer of 1948, for example, saw Seymour Benzer and Gunther Stent doing their first phage experiments, and they never went back to their respective past worlds of physics and chemistry.
Encouraged by the teaching triumphs of the Phage Course, then-Director Milislav Demerec, in 1950, started a second course, on bacterial genetics. No one then could have imagined that we would be celebrating its 50th consecutive offering this year. Its success, in turn, inspired the creation in 1958 of our third course on animal cells and viruses. Equally influential, its early students included Purnell Choppin, later long to serve as the president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; growth factor discoverer and Nobel prize winner Stanley Cohen, and the clever Swiss interferon cloner, Charles Weissman. Today, our yearly course offerings, ranging from Yeast Genetics to Neurobiology, total 25, with the number bound to increase as biology grows ever more relevant to human life during the next century.
We always aim to teach ideas and experimental techniques that are not yet part of the academic teaching scene even in the best of universities. We therefore recruit teachers who have actually generated new ideas and techniques, and they choose the students from the respective applicant pools. To ensure that their choices are not influenced by financial circumstances, our student fees are low, covering only a small percentage of the true teaching costs. And when a given student has no means to cover even such reduced fees, we usually provide scholarship support. As a result, we are constantly seeking governmental and foundation monies to cover most of our true teaching costs.
Next fall, we shall be taking on an equally important academic challenge. Our long-dreamed-for opportunity of offering our own Ph.D. degrees is now a reality. Late last September, we received formal permission from the New York State Department of Education to create a degree-granting School of Biological Sciences. Although we have long served as a site for extensive Ph.D. thesis research, the actual degrees have been awarded by nearby universities-for the most part, by the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook. With large numbers of most valuable Stony Brook students continuing to do their thesis research here, an increasing number of students will have all aspects of their Ph.D. education take place here.
In helping plan our new Ph.D.-granting program, I have naturally looked back on my own education to try to pinpoint the crucial elements that led to my future success as a scientist. Not surprisingly, I see the very powerful influence of my parents. They both strongly encouraged my studies, seeing knowledge and its creation as the key factor that liberates human beings from much of illness, poverty, and superstition. To them, ultimate truth came from observation and experiments, never from personal revelations. Scholarly and cultural pursuits were the ways our Depression-limited family's money was most enthusiastically spent. At Christmas, books were increasingly favored over toys, starting with the child-oriented Travelling with Birds, given to me by my uncle and aunt on my eighth Christmas. It was instantly a cherished gift, with its focus on bird migration kindling an interest in biology that increasingly dominated my intellectual aspirations as I moved through adolescence.
Even before high school, I wanted to master the basic laws of nature, and I found Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection a powerful liberating force in facing up to the extraordinary diversity of living forms that now inhabit the earth. Its importance to me steadily increased as I went through the University of Chicago and, with little hesitation, early on chose zoology as my major. That I had matriculated when just 15 in no way indicated unusual childhood precocity. Instead, it was a reflection of President Robert Maynard Hutchins' belief that the last two years of American high schools served no useful purpose. In particular, he faulted them for not successfully challenging human minds to think as opposed to learn facts, a task best left to trade schools. To prove his point, he created a program that let a small number of students enter the university after only two years of high school. I was one of those so chosen, most likely because I was a keen reader with much better than ordinary memory.
Not until my third year in college did I as a student feel at ease, knowing by then that it was the ideas, not the facts of the past, that led to good grades in Hutchins' College. Only with ideas in place could facts be prioritized. I was thus ready for intellectual zapping by the famous Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger, through his little, elegantly written, wartime book, What is Life? Here he posed the key question that had attracted me to biology but whose previous answers had left me wanting. Schrodinger's message was that the essence of life was its ability to pass genetic information from parental to daughter cells. Most importantly, this information must reflect the precise arrangement of atoms within the molecules of heredity located on chromosomes. To truly understand life, we must pursue genetics at the molecular level.
Suddenly, birds seemed objectives for outdoor fun, not for serious science, and I began anticipating going on to a graduate school that would broaden my education to include chemistry as well as physics. But my first choice, Caltech, did not find me up to their standards, being apprised from my transcript that I was a straight-A student only in ecology courses. Happily, Indiana University only wanted to be sure that my main intellectual objective was no longer birds, and so in the fall of 1947, I was off to its main campus at Bloomington.
My two and a half years there as a graduate student were to transform me from a student into a scientist. Crucial to this process were Indiana's splendid courses. They gave me a sense not only of topics then currently exciting, but also of key earlier experiments that had put the gene at the center of heredity. Particularly inspirational during my first term were lectures on advanced genetics by the recent Nobel prize winner Herman J. Muller. They, in effect, were the story of his pursuit of the gene, starting with his undergraduate days at Columbia University. A year later, I took Felix Haurowitz's course on proteins and nucleic acids, the molecules most likely to carry genetic information. From him I learned that their highly complex structures were likely too complex for current X-ray crystallographic methods to soon give any meaningful take-home lessons for genetics. Instead, this was the time for me to master the ways of the phage world first introduced to me by Salvador Luria's fall 1947 virus course at Indiana University. By the time its final exam was over, I was totally hooked on phages and the possibility that in studying how they multiply, we were in essence studying how genes were copied. Although my resulting Ph.D. thesis, which Luria suggested I do on X-ray-inactivated phage, eventually went nowhere, I frequently went to the lab hoping my next experiment might have a real intellectual payoff.
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