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 Jim Watson's CSHL Anniversaries
In addition to a milestone birthday, 1998 marked two special anniversaries for Jim Watson. It has been 50 years since his first visit to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as a graduate student doing summertime research, and 30 years since he became director of the Laboratory. To commemorate these events, the Laboratory held a special late-winter conference called Pathways to Cancer. CSHL alumnus and Trustee Ed Harlow, of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, Jan Witkowski, and I, were coorganizers.
The meeting included sessions entitled "Cancer Genetic Pathways," "Cancer Cell Growth Controls," and "Cancer Pathways"--a discussion of research from the cell to the clinic. But the highlight of the meeting came on Thursday evening when the BBC film Life Story was shown in Grace Auditorium. What an extraordinary experience it was to see Jim Watson stand before us offering offered his thoughtful comments on the movie that was based upon his 1968 best-selling book The Double Helix. The showing of the movie in the context of a modern meeting on biology highlighted how far we have come since those exciting days in 1953.
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