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Library & Center for Humanities Past Events

Visit our Special Events playlist to view videos of our past events.

Syndey Brenner Research Fellowship Symposium

Talks from our past Sydney Brenner Research Fellowship recipients. Held virtually on March 22, 2024.

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LOVE DATA WORKSHOP 2024

Celebrating International Love Data Week

Be a part of the library’s celebration of Love Data Week with an enlightening data workshop on the morning of February 14th. Join us in exploring crucial topics such as data management (description, storage, and special repositories for data), open access data, and more. Reflecting on the one-year milestone since the initiation of the NIH Data Management and Sharing policy, and with impending open data mandates from the White House, it’s imperative for government funding bodies to align with the evolving landscape by 2025.

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CITY OF SCIENCE

James P. Allison in Conversation with Lesley Stahl

Thursday, November 16, 2023 @ 6:30pm
Elebash Recital Hall, CUNY Graduate Center

Winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize, maverick Texan James P. Allison pioneered the science of immunotherapy, a game-changing cancer treatment that uses the body’s own immune system to attack tumor cells. In his lab research, working outside the scientific mainstream, he found the molecular key to stimulating an immune response to cancer, resulting in new lifesaving drugs.

Presented in partnership with CUNY Graduate Center and CSHL Center for Humanities and Modern Biology, BGI Nobel Laureate Archives Program.

Open to the Public at no cost.

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Recombinant DNA

Fifty Years of Discovery & Debates

Katalin Karikó speaking at Recombinant DNA: Fifty Years of Discovery & Debates. Meeting held at Cold Spring Harbor, Sept 27-30, 2023

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The Exceptions: A Center for the Humanities event

featuring Kate Zernike and Nancy Hopkins

On April 28, 2023, the Center for Humanities hosted a discussion of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kate Zernike’s book, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science, which tells the story of sixteen female faculty members at MIT who quantified the discrimination faced by female scientists at their institution and forced a sustained public discussion about sexism in science.

The discussion was moderated by Laura Lindenfeld. In addition to Kate Zernike and Laura Lindenfeld, the panelists included Nancy Hopkins, who is the central figure of the book, and CSHL professor Hannah Meyer.

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image of oil change lecture

Oil Change

Saving the rainforest with sustainable oil palm and aquatic plants

Speaker Rob Martienssen studies epigenetic mechanisms that shape and regulate the genome, and their impact on transposable elements, first discovered by Barbara McClintock at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. These mechanisms underlie clonal propagation of oil palm, with implications for rain forest conservation, and of aquatic plants, including the humble duckweed, that are being…

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CITY OF SCIENCE

Phillip A. Sharp in Conversation with Siddhartha Mukherjee

Elebash Recital Hall, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY
Thursday, September 29, 2022 6:30 p.m.

Join us for a stimulating conversation between two great scientific minds. Molecular biologist Phillip A. Sharp received the Nobel Prize for his discovery of “split genes,” which has been fundamental to medical research on the development of cancer and other diseases. Sharp is an institute professor at MIT and member of its Department of Biology and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research; he also co-founded the biotech companies Biogen and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals. He speaks about his groundbreaking work with Siddhartha Mukherjee, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, a faculty member at Columbia University Medical Center, and a cancer physician and researcher. Mukherjee is also the author of The Gene: An Intimate History and the forthcoming The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human.

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Group shot of St Petersburg Lab

Revisiting H. J. Muller In Russia

Talk by Dr. Helen Juliette Muller

Revisiting H. J. Muller In Russia
Talk by Dr. Helen Juliette Muller on her father Herman Muller, Nicolai Vavilov, science in 1930s USSR, and the Lysenko affair

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Life, Hope & Science

Three Journeys in Research

Life, Hope & Science: Three Journeys in Research
The Center for Humanities and History of Modern Biology at CSHL invites you to join us for a discussion about the life in science of three prominent Nobel Prize laureates, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Jennifer Doudna and Elizabeth Blackburn. Susan Hockfield, president emerita of MIT, will moderate.

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THE GENE: An Intimate History

Meet the Author - Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha Mukherjee discussed his book The Gene, and the recent PBS documentary of the same name by Ken Burns and Barak Goodman that featured CSHL scientists. Dr. Matthew Cobb, University of Manchester professor and author of Life’s Greatest Secret and Richard Sever, co-founder of bioRxiv and medRxiv, also participated.

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Anna Marie Skalka

Discovering Retroviruses: Beacons in the Biosphere

Meet the Author Anna Marie Skalka

Anna Marie Skalka will discuss her book, Discovering Retroviruses: Beacons in the Biosphere

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image of Venki Ramakrishnan and his book Gene Machine

Gene Machine

The Race to Discover the Secrets of the Ribosome

Gene Machine: The Race to Discover the Secrets of the Ribosome recounts Ramakrishnan’s quest to solve the structure of the ribosome, and in the process, paints a clear picture of the actual process of scientific inquiry, including successes and failures, collaborators and competitors, insights and frustrations.

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Barbara McClintock's Controlling Elements

Controlling Elements

Then and Now lecture by Rob Martienssen

Rob Martienssen’s special lecture on Barbara McClintock’s ‘Controlling Elements, Then and Now.’ In the 1940s Barbara McClintock famously discovered transposable elements, sometimes called jumping genes, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983. But she called them “controlling elements” and devoted much of her career to the regulation of…

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image of ad for The Message event at the Center for Humanities

The Message

A play about the discovery of messenger RNA

The Message uses two fictional characters, one from Brenner’s group and one from Watson’s group, who participated in the discovery. They are meeting in the present time and reminiscing about the race to discover the structure of DNA.

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Carl Zimmer 2018 Talk

Carl Zimmer will discuss his latest book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

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Mad Sessions, Preprints and a Blackboard

How Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner Collaborated in the 1950s and 1960s

Matthew Cobb, the 2016-2017 Sydney Brenner Research Scholarship recipient, will discusses his most recent book Life’s Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

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