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Founded in 1890, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is a biomedical research and education facility with programs in cancer, neuroscience, plant biology and quantitative biology. CSHL is ranked number one in the world by Thomson Reuters for impact of its research in molecular biology and genetics. The Laboratory has been home to eight Nobel Prize winners. Today, CSHL's multidisciplinary scientific community is more than 350 scientists strong and its Meetings & Courses program hosts more than 11,000 scientists from around the world each year. The Laboratory's education arm also includes a graduate school and programs for undergraduates as well as middle and high school students and teachers. CSHL is a private, not-for-profit institution on the north shore of Long Island. For more information, visit www.cshl.edu.

© 2012 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. All Rights Reserved.

Cancer
Researchers at CSHL are devoted to understanding the fundamental biology of human cancer. Their commitment to studying basic cellular processes reflects the premise that understanding how these processes are altered in cancer cells will provide a framework for rational therapies. Several technological advances developed at CSHL have given rise to innovative genomic approaches and the development of new mouse models of various cancer types. These provide a powerful pathway for discovery, characterization, and validation of genes that contribute to cancer development and progression. A unique aspect of the CSHL cancer program is its interactive nature. Scientists are encouraged to share their ideas and work on questions in a synergistic way that far exceeds the power of any single laboratory working in isolation. CSHL has been designated as a Cancer Center of the National Cancer Institute since 1987.

Neuroscience
CSHL neuroscientists focus on understanding how neural activity and neural circuitry underlie behavior, and how disruptions in these circuits lead to neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, autism, schizophrenia, and depression. These questions are addressed in two model systems - rodents and Drosophila - using molecular, cellular, genetic, developmental, theoretical, physiological, and behavioral approaches. Neuroscience research at CSHL is highly collaborative, and can be divided into three broad themes: sensory processing, cognition, and cognitive disorders. In addition, there is an effort to develop new anatomical methods to improve our understanding of brain circuits, connectivity, and function.

Plant Genetics
The plant group at CSHL studies fundamental mechanisms in plant development and genetics that impact crop productivity, biodiversity, and climate change. Their research uses Arabidopsis, maize, and most recently tomato as model systems and expands upon the Nobel Prize-winning work done at CSHL by Barbara McClintock in the 1940s and 1950s. The transposable genetic elements, or "jumping genes," that she discovered are now understood to reprogram the epigenome and are being used at CSHL for functional genomics in Arabidopsis and maize. CSHL has taken part in numerous plant genome-sequencing projects including Arabidopsis, rice, sorghum, and maize, as well as epigenomic sequencing and profiling.

Bioinformatics and Genomics
The Genomics program is composed of faculty working across disciplines and research areas. Their main research interests are genomic organization, structural variation of the human genome as related to disease, computational genomics and transcriptional modeling, and sequencing technology. These faculties are located at both the main campus and the Woodbury Genome Center, a few miles away. Faculty conducts research in the areas of human genetics, functional genomics, small RNA biology, and bioinformatics.

Quantitative Biology
CSHL has recently opened the Simons Center for Quantitative Biology (SCQB). The areas of expertise in the SCQB include applied mathematics, computer science, theoretical physics, and engineering. Members of the SCQB will interact closely with other CSHL researchers and will apply their approaches to research areas include genomic analysis, population genetics, neurobiology, evolutionary biology, and signal and image processing. © 2012 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. All Rights Reserved.

Educational Activities
In 1890, High School Biology teachers first took courses at Cold Spring Harbor under the aegis of The Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Science. The Laboratory's "phage" courses of the early post-World War II years were intellectual incubators for the pioneers of molecular biology. Today, CSHL carries forward this rich tradition on a greatly expanded basis, in a remarkable range of educational offerings for working scientists, scientists in training, and students and teachers in primary and secondary school systems locally, throughout the United States, and overseas.

Meetings and Courses
CSHL's reputation as one of the world's premier hubs of activity in biology and genetics is closely linked with its Meetings and Courses Program. With roots in the annual Symposia in Quantitative Biology series, which began in 1933, the program organizes more than 50 meetings and courses annually, covering a wide range of topics in the biological sciences. Together, they bring some 8,500 scientists to the campus each year. Participants range from the most accomplished senior investigators to graduate students and postdocs. Programs are put together by organizers on the basis of openly submitted abstracts and include the discussion of unpublished work. A CSHL-styled meetings program was begun in 2009 in Suzhou, China.

David J. Stewart, Executive Director

Banbury Center
Banbury Center, located on the grounds of the historic Robertson House, scientists and other leaders in society meet in privacy to discuss topics of common interest. About two dozen meetings are organized at Banbury each year, for groups of up to 30 or 40 participants. Topics discusses are molecular biology, molecular genetics, human genetics, neuroscience, and science policy.

Jan A. Witkowski, Executive Director

Watson School of Biological Sciences
The Watson School of Biological Sciences (WSBS) trains the next generation of biologists, offering the Ph.D. in biology in as little as 4 years to a limited number of accomplished students drawn from around the world. The curriculum is designed to train self-confident, self-reliant young scientists to become scholars and to acquire the knowledge that their research and future careers demand.

Leemor Joshua-Tor, Dean

DNA Learning Center
The DNA Learning Center (DNALC) has a major impact not only in the New York metropolitan area, but also globally in pioneering public science education for the genome age. With teaching facilities in Long Island and New York City, it brings a hands-on approach to learning about biology and genomes to classrooms and homes of children in primary schools, middle schools, and high schools. The DNALC is known for devising means for young people, teachers and parents to conduct sophisticated experiments with DNA.

David A. Micklos, Executive Director

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
With origins in the 1930s, CSHL Press enhances the Laboratory's educational mission by publishing original work that assists in the advance and spread of scientific knowledge. The Press publishes research and review journals, books, manuals, primers, and other information sources, in electronic and print form. These publications are made available in a variety of languages through distributors and publishing partnerships worldwide.

John R. Inglis, Executive Director and Publisher © 2012 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. All Rights Reserved.

Facts and Figures
Founded in 1890, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is an international research institution, achieving breakthroughs in molecular biology and genetics and enhancing scientific knowledge worldwide.

Research

 * Over 350 scientists, with expertise in cancer, neuroscience, quantitative biology, plant biology, bioinformatics and genomics.
 * Consistently ranked #1 for impact in molecular biology and genetics by Thomson Reuters.
 * Eight Nobel laureates, including Dr. James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA's double helix.
 * National Cancer Institute (NCI) - designated Cancer Center for 25 years, with NCI "outstanding" rating.
 * Collaborations with top clinical institutions including Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Dana-Farber, Johns Hopkins, NYU, Weill Cornell, Columbia University, Yale and http://www.ucla.edu/ UCLA].
 * Springboard for 19 biotechnology start-up companies, including OSI Pharmaceuticals.
 * 50% of research funding is from private and unrestricted sources, allowing a unique degree of scientific freedom and collaboration.

Education
Meetings and Courses
 * CSHL brings together more than 11,000 scientists each year from around the world to its Long Island campus and its new China center to learn about the latest technologies and share advances in biological and biomedical research.
 * The Lab's meetings, including Biology of Genomes and Genome Informatics, rank among the top scientific conferences in the world.

Watson School of Biological Sciences
 * The Watson School trains the next generation of scientists through an innovative Ph.D. program.
 * It recruits students from divers backgrounds, funds their research at any of the 50 CSHL labs, and challenges them to complete their Ph.D. on an accelerated basis.

DNA Learning Center (DNALC)
 * CSHL teaches more than 30,000 students hands-on genetics each year.
 * In total, 400,000 students have been taught in NY State.
 * 8,000 high school teachers across the country have been trained in molecular biology instruction.

CSHL Press © 2012 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. All Rights Reserved.
 * CSHL publishes journals and books for 2,000 academic institutions worldwide, including all of the Ivy League universities and top colleges in the U.S.

History
1890: Founded as a biology teacher-training laboratory

At the end of the 19th century, the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Science found a laboratory for training high school and college teachers in marine biology. As biologists and naturalists of that time worked out the consequences of Darwin's theory of evolution, they often established their laboratories at the seashore, where there was an abundance of animals and plants for study. The pristine north shore of Long Island was a natural site for the Brooklyn Institute's facility - a place to study nature at its source, the sea.

In 1889, John D. Jones gave land and buildings - formerly part of Cold Spring Whaling Company on the southwestern shore of Cold Spring Harbor - to the Institute. The first course at the new Biological Laboratory (the General Course on Biology) began on July 7, 1890, establishing education in the biological sciences as the Laboratory's first mission.

1904: Genetics research begins

Soon, another mission was established: research in genetics. This grew out of two events: the appointment, in 1898, of Charles Davenport, professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard, as directory of the Laboratory, and the rediscovery in 1900 of Gregor Mendel's work, carried out 35 years earlier. Mendel's Laws provided explanations for the variability that underlies evolution, and his work opened new possibilities for experimentation in biology.

Davenport approached the Carnegie Institute of Washington and proposed that it establish a genetics research program at the Cold Spring Harbor site. In June 1904, the Carnegie Institute's Station for Experimental Evolution, later renamed the Department of Genetics, was formally opened with a commerative speech given by Hugo de Vries, one of the three re-discoverers of Mendel's work.

1920s-30s: Cornerstones of modern cancer research

In 1916, Clarence Little - studying the genetics of cancer in mice - discovered that Japanese "waltzing" mice, but not other mouse strains, were susceptible to transplanted sarcomas (connective tissue cancers). In 1928, E. Carleton MacDowell discovered a strain of mice predisposed to spontaneous leukemia. Subsequent breeding experiments led to the development of mice with increased susceptibility or resistance to the cancer. MacDowell's work is a cornerstone of modern cancer research.

In 1924, Charles Davenport appointed Reginald Harris as the director of the Biological Laboratory. Harris began to change the Laboratory's research program to focus on quantitative biology - physiology and biophysics in particular. Harris' greatest legacy was his creation of the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology in 1933.

1945: Phage course lays foundation for molecular genetics

The appointment in 1941 of Milislav Demerec as director of both the Biological Laboratory and the Department of Genetics signaled a new era of genetics research, one in which microorganisms were used to study the nature of the gene. Demerec began to study bacteria and simple viruses that infected them called bacteriophages, and in 1945 encouraged Max Delbrück to introduced other researchers to new genetic concepts and tools in these annual courses.

The Phage Course played a key role in the development of molecular genetics. May scientists who took it went on to help determine the physical basis of the gene. Delbrück and Luria were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969 together with a third phage geneticist, Alfred Hershey, who beginning in 1950 made Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory his scientific home.

In 1942, Demerec appointed Barbara McClintock to the Department of Genetics. Already acknowledged as a world leader in cytogenetics (the microscopic study of chromosome structure and behavior), in 1944 she became the third woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In the 1940s, McClintock began to study puzzling unstable mutations in maize, an effort that ultimately led her to describe transposable elements. In 1983, McClintock received the Nobel Prize for her studies of transposons, which she earlier had called "jumping genes."

During World War II, Milislav Demerec performed other research at the Laboratory which led to isolation of mutant strains of the fungusPenicillium chrysogenum. This research greatly increased the yield of the antibiotic penicillin, and proved a great boon to the U.S. war effort.

1950s: DNA discoveries herald new era in biology

Alfred Hershey came to Cold Spring Harbor in 1950. Two years later, he and Martha Chase performed one of the most famous experiments in modern biology, the "Waring blender" experiment, which reinforced the findings of other scientists that genes were made of DNA, not protein. The discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, first described publicly by James Watson at the 1953 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium entitled "Viruses," heralded a new era in biology.

1968: James Watson becomes director; broadens mission

In 1962, the Department of Genetics, no longer supported by the Carnegie Institute of Washington, merged with the Biological Laboratory to form "Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory of Quantitative Biology." (In 1970, the name was simplified to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.) The first years of the new institution were financially difficult, and it was only through the heroic efforts of then-director John Cairns that the Laboratory's financial situation was stabilized. In 1968, Cairns resigned to return to research, and Nobel laureate James Watson, then a professor at Harvard University, agreed to become director while initially retaining his Harvard post.

Watson was eager to change the focus of the Laboratory to the study of cancer. One of early accomplishments was the 1969 hiring of a young virologist, Joe Sambrook, to begin a tumor virus group that continues to this day. It was not until 1973, however, that real financial stability came to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. In that year, Charles Sammis Robertson established the Robertson Research Fund with a generous gift of nearly $8 million. In 1976, Robertson donated his nearby Banbury estate to the Laboratory, where it established the Banbury Conference Center in 1977.

Since the 1970s, the Laboratory's studies on cancer have flourished, and there has been a large expansion and broadening of its research. The study of plants at the Laboratory was reinvigorated in the 1980s with the construction of Page Laboratory, a building dedicated to plant biology. In 1990, the program of neuroscience research at CSHL was significantly expanded with the completion of the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Laboratory.

In addition to the expansion of research at the Laboratory, educational programs flourished under Watson's directorship. Major developments in the educational mission under Watson include the establishment of a large number of postgraduate courses including the seminal Yeast Genetics course, and the founding of the DNA Learning Center in 1988, the first science center devoted entirely to educating the public about genetics. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's long tradition of education in the biological sciences culminated with its accreditation, in 1998, as a Ph.D. degree-granting institution. The founding of the Watson School of Biological Sciences in 1998 and the establishment of the CSHL Cancer Genome Research Center just two years later is a clear demonstration of how education and research have progressed together at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since its inception.

1994 - 2009: New Leadership and the Lab's biggest expansion

In 1994, CSHL scientist Bruce Stillman became director of the Laboratory and Watson became its president. Stillman, a pioneer in the field of DNA replication who has worked at the Laboratory since 1979, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (London) in 1993 and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2000.

In 2003, Watson became chancellor and Stillman was named president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Stillman also serves as chief executive officer of the Laboratory and as director of its NCI-designated Cancer Center.

In 2007, Watson retired as chancellor, and in 2008 he was appointed chancellor emeritus.

Representing the largest expansion in CSHL's history, the Hillside Laboratories opened in 2009. The six buildings increased active research space by 40 percent and can house about 200 research-related personnel.

© 2012 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. All Rights Reserved.