History of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, April 1973

In 1889, the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences established a biological laboratory for training high school and college teachers at Cold Spring Harbor on the north shore of Long Island. The Laboratory’s land and buildings had belonged to the Cold Spring Whaling Company and were given to the Institute by John D. Jones. The first course— the General Course on Biology—at the new Biological Laboratory began on July 7, 1890, establishing education in the biological sciences as the Laboratory’s first mission.

The second mission—research on genetics—was soon established. It grew out of two events: the appointment, in 1898, of Charles Davenport as director of the Laboratory, and the discovery in 1900 of Mendel’s work, carried out 35 years earlier. Davenport persuaded the Carnegie Institute of Washington to establish a Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor and in June 1904, it was formally opened by Hugo de Vries, one of the three rediscoverers of Mendel’s work.

Significant early discoveries began immediately. George Shull, in his studies of corn, achieved the first great discovery at Cold Spring Harbor in 1908. By studying the growth and yields of corn plants, he found that crossing purebred lines produced hybrid offspring that were stronger and more productive than plants produced by open pollination in the field. Shull’s discovery of hybrid vigor led to increased corn production and to a revolution in crop breeding.

In 1920, Albert Blakeslee provided key evidence in support of the chromosome theory of heredity with his studies of polyploidy; Carleton MacDowell began to study the inheritance of leukemia in mice and established the C57BL strain of mice—the same strain whose genome sequence is being determined. Clarence Little—who went on to found the Jackson Laboratory at Bar Harbor, Maine— discovered that Japanese “waltzing”mice, but not other mouse strains, were susceptible to transplanted sarcomas.

In 1924, Reginald Harris became 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 is the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology. These meetings, held annually since 1933, continue to be the premier meetings for molecular biology and genetics in the world. The Symposium was the beginning of the Laboratory’s meetings program, which now includes some 20 large, international scientific conferences a year. The Symposium proceedings were published as the “Symposia on Quantitative Biology” which contain many classic papers, and became required reading for many biologists.

Delbruck Laboratory.The historic Phage Course was taught here, where courses continue today.

The publication of the Symposia volumes was the origin of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, which publishes five research journals, technical manuals and monographs for working scientists, educational books for students and the public including children, and electronic media. The appointment in 1941 of Laboratory researcher Milislav Demerec as director signaled a new era of genetics research, one in which microorganisms, especially bacteria and bacteriophages, were used to study the nature of the gene. In 1945, Demerec encouraged Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria to start the Phage Course, the first advanced course at the Laboratory. Many of the scientists who developed the field of molecular genetics during the 1950s and 1960s took this course. The Course Program has enlarged so that each year the Laboratory offers 25 laboratory and lecture courses in the biological sciences. Delbrück and Luria went on to win the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1969 together with a third phage geneticist, Alfred Hershey, who came to Cold Spring Harbor in 1950. Two years later, Hershey and Martha Chase performed one of the most famous experiments in modern biology, the “Waring-blender” experiment, which reinforced the earlier findings of Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty that genes were made of DNA and not protein. The discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, first described publicly by James Watson at the 1953 Symposium entitled “Viruses,” heralded a new era in biology.

History, continued