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Robert Waterston, 2003-06-01

 Item — Box: AV08, Hi8: CSHL1317
Oral History | Robert Waterston
Oral History | Robert Waterston

Scope and Contents

Robert Waterston, professor of genome sciences and early participant in genome sequencing, is interviewed by Mila Pollock and Jan Witkowski on June 1, 2003, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, in Cold Spring Harbor, New York.

Robert Waterston discusses the following in his interview: Scene 1. Involvement in genomics: C. elegans Genome Project -- Scene 2. Involvement in genomics: the Human Genome Project -- Scene 3. Mechanics of the Human Genome Project -- Scene 4. Challenges of the Human Genome Project -- Scene 5. The Burke incident -- Scene 6. Jim Watson, personality and influence: the Human Genome Project -- Scene 7. The Human Genome Project after Jim Watson's Directorship -- Scene 8. Surprises in the Human Genome Project -- Scene 9. The Human Genome Project: international collaboration -- Scene 10. Gene patenting -- Scene 11. Dangers of genomic research -- Scene 12. The future of genomics -- Scene 13. Is understanding human chemistry unnatural? -- Scene 14. Science and spirituality -- Scene 15. Cold Spring Harbor Symposia --Scene 16. Sydney Brenner.

Dates

  • Creation: 2003-06-01

Creator

Conditions Governing Access

Portions of this collection have been digitized and are available online: https://library.cshl.edu/oralhistory/. Select tapes have been digitized thanks to support from CLIR Recordings at Risk Grant awarded in 2021, these tapes are available for research online via our Oral History Website and in person at CSHL Archives. Please contact CSHL Archives archives@cshl.edu with any questions regarding availability.

Biographical / Historical

Robert Waterston received his bachelor's degree in engineering from Princeton University (1965) and both an M.D. and a Ph.D. in pathology from the University of Chicago (1972). After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, he joined the Washington University in St. Louis faculty in 1976 where he became the James S. McDonnel Professor of Genetics, head of the Department of Genetics, and director of the School of Medicine’s Genome Sequencing Center, which he founded in 1993. In early 2003 Dr. Waterston took the position of Professor and William Gates III Chair of the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he is currently Professor of Genome Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, was a recipient of the International Gairdner Award, the Genetics Society of America’s Beadle Award, the Dan David Prize, and the Alfred P. Sloan Award from the GM Cancer Research Foundation. Waterston attended the worm meetings at Cold Spring Harbor Lab and in 1989 Watson supported Waterston’s proposal to use the worm as a model organism in the Human Genome Project.

Extent

1 Cassettes (Camcorder footage) : Hi-8 - CSHL1317

1 Optical Disks (Talking science with Robert Waterston.) : DVD ; 35 min.

1 VHS (Working copy.) : WATERSTON_ROBERT_01 [0:42:01] unedited

Language of Materials

From the Collection: English