My first CSH symposium

[Errol Friedberg]

I shall never forget my first CSH symposium. It was the 1968 meeting and I was a young and very green postdoc with David Goldthwait at Case Western Reserve University. David was invited to talk at the meeting that year and I was overwhelmed at his suggestion that I give the talk on work that I was doing then. This was the first formal scientific presentation of my career and I spent most of the meeting up to the time of the talk in abject terror; a terror considerably heightened by seeing in the flesh for the first time scientific lumineries such as Gobind Khorana and Arthur Kornberg. I remember distinctly my fascination at hearing Wallie Gilbert "unroll" his rolling circle model of phage DNA replication. The talk came and went and so did my terror. The next time I was invited to talk at a CSH symposium was 32 years later at the 2000 meeting. A very different experience indeed!