1970 Yeast Genetics Course

[Jim Haber]

The only eukaryotic genetics course I ever took was the Yeast Genetics course offered for the first time in 1970 by Gerry Fink and Fred Sherman. This course launched the yeast genetic careers of many successful scientists and stands as one of the most important reasons that yeast genetics took off as impressively as it did. My classmates in this first year of the course included the chair of the department from which I had just received my Ph.D. at Berkeley, Clint Ballou, and Gottfried Schatz. The course did not get off to a great start, as the first lecture was given by the stone-deaf Carl C. Lindegren, the discoverer of gene conversion (about which I knew nothing), but it was uphill from there! I learned enough from Fred and Gerry and their colleagues to start trying to do real yeast genetics when I set up my own lab. The first dissection needle I made, Gerry said "Well, it's a needle, but no self-respecting geneticist would use it." I got better. At the end of the course, following the tradition of the phage course, I made a poster showing a cartoon of the yeast genetic map, full of puns, reflecting the few loci that were mapped in those days. We all signed it.