Harbor lights

Illuminating Life: Selected Papers from Cold Spring Harbor (1903-1969) by J. Witkowski Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press (2000) pp. 383 + xvi. ISBN 0-87969-566-8 $25.00 If you are anywhere on the spectrum from frequent Cold Spring Harbor visitor to someone who barely knows that Symposia of that name were until recently published in maroon covers, and if you want to learn more of the history of this remarkable research centre, then this book is for you. At first sight, Illuminating Life looks like a coffee table book, but it is much more than that. Jan Witkowski has assembled a history of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories from their inception in 1890 through to 1968, illustrated by a selection of research papers from 1903 to 1969. Each one or two papers is preceded by an interpretative essay and a biographical note on the principal author(s), and the whole is introduced by an informative historical preface. At the end are three obituaries from the literature summarizing the lives of three key players, Davenport, Harris and Demerec. For a book of this size and compass, the essentials can be assimilated remarkably quickly, and at $25 the book is exceptional value for money. First read the preface. Then the essays. These are gems, and at two or three pages each there is no need to postpone them until later! Then dip into a few research papers. Then re-read the preface. Then you will know a lot about Cold Spring Harbor. If you read the obituaries you will know even more. Here are just a few impressions. On p. 364 there is a photograph of one of the early buildings, the James Laboratory. The laboratory was constructed for $12,000 in 1928 for biophysics research (p117). It looks tiny, but in the early years of the Symposia, which were then on biophysical topics, it housed a galaxy of summer visitors including Curtis and Cole (electrophysiology), J. Z. Young (nerve conduction), Davison and Danielli (need one say more?) and many others. If biophysics under Reginald Harris (1924-36) was what made Cold Spring Harbor Quantitative, then the quest for the genetic material and its properties is what has made it most widely famed. The book brings out the seminal contributions of Demerec, both as scientist and as director (1941-60) and of McClintock, Hershey, Cairns (director 1963-8) and others. The chosen research papers include many that are landmarks in science, from maize to bacteria and phage, and generally they are easy to read. They are largely devoid of the ponderous throat-clearing and innumerable citations that are so much a part of scientific literature today. Many examples could be given of such ease of style and freedom from excess verbage, but one will suffice here. 'Aggregation of DNA is often suspected but seldom studied. In phage &lgr; we found a DNA that can form characteristic and stable complexes. A first account of them is given here'. That is the entire introduction in Hershey, A. D., Burgi, E. and Ingraham, L. (1963), Cohesion of DNA molecules isolated from phage &lgr;. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 49, 748-755. The paper by de Lucia and Cairns (1969) on 'Isolation of an E. coli strain with a mutation affecting DNA polymerase' is a fitting choice with which to conclude the compilation. In the late 1960s something seemed not quite right about the Kornberg enzyme as the putative engine of replication. Several suspicious inconsistencies were accumulating. How to test these suspicions? Random mutagenesis, a precise and rapid screening assay applicable to thousands of isolates. The rest is history. What of the last thirty years? The spine of the cover says, rather enigmatically, 'Volume 1'; the reviewer could find no statement elsewhere in the book that more is to follow. Perhaps we can look forward to Volume 2. Surely that volume will contain, among many other landmark papers, one called 'An amazing sequence arrangement at the 5 ends of Adenovirus 2 messenger RNA'.