In general it depends on the leadership, okay? And the direction. And a lot of it depends on the luck of the draw that you get your grants. But Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from its beginnings, which were very, very disturbing beginnings that they don’t want to admit with this genocide kind of group of purification of species and stuff like that up the road apiece. But I think that Cold Spring Harbor Lab is an ideal place for people doing high profile important, critical research. And I don’t have a crystal ball to know how it will survive, but I truly hope and pray that it does survive.

Bruce Roe is a George Lynn Cross Research Professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Oklahoma. He graduated with a Ph.D in biochemistry from the University of Western Michigan and received a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellowship to research at SUNY Stony Brook. He spent his 1978-79 sabbatical at Fred Sanger’s lab, where he helped develop the renowned method of DNA sequencing currently used today.

Roe is founding director of the Advanced Center for Genomic Technology (ACGT) at the U. of Oklahoma, one of the first large-scale sequencing facilities in the US. At present, the ACGT innovates computational and robotic methods to analyze DNA sequence results and is currently determining the nucleotide sequence of five microbial genomes. In 1999, Roe’s research led to the elucidation and publication of the complete sequence of human chromosome 22. This was the first human chromosome to be sequenced in its entirely.

He has attended genome meetings and symposia at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for over 20 years.