It was in very bad taste to publish more than once every five years when you had enough finished. People talked and the general idea was you know what people are doing and there is no reason to publish, the group was small and we knew what was being done during meetings, during exchanges and correspondence. And publishing was only for this, which are trying to push themselves to publish then it slowly changed. The people who are always publishing and competing were biochemists. And phage geneticists are not like biochemists, they are gentlemen and ladies.

Waclaw Szybalski is an authority on molecular biology, genetics and microbiology. He earned his Ph.D. at the Gdansk Institute of Technology in Poland and joined the University of Wisconsin in the mid-1950s where he is now Professor Emeritus of Oncology in the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research.

Szybalski is known for the many significant contributions he has made throughout his career, beginning with his studies on mutagenesis and continuing through his contributions to genomics. He was among the first to formulate the concept of multi-drug antibiotic therapy.

Szybalski has also participated in the Human Genome Project.

Szybalski is the founder and head of many editorial boards including that of the journal Gene.

A long-time meeting and course participant at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Szybalski was a friend and contemporary of many pioneers in the field of genetics, including Alfred Hershey, Martha Chase, Max Delbrück, and Barbara McClintock.