Ernst Peter Fischer on Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory: Changes Over Time
  Ernst Peter Fischer     Biography    
Recorded: 23 Jun 2000

Well the one thing has changed; the size, but the thing which is more important that has not changed is the spirit. I have the feeling that people still like to come here, the size has not changed, the way people feel at home here, this is the miracle. If you just improve on science, you have more people, but usually, they don’t like to be around, you feel more lonesome than before, but I don’t see that [here.] my feeling is that Cold Spring Harbor has managed to make the living room bigger but it’s still a living room.

Ernst Peter Fischer, Professor of the History of Science at the University of Constance since 1994. He studied mathematics and physics in Cologne and biology at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He earned Ph.D. in biology and qualified as a professor in the history of science.

He has published biographies of Max Delbrück, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli and James D. Watson and received several awards for his scientific publications. Fischer is an author of such books as "Die andere Bildung", "Selling science - The history of Boehringer Mannheim" and "Das Genom" - an introduction into modern genome research.

He has been honoured with the Heinrich-Bechold-Medaille (1980), Preis der wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft Freiburg (1981); Lorenz-Oken-Medaille (2002), Treviranus-Medaille (2003) and Eduard-Rhein-Kulturpreis (2003).