It was presented by Tom Broker. Tom was the sort of spokesperson for the group and we were all very happy with that and he gave a very nice talk. And it generated a huge amount of excitement. And as anyone that’s followed the history of that would know that once it became clear that it was possible through splicing to bring together pieces of DNA that were not contiguous in the chromosome. It was the means by which a lot of people’s data could be explained that up to that point was a puzzle for them. And everyone was very keen to get on the stage and put now a new spin on their story, a new way of explaining data that was inexplicable before that. And we were very cynical of those people, of course. And I remember Joe and Phil Sharp had a few things to say about people that appeared to be very smart as they stood upon the stage, but they were only able to create the solution on the basis of explaining their data through splicing.

Ashley Dunn is currently a Senior Consulting Scientist and member of the Scientific Advisory Board at the Cryptome Pharmaceuticals Ltd., an Australian biotech company. He also serves on Australia’s Gene Technology Advisory Committee. He is the former Head of Molecular Biology in the Melbourne Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.

He came to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1976 to work with Joe Sambrook as a postdoctoral fellow and eventually became a junior faculty member.

His research has been concentrated on mammalian growth factors and the regulators responsible for the production of white blood cells in mice and men. He co-invented a mammalian blood cell regulator (GM-CSF), and his lab was the one of the first to establish gene targeting in the development of human diseases such as cancer.