Bruce Roe on CSHL Symposia
  Bruce Roe     Biography    
Recorded: 29 May 2003

I think that Cold Spring Harbor is an incredible environment for science. An incredible environment for interactions. I used to go to Gordon Conferences in New Hampshire and they were very good, okay? And the kind of interactions that we have at Cold Spring Harbor. It just so happens that the genome projects kind of meetings were at Cold Spring Harbor. This is the place. This is where Jim Watson—this is where history was made. This is where Barbara McClintock discovered jumping genes and how corn evolves. But this meeting is a special meeting. These Cold Spring Harbor meetings I’ve been coming to for twenty something years. It’s kind of scary and you don’t want to think about it. But every time I come away from this meeting I get revitalized. It’s the same way when I go to Cambridge, England, okay? This is a little bit of England for me. I remember when Rich Roberts was here, who is a good friend of mine. You just enjoy, you can interact with anyone, okay? So I think its kind of fun. I actually like the more recent format of the meetings. A little more question and answer, sort of like the old days with lambda phage and stuff that people really interacted with meetings. It’s a fun place to be and an exciting and knowledgeable place.

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.

SCIENTISTS SPEAKING ABOUT SYMPOSIA
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