It is different? I don’t know if it’s different than all other meetings. But it certainly has its—meetings at Cold Spring Harbor in general have a different flavor than the other meetings partly because it’s a remote site. So you know those of us who are lucky enough to stay on the grounds stay here for five days or whatever and we never leave. And so that means that for every hour except when you’re sleeping you are interacting with somebody. It’s a very intense experience. You have a meeting in a university campus or in the middle of the city or whatever in a hotel that’s a very different experience because you end up going out and so forth. So I think it is—it’s a very nice venue for having an intense meeting, but it is exhausting.

Robert Waterston received his bachelor's degree in engineering from Princeton University (1965) and both an M.D. and a Ph.D. in pathology from the University of Chicago (1972). After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, he joined the Washington University faculty in 1976 where he is the James S. McDonnel Professor of Genetics, head of the Department of Genetics, and director of the School of Medicine’s Genome Sequencing Center, which he founded in 1993. In early 2003 Dr Waterston took on the role of Chair of the department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, was a recipient of the International Gairdner Award, the Genetics Society of America’s Beadle Award, the Dan David Prize, and the Alfred P. Sloan Award from the GM Cancer Research Foundation.

Waterston attended the worm meetings at Cold Spring Harbor Lab and in 1989 Watson supported Waterston’s proposal to use the worm as a model organism in the Human Genome Project.