I’ve always been interested in biology and I think I was pretty good at biology. And I think the thing that pushed me into biology was more the fact that I wasn’t very good at anything else, than that I was particularly good at biology. But I was interested in it and was quite seduced by the discoveries that were being made at about the time that I started to think that I needed to get a profession behind me and start to plan for what I was going to do for my professional life. And I’ve never regretted doing that and it has been an extraordinarily exciting time. And I’ve had a great time!

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.