Library & Center for Humanities Past Events
Visit our Special Events playlist to view videos of our past events.
City of Science
Katalin Karikó in conversion with Carl Zimmer
Karikó research has fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, contributing to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.
Science Meets Art Festival, 2024
An exhibition and talks celebrating the Celia & Wally Gilbert Artist-in-Residence program at Cold Spring Harbor Laborary’s Center for Humanities and History of Modern Biology.
Syndey Brenner Research Fellowship Symposium
Talks from our past Sydney Brenner Research Fellowship recipients. Held virtually on March 22, 2024.
LOVE DATA WORKSHOP 2024
Celebrating International Love Data Week
Be a part of the library’s celebration of Love Data Week with an enlightening data workshop on the morning of February 14th. Join us in exploring crucial topics such as data management (description, storage, and special repositories for data), open access data, and more. Reflecting on the one-year milestone since the initiation of the NIH Data Management and Sharing policy, and with impending open data mandates from the White House, it’s imperative for government funding bodies to align with the evolving landscape by 2025.
The Role of Capital Markets in the Development of Biotech
The 2023 Gardiner Lecture, given by Dr. Stelios Papadopoulos
Tuesday, December 19, 2023 at 4:00pm
Bush Lecture Hall, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Much has been said and many excellent books have been written about the rise of biotechnology and how scientists and entrepreneurs founded path-breaking companies and developed important new drugs. None of that could have happened without billions of dollars of investment over the five decades of the industry’s life. That money came for the most part from Wall Street, and it is investors who make capital allocation decisions. What many industry observers may not appreciate is how the capital, and not scientists, established priorities and influenced the choice of scientific projects to be pursued.
CITY OF SCIENCE
James P. Allison in Conversation with Lesley Stahl
Thursday, November 16, 2023 @ 6:30pm
Elebash Recital Hall, CUNY Graduate Center
Winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize, maverick Texan James P. Allison pioneered the science of immunotherapy, a game-changing cancer treatment that uses the body’s own immune system to attack tumor cells. In his lab research, working outside the scientific mainstream, he found the molecular key to stimulating an immune response to cancer, resulting in new lifesaving drugs.
Presented in partnership with CUNY Graduate Center and CSHL Center for Humanities and Modern Biology, BGI Nobel Laureate Archives Program.
Open to the Public at no cost.
Recombinant DNA
Fifty Years of Discovery & Debates
Katalin Karikó speaking at Recombinant DNA: Fifty Years of Discovery & Debates. Meeting held at Cold Spring Harbor, Sept 27-30, 2023
The Exceptions: A Center for the Humanities event
featuring Kate Zernike and Nancy Hopkins
On April 28, 2023, the Center for Humanities hosted a discussion of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kate Zernike’s book, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science, which tells the story of sixteen female faculty members at MIT who quantified the discrimination faced by female scientists at their institution and forced a sustained public discussion about sexism in science.
The discussion was moderated by Laura Lindenfeld. In addition to Kate Zernike and Laura Lindenfeld, the panelists included Nancy Hopkins, who is the central figure of the book, and CSHL professor Hannah Meyer.
Oil Change
Saving the rainforest with sustainable oil palm and aquatic plants
Speaker Rob Martienssen studies epigenetic mechanisms that shape and regulate the genome, and their impact on transposable elements, first discovered by Barbara McClintock at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. These mechanisms underlie clonal propagation of oil palm, with implications for rain forest conservation, and of aquatic plants, including the humble duckweed, that are being…
CITY OF SCIENCE
Phillip A. Sharp in Conversation with Siddhartha Mukherjee
Elebash Recital Hall, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY
Thursday, September 29, 2022 6:30 p.m.
Join us for a stimulating conversation between two great scientific minds. Molecular biologist Phillip A. Sharp received the Nobel Prize for his discovery of “split genes,” which has been fundamental to medical research on the development of cancer and other diseases. Sharp is an institute professor at MIT and member of its Department of Biology and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research; he also co-founded the biotech companies Biogen and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals. He speaks about his groundbreaking work with Siddhartha Mukherjee, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, a faculty member at Columbia University Medical Center, and a cancer physician and researcher. Mukherjee is also the author of The Gene: An Intimate History and the forthcoming The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human.
Revisiting H. J. Muller In Russia
Talk by Dr. Helen Juliette Muller
Revisiting H. J. Muller In Russia
Talk by Dr. Helen Juliette Muller on her father Herman Muller, Nicolai Vavilov, science in 1930s USSR, and the Lysenko affair
Life, Hope & Science
Three Journeys in Research
Life, Hope & Science: Three Journeys in Research
The Center for Humanities and History of Modern Biology at CSHL invites you to join us for a discussion about the life in science of three prominent Nobel Prize laureates, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Jennifer Doudna and Elizabeth Blackburn. Susan Hockfield, president emerita of MIT, will moderate.
THE GENE: An Intimate History
Meet the Author - Siddhartha Mukherjee
Siddhartha Mukherjee discussed his book The Gene, and the recent PBS documentary of the same name by Ken Burns and Barak Goodman that featured CSHL scientists. Dr. Matthew Cobb, University of Manchester professor and author of Life’s Greatest Secret and Richard Sever, co-founder of bioRxiv and medRxiv, also participated.
Discovering Retroviruses: Beacons in the Biosphere
Meet the Author Anna Marie Skalka
Anna Marie Skalka will discuss her book, Discovering Retroviruses: Beacons in the Biosphere
Gene Machine
The Race to Discover the Secrets of the Ribosome
Gene Machine: The Race to Discover the Secrets of the Ribosome recounts Ramakrishnan’s quest to solve the structure of the ribosome, and in the process, paints a clear picture of the actual process of scientific inquiry, including successes and failures, collaborators and competitors, insights and frustrations.
Controlling Elements
Then and Now lecture by Rob Martienssen
Rob Martienssen’s special lecture on Barbara McClintock’s ‘Controlling Elements, Then and Now.’ In the 1940s Barbara McClintock famously discovered transposable elements, sometimes called jumping genes, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983. But she called them “controlling elements” and devoted much of her career to the regulation of…
The Message
A play about the discovery of messenger RNA
The Message uses two fictional characters, one from Brenner’s group and one from Watson’s group, who participated in the discovery. They are meeting in the present time and reminiscing about the race to discover the structure of DNA.
Carl Zimmer 2018 Talk
Carl Zimmer will discuss his latest book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity
Mad Sessions, Preprints and a Blackboard
How Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner Collaborated in the 1950s and 1960s
Matthew Cobb, the 2016-2017 Sydney Brenner Research Scholarship recipient, will discusses his most recent book Life’s Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code