Item GS/8/9/2/1 - Photograph of Boris Ephrussi, Harriet Taylor, Jacques Lucien Monod and André Lwoff, Cold Spring Harbor.

Extent: 1 photograph; Format: Photograph

Black & white photograph of 4 scientists sitting on a verandah: Boris Ephrussi, Harriet Taylor, Jacques Lucien Monod and André Michel Lwoff. Taken during the 1946 summer symposium on Heredity and Variation in Microorganisms held at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York, USA.

Admin History: Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, founded in 1890. The program began as an initiative of Eugene G. Blackford and Franklin Hooper, director of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, the founding institution of The Brooklyn Museum. In 1904, the Carnegie Institution of Washington established the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor on an adjacent parcel. In 1921, the station was reorganized as the Carnegie Institution Department of Genetics. Milislav Demerec was named director of the Laboratory in 1941. Demerec shifted the Laboratory's research focus to the genetics of microbes, thus setting investigators on a course to study the biochemical function of the gene. During World War Two, Demerec directed efforts at Cold Spring Harbor that resulted in major increases in penicillin production. Beginning in 1941, and annually from 1945, three of the seminal figures of molecular genetics convened summer meetings at Cold Spring Harbor of what they called the Phage Group. Salvador Luria, of Indiana University; Max Delbrück, then of Vanderbilt University; and Alfred Hershey, then of Washington University, St. Louis, sought to discover the nature of genes through study of viruses called bacteriophages that infect bacteria. In 1945 Delbrück's famous Phage Course was taught for the first time, inspiring, among others, a young James D. Watson; it was repeated for many years after. This photograph was taken during the 1946 summer symposuim 'Heredity and Variation in Microorganisms'. Boris Ephrussi: ( 9 May 1901 – 2 May 1979), a Russo-French geneticist, Professor of Genetics at the University of Paris. Harriett Ephrussi-Taylor: (1918–1968), an American geneticist and crystallographer. Jacques Lucien Monod: (9 February 1910 – 31 May 1976), a French biochemist, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965, sharing it with François Jacob and Andre Lwoff for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis. André Michel Lwoff: (8 May 1902 – 30 September 1994), a French microbiologist