Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

process of gastrulation in a whole series of different ways — for example, as a sequence of drawings taken from the classic work on the subject by Nieuwkoop and Faber, which have been 'morphed' together into a movie. There is also a movie showing the external movements of gastrulation recorded using a conventional light microscope, and also a movie showing the internal movements of gastrulation, recorded using a confocal microscope (this one is a treat!). Zebrafish researchers are in on the act too. The FishScope resource, maintained by Mark Cooper at the University of Washington, serves as an archive for all things animated and fishy. Other biological movies Whole-organism biologists and physiologists don't have a monopoly on the use of movies. ProtMotDB, maintained by Mark Gerstein, is a resource for structural biologists which documents and classifies 'protein motions' — situations in which proteins are thought from crystallographic evidence to move between different conformations. Most of the entries in the database are held as VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language) files, but there are a number of MPEG movies as well, including a dramatic demonstration of the hinge movement of Calmodulin. Several publishers have experimented over the years with offering movies and videos as supplementary material to their scientific journals, but this has always proved awkward when the journal exists primarily in paper form. As journals, and even conference poster sessions, are increasingly viewed on screen as well as on paper, we will begin to see just how far biological data can benefit from being represented as movies or animations. What is it famous for? Historically, for major contributions to molecular biology and genetics, but increasingly for its meetings, symposia, courses, and a growing number of publications. How did it start? The Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor (CSH) was founded in 1890 by the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. The Long Island site served as a field station (and summer camp) for collecting specimens of animals and plants from a variety of ecological niches. Where did the interest in genes come from? The first stage was the appointment of Charles Davenport as director of the Biological Laboratories in 1898. Rather embarrassingly in retrospect, Davenport's interest in human genetics led him to establish the Eugenics Record Office at CSH in 1910, which was not shut down until 1940. But he also persuaded the Carnegie Institute to establish a Station for Experimental …