Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

What happens when you give brilliant young scientists the freedom to pursue bold ideas? This spring, we caught up with a handful of CSHL Fellows during the program's 40th anniversary celebration to reflect on the early days of their careers and how the Fellows Program shaped the groundbreaking research they're leading today. 🎥 A rare conversation with some of the world's most influential scientists, looking back on where it all began! 📖 Read the story. Watch the interviews. cshl.edu/born-of-curios… @cshlmeetings #Research #InspiringDiscovery #CSHLFellows #ScienceMakesLifeBetter

Nancy Wexler spent a lifetime pursuing a cure for Huntington’s disease (HD). Her work led to the discovery of the HD gene and helped make genetic testing possible. Yet when Nancy and her sister, Alice, learned they each had a 50-50 chance of inheriting the disease, they made the decision not to be tested. In a powerful recent New York Times feature, Nancy reflects on the deeply personal and scientific journey behind her memoir, My Life, My Science: Pursuing a Cure for Huntington’s Disease, published by CSHL Press this past March. The book is currently on backorder via Amazon but copies are available NOW directly from CSHL Press for immediate delivery. Read the full @nytimes story X Gina Kolata and order your copy through the link here: cshlpress.com/default.tpl?ac… #CureHD #HuntingtonsDisease #NancyWexler #InspiringInnovation #InspiringDiscovery #ScienceMakesLifeBetter

Great to be back with @mariadelapax and @WanglabTingting as co-directors of the CSHL Drosophila Neurobiology course 🪰! Thank you for the excellent technical support, Heena Khurana and Khanh Lam-Kamath! @cshlcourses @CSHL #scicomm #drosophila 🪰

In honor of the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States, @Forbes compiled a list of the 250 greatest immigrants alive, and CSHL Professor Adrian Krainer is one of them! Studying biochemistry first brought Krainer to the U.S. from Uruguay. He then received his Ph.D. and became the first participant in CSHL's prestigious Fellows Program. A prolific scientific career followed. Krainer’s research led to the development of Spinraza, the first FDA-approved medicine for spinal muscular atrophy, and he is cofounder of the biotech company Stoke Therapeutics. Today, CSHL's Adrian Krainer is recognized on the Forbes #Forbes250 America’s Most Successful Living Immigrants list, celebrating individuals whose achievements have helped shape America.⁣ Please join us in congratulating Adrian Krainer and read all about his scientific career in the United States at the link here: cshl.edu/krainer-includ… #InspiringDiscovery #Forbes250 #ScienceMakesLifeBetter

Barbara McClintock was born #OTD in 1902. 🌽 McClintock, who spent most of her career at @CSHL, won a Basic Medical Research Lasker Award in 1981 for the discovery of transposons, genetic elements that can move from one location to another: ow.ly/hVNI50Jvkql #WomenInSTEM

Serving others & caring for community are values #FreemanHrabowski Scholar Lucas Cheadle learned from his father, & they now inspire how he leads his lab @cshl. And the FHS program? "Not just about excellent science ... it's a community." Apps open 11/3! bit.ly/fhs26

CSHL's Neuro-Imaging and Behavior Core Facility uses state-of-the-art optical and ultrasound imaging to bridge the gap between rodent behavior and their neuronal circuits. In this video, this fluorescent wonder displays a collection of nerves within a tumor using light-sheet microcopy. Light-sheet microscopy allows our scientists to obtain 3D images of live tissues in a short period of time. Researchers that study neurological disorders, like Alzheimer's disease, rely on this shared resource to better understand how the brain processes sensory information and decision-making. #InspiringInnovation #AlzheimersAwareness #ENDALZ #ScienceMakesLifeBetter

America has long been a place where people come to build a new life for themselves and their children. For the nation’s 250th anniversary, Forbes is honoring that legacy by ranking America’s 250 greatest living immigrants. forbes.com/sites/alexknap… #Forbes250 📸: Martin Schoeller for Forbes; Cody Pickens for Forbes (2); Joe Pugliese/August; Austin Hargrave/August; Illustration by Lina Jaradat for Forbes; Mike Coppola via Getty Images

✒️Mark Your Calendars🗓️! On Tuesday, June 30, 10am, join the #BrainBodyResearchInstitute Seminar Series when host Jessica Ables @ables_lab welcomes @CSHL's Jeremy Borniger, PhD. Dr. Borniger will present "Distal regulation of hypothalamic neuronal activity in breast cancer."

Nancy Wexler has spent a lifetime advancing our understanding of Huntington’s disease. In this moving New York Times profile, she reflects on the personal and scientific journey behind her new memoir, "My Life, My Science", published by CSHL Press. bit.ly/wexlernytimes

AI isn’t just changing biology, it’s accelerating it! What if we could test cancer treatments on a digital twin before ever treating a patient? Or predict viral mutations before they happen? Or cut drug development from years to months? At the 90th CSHL Symposium on Quantitative Biology, those questions weren’t speculation, they were research talks. Catch our recap of the AI in Biology Symposium to see what happened when scientists, clinicians, and tech leaders came together at CSHL last week to rethink life sciences → cshl.edu/ai-goes-biolog… #CSHLSYMP26 #AIinBiology #PrecisionMedicine  #Biotechnology  #ScienceMakesLifeBetter

Day 4 at the 90th Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Symposium on Quantitative Biology. A day of provocations -- from neuroscience, agents, and a public lecture that brought the week into focus. CSHL’s @TonyZador opened the NeuroAI session with a challenge: AI can reason, but biology can sense, move, and act. The missing ingredient may not be better learning algorithms, it may be the right priors, shaped by evolution’s genomic “compression strategy.” @sejnowski (@salkinstitute) followed on the same gap from another angle: how cortical traveling waves handle temporal context in ways our architectures still can't match. Two giants, one morning, asking the same question from different directions. Then @JonahCool (@AnthropicAI) gave the most honest talk of the week. He shared how critic agents can challenge AI outputs in real time and revealed new insights into how models like Claude represent concepts internally. @marinkazitnik (@Harvard ) showcased AI agents grounded in biology, including PROTON and newly launched AutoScientists teams of agents that generate hypotheses, critique one another, and learn from failure. To close out the evening @ewanbirney took the stage for the Dorcas Cummings Lecture. A CSHL alumnus, @emblebi Director, co-author of the human genome in 2001. He offered a simple test for AI: Goal. Metric. Data. Do you trust them? He demonstrated it with Delphi-2M, a model that predicts diagnoses from health records. Trained on UK Biobank data and validated on 1.9 million Danish patients, its performance held. Birney's closing message: AI has already revolutionized biology and we're still in the foothills. After the lecture, some neighbors of the lab hosted selected meeting participants for dinner parties at their homes. The rest headed to the CSHL beach for a picnic. Some conversations need open sky. #CSHL AI in Biology Symposium is like a lit fire and by the last night, everyone was adding wood. #CSHLSYMP26 #AIinBiology #NeuroAI #InspiringDiscovery #ScienceMakesLifeBetter

A two-protein circuit in C. elegans appears to set the start and length of one-time gene-expression pulses that guide growth. @CSHL @PNASNews phys.org/news/2026-06-n…

Day 2 at the 90th Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Symposium on Quantitative Biology brought the science into sharper focus and the evening brought it onto the lawn. The morning session on AI and Regulatory Genomics opened with Ziga Avsec @Avsecz of @googledeepmind making the case for why the non-coding genome is no longer a black box. The tools to read regulatory logic at scale are here. Peter Koo @pkoo562 , CSHL's own, grounded the session with something every practitioner needed to hear: deep learning models are only as useful as our ability to interrogate them. Improving interpretability is not a footnote. It is the work. The afternoon session on AI and Evolution closed with Debora Marks @deboramarks of @harvardmed reminding us that evolution is the longest-running optimization experiment in history and that language models trained on sequence diversity are finally letting us read what evolution has been writing for billions of years. Then the symposium did what only CSHL can do: moved the conversation to the lawn in front of the historic Carnegie Library. Wine, cheese, and the kind of unscheduled science that does not fit on any agenda. The evening closed with a packed poster session: the real peer review, face to face. #InspiringDiscovery #CSHLSYMP26 #AIinBiology #ScienceMakesLifeBetter

@ElliotHershberg We're excited too! #CSHLSYMP26

I'm pretty excited about AI in Biology. I bet my research career on it. And now I'm betting my investment career on it! But somehow, spending this past week at CSHL's 90th symposium—which was exclusively dedicated to this topic this year—made me even more bullish! One of the most electric conferences I've been to in a while... maybe ever. Back-to-back talks from the top scientists and industry leaders in this field. Even though my job is to cover this domain, it was a visceral reminder of how quickly things are moving. Fantastic job curating and organizing by @pkoo562 and @TonyZador. My plan is to get some notes up on what I saw in the next week or two on CoB! 🧬

Growing up takes time. In the case of a tiny transparent worm, called C. elegans, it takes about five or six days over the course of four larval stages. Disruptions to this process can mean the difference between maturing into a healthy adult and never growing up at all, so how does this tiny transparent worm get it right? Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Christopher Hammell and his team have discovered that two proteins, MYRF-1 and LIN-42, act as the master developmental clock in C. elegans, scheduling the start time and duration of each larval stage. The MYRF-1/LIN-42 circuit ensures that each stage’s pulse of gene expression lasts only as long as necessary and never repeats. It is the first biological clock of its kind ever found. Read more here: cshl.edu/how-our-biolog… #InspiringDiscovery #ScienceMakesLifeBetter

The historic 90th CSH Symposium on AI in Biology at @CSHL has come to an end. After a decade of remarkable advances in AI x Bio, aspirations have become bolder than ever. The future looks bright but much work remains to turn hype into real-world progress. Thanks to all speakers!

POV: You're at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Symposium on Quantitative Biology: AI in Biology and your brain is trying to process all the paradigm shifts. The 90th year of #CSHLSYMP26 kicked off Tuesday May 26th with four opening talks by CSHL President Bruce Stillman, Jennifer Doudna @DoudnaJennifer @UCBerkeley, Alex Rives @biohub, Pushmeet Kohli @pushmeet @GoogleDeepMind and Hoifung Poon @hoifungpoon @MSFTResearch CSHL Symposia have helped spark some of the most transformative breakthroughs in modern science. The 1989 Symposium helped set the stage for the Human Genome Project. The 1978 Symposium on Recombinant DNA helped lay the groundwork for CRISPR gene editing. History has a way of starting here. This year, it's all about AI and its applications in biology research as well as clinical medicine.  In all, the Symposium will feature 9 oral sessions with 53 talks and over 200 posters in 3 sessions. Major themes include AI & Regulatory Genomics, AI & Evolution, AI & Cells & Tissues, AI and Clinical Translation & Precision Oncology, Neuro AI, Scientific Agents & Multimodal Models, and AI & Proteins. Scroll through for Day 1 highlights - part 1 What a way to open! #InspiringCuriosity #AIinBiology #CRISPR #PrecisionMedicine #MachineLearning #Biotechnology #InformationTheory #Claude #ScienceMakesLifeBetter