Cold Spring Harbor Duck Soup

[Terrance]

Hmmmmm, Long Island Duck. Lots of great French Duck round TRP's old
stomping grounds. 

 "The origin of the transformation meetings can be traced
back to the Cold Spring Harbor phage meetings...I can point out with
certainty that the
transformation meeting was conceived one summer evening in 1956 at Cold
Spring
Harbor and birth occurred the following spring in Baltimore...One
evening at the phage
meetings...I was walking down Bungtown Road with my boss Roger
Herriott...and I finally
gathered up enough courage to breach a proposition. Something like 'Why
don't we have a
meeting to discuss transformation?' It took Roger all of 10 milliseconds
to respond... He
had all kinds of suggestions, and we finally decided to hold the meeting
at the Johns
Hopkins Homewood Campus in Baltimore...The meeting was small, 30 people,
and lasted
two days...The most remarkable presentation of the meeting was provided
by...Rollin
Hotchkiss, who wasn't even reporting on his own work. He talked about
the famous
Benoit-Vanderlay experiment on transformation in ducks. The
details...are recorded in
the literature, but what is not recorded is the drama of the
presentation...The French
investigators claimed they transformed one variety [of duck] into
another, including their different waddles...First Rollin imitated the
French investigator demonstrating the waddle of one duck moving across
the stage and after transformation, the waddle of the transformed
variety moving back in the opposite direction (this demo was reprised at
the 25th WRC). From then the meeting was pure science...The tradition of
choosing the next chairman and location also took place at the first
meeting, and after very little
deliberation, no one had to twist Arnold's (Ravin) arm to convene the
second
meeting...and the meeting at the University of Rochester was better
attended than the
first...Arnold passed the baton to Leonard Lerman, who made frequent
excursions into
the mountains from his home in Denver and discovered the Wind River
Ranch, with the
Hutchinsons, Helen and Bob, and proposed it for our next meeting. It was
a stroke of
genius; we all fell in love with the place." That meeting was in 1959.