Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Last week my wife, my mother-in-law, and I made a brief trip to Long Island, New York, where we made a quick stop at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. What a lovely setting for a research center. We drove around the grounds, looking at the various labs. It sits right on a bay off the Long Island Sound, and looks more like a resort than a scientific laboratory. James Watson, of DNA fame, was the long-time director of Cold Spring Harbor Lab.

In the last few years, the lab has begun a thrust into “Quantitative Biology”. This area of research has much overlap with the 4th edition of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology. In fact, I view this development as evidence that science is going in “our direction,” toward a larger role for physics and math in medicine and biology. The Cold Spring Harbor website describes the new Simons Center for Quantitative Biology.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has recently opened the Simons Center for Quantitative Biology (SCQB). The areas of expertise in the SCQB include applied mathematics, computer science, theoretical physics, and engineering. Members of the SCQB will interact closely with other CSHL researchers and will apply their approaches to research areas including genomic analysis, population genetics, neurobiology, evolutionary biology, and signal and image processing.

We passed by CSHL during a trip that included stops at Sagamore Hill National Historic Site in Oyster Bay (President Theodore Roosevelt’s home), Planting Fields Arboretum, and the Montauk Point Lighthouse.