No. 853 K. Gordon Lark, 2015

File — Box: 77, Folder: 2

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

Karl Gordon Lark’s father was the head of the physics department at Purdue and his mother was an artist and a psychologist. They emigrated from Austria to Indiana, where Lark grew up. When Lark was fifteen, he attended the University of Chicago. He then took a Phage Course at Cold Spring Harbor before working in a molecular biology laboratory. After finishing at the University of Chicago, Lark returned to Cold Spring Harbor, and then attended New York University as a PhD candidate. He talks about marrying his first wife, Cynthia, who worked at Sloan-Kettering, and living and working in New York. Cynthia and Gordon had a working relationship throughout their careers. At NYU, Lark studied how cations shaped the protein of viruses. In 1953, Lark and his wife went to Copenhagen and worked at the State Serum Institute, then worked in Geneva. Lark and Cynthia then worked at St. Louis University, where they stayed for seven years. The two of them then took their family to Manhattan, Kansas, where Lark was offered a job in the physics department at Kansas State. While there, Gordon and Cynthia performed segregation and DNA experiments. Lark won the Eli Lily Award for the most promising young scientist in microbiology. After leaving Kansas State, Lark took a position as the chair of the department of biology at the University of Utah. While at the University of Utah, Lark was part of growth and big change, hiring seventeen faculty members. He describes the people he hired to join his department as well as the research work they did, including the work they did on dogs.
Project: University of Utah oral history project.
Interviewer: Becky Lloyd.

Dates

2015

Conditions Governing Access

Twenty-four hour advanced notice encouraged. Materials must be used on-site. Access to parts of this collection may be restricted under provisions of state or federal law.