A longtime advisor to the company, Bruce Stillman, professor of biochemistry and president and CEO of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, has been studying the process of DNA replication, which plays a key role in cell division and cancer progression.It is inevitable that over the course of a person’s lifetime, this process will make mistakes—some harmless, but others leading to malignant mutations.Stillman’s group first discovered the ORC in yeast, experimenting with a strain called Saccharomyces cerevisiae, normally used to make bread, wine, and beer.(Notably, in 2020, he won a Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics for his work, although it didn’t have anything to do with brewing—the prizes are awarded to the leading figures in the above disciplines as well as in art, medicine, history, and environmental and cognitive sciences.)“We started off with yeast cells and we were able to walk through evolution and eventually get to the human genes.” Another key player in DNA replication is an enzyme called DNA polymerase."