Articles by Colby Stong

Hilary Koprowski, director of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, recently was presented with the Philadelphia Award, also referred to as "Philadelphia's Nobel Prize." The annual $25,000 award, originated in 1921 by publisher Edward W. Bok, who died in 1930, is given by a board of trustees established in Bok's will. The honor recognizes outstanding achievement in the Philadelphia area. Previous winners include the Rev. Leon Sullivan and orchestral conductors Eugene Ormandy and Leopold Stokow

Erkki Ruoslahti, president and CEO of the La Jolla Cancer Research Foundation, has been named the winner of the 1990 G.H.A. Clowes Memorial Award, given by the American Association for Cancer Research. The award has been given annually since 1978 to recognize accomplishments in basic laboratory research. The $5,000 award was established by the Eli Lilly Co., an Indianapolis-based R&D company that focuses on medicine and agriculture, to honor Clowes, a founding member of AACR and former res

Max Cooper, director of the Division of Developmental and Clinical Immunology in the Departments of Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, and Jacques Miller, head of the Thymus Biology Unit at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, recently received a share of the first $100,000 Sandoz Prize for Immunology. The prize, to be given biennially by the Basel, Switzerland-based pharmaceutical company, encourages research in basic cellular, d

Gerald R. Fink, American Cancer Society Professor of Genetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, has been named the new director of the institute. Fink will assume the post July 1, succeeding David Baltimore, who has accepted the presidency of Rockefeller University. Fink was nominated by an eight-member search committee composed of MIT and Whitehead Institute faculty members, with the final selection being made by Whitehead's board of d

Milton W. Brightman, section chief on brain structural plasticity in the Laboratory of Neurobiology at the National Institutes of Health, has been appointed the first Edward Horne Craigie Scholar. The honor is named for the noted biomedical scientist who conducted pioneering research on brain capillaries. Craigie, who died last year at the age of 94, was associated with the University of Toronto's departments of biology and zoology for more than 70 years. To honor Craigie, present and former f

Kerry J. Vahala, assistant professor of applied physics and a specialist in quantum electronics and lasers at the California Institute of Technology, has been chosen as the first recipient of the Richard P. Feynman-Hughes Fellowship. Sponsored by the Los Angeles-based Hughes Aircraft Co., the fellowship is named after the late Richard P. Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his theory of quantum electrodynamics and was also a Caltech faculty member and consultant to Hughes.

James E. Darnell, Jr., Vincent Astor Professor at the Rockefeller University, has been appointed vice president for academic affairs, a new position at the school. Darnell, 59, was named to the position by President-Elect David Baltimore and will become the university's chief academic officer. He will assume the post July 1. Darnell has been a professor at Rockefeller since 1973 and says he looks forward to his new position. His new duties include more responsibility for the university's facu

For his contributions to research, scholarship, and teaching, Stephen L. Buchwald, Firmenich Associate Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has won the school's 1990 Harold E. Edgerton Award. The annual $5,000 award was established in 1983 by the MIT faculty in honor of Edgerton, former professor at MIT and inventor of the strobe light, who died this past January. Chosen by a four-member MIT faculty committee, the Edgerton award recognizes young faculty members.

The research career of Michael S. Witherell, professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been "charmed" of late: The 40-year-old investigator was recently named the winner of the American Physical Society's 1990 W.K.H. Panofsky Prise for his studies of the charmed quark, a subatomic particle that has higher energy than that of ordinary quarks. The prize is named for Wolfgang Panofsky, the German-born professor emeritus of physics at Stanford University and former d

Although many of the research community's major awards honor investigators' lifetime achievements, there are only a few that recognize researchers early on in their careers. One of the most prestigious of these honors, the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award, was recently presented to Mark E. Davis, professor of chemical engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. The prize, first awarded in 1976 and named after the first director of NSF, is given for o

Marjory Stoneman Douglas, an environmentalist who recently celebrated her 100th birthday, was an honored guest at a ceremony last month to dedicate a bronze sculpture by Philadelphia artist Eric Berg at the entrance to the Everglades National Park Royal Palm Visitor's Center in Florida. The life-size statue, which depicts a Florida panther, also honors landscape architect Ernest F. Coe (1886-1951), who conceived the idea of an Everglades national park in 1928. It is estimated that fewer than 5

Ronald Breslow, Samuel Latham Mitchill Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University, has been awarded the Swiss Chemical Society's 1990 Paracelsus Prize, named in honor of the 16th-century Swiss chemist, surgeon, and philosopher. The prize, first awarded in 1941, is given biannually by the Basel, Switzerland-based society and honors leading scientists in the field of chemistry. Accompanying the prize is an award of 20,000 Swiss francs ($12,000). Breslow, 59, was cited for his contributions t

With the 20th anniversary of Earth Day just recently passed, the time was right to recognize a scientist for his discovery of an "environmentally friendly" product. John E. Franz, distinguished science fellow at the Monsanto Agricultural Products Co. in St. Louis, has recently received the 1990 Perkin Medal, given by the American Section of the Society of Chemical Industry. Established in 1906, the medal is named in honor of Sir William Henry Perkin, who developed the first synthetic dye in 18

Marjorie C. Caserio is one of only a small number of women who chair a university science department. And on July 1, she will be joining an even more elite group. Caserio, who heads the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine, has been selected as vice chancellor for academic affairs at UC-San Diego. After an expected approval by the UC Board of Regents soon, Caserio will assume one of the top administrative posts at UC-San Diego. "There are few women in academic admin

John Carbon, professor of biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Leland Hartwell, professor of genetics at the University of Washington, have been named American Cancer Society Research Professors. The professorships, which were established in 1956, offer lifetime support and are usually awarded once a year. They generally pay one third of the researcher's salary up to a maximum of $50,000 annually, and are designed to relieve the researchers of administrative and tea