[Editor’s note: Next spring, Cornell University professor Roald Hoffmann will be honored by his peers with the American Chemical Society’s Priestley Medal, the society’s highest award. For Hoffmann, 52, it won’t be his first trip to a dais. He is a Nobel laureate, having won the 1981 prize for chem- istry. And, as the recipient of both the A.C. Cope Award in Organic Chemistry and the ACS’s award for inor- ganic chemistry, he is the only person in the history of the

On Feb. 5, 1987, Vilma Ponce and her infant daughter were stabbed to death in their Bronx, N.Y., apartment. Police arrested a suspect, Joseph Castro, on whose wristwat they found a small bloodstain. The police took the evidence to Lifecodes Corp. in Valhalla, N.Y., where lab analysis convinced the company’s scientists that DNA retrieved from the blood on the watchface matched that of the dead woman. If true, this would have put Castro at the scene of the crime. Chances of the match bei

Geologists Priscilla and Edward Grew have been happily married for the past 14 years. Yet the success of their relationship can hardly be attributed to “togetherness.” Far from it. Priscilla, director of the Minnesota Geological Survey and a full professor of geology at the University of Minnesota, lives in Minneapolis. Edward, meanwhile, is a research associate professor at the University of Maine in Orono. And that’s where he lives—about 1,000 miles as the crow flies,

Ever since 1983, when it was establisbed with a $300 million gift from the late Kentucky racehorse breeder Lucille P. Markey, the Markey trust has been sinking millions into basic biomedical research. At the same time the Miami-based endowment has been earning millions in interest on investments largely tied to oil properties. The net result: an enormous cash balance of close to $133 million—all of which must be given away over the next seven and one-half years, when, according to a con

The first time paleontologist Robert Bakker examined a small one-of-a-kind dinosaur skull at, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, something about it puzzled him. And while he couldn’t quite put his finger on what that something was, he was fairly sure it was not the skull of a gorgosaurus as its label indicated. So Bakker, adjunct curator of paleontology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, did what he always does— he began to draw, using a pencil to record each and every

Perhaps the biggest splash of all in the science philanthropy stream last year was made not by one of the high-profile science endowments such as Rockefeller or MacArthur, but by an immensely well-heeled midwestern organization known mainly for its community action programs. In this case, the beneficent snap, crackle, and pop was supplied by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Mich., an offshoot of a company long-associated with Rice Krispies and Corn Flakes. In a dramatic departure

In the early 1960s, Robert Jastrow, then a young, adjunct professor of astronomy at Columbia University set out to write his first book—an examination of space science that, as he foresaw it, would stimulate the minds of his academic colleagues but, at the same time, be comprehensible to the general public. His motives were altruistic, he says now. His natural passion for teaching and writing was fired by the strong conviction that even the most esoteric scientific concepts can beR