When the winners of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search were announced at an awards banquet in Washington, D.C., last month, two young women had taken the top slots in the prestigious precollege competition. Elizabeth Pine, 17, of Chicago finished first for her experiments linking two different types of fungi; Xanthi Merlo, also 17, placed second for demonstrating the role a specific protein may play in prolonging blood clotting. "After they announced the first five of the top 10, I didn't

When astronomer Bruce Partridge left Princeton University to join the faculty at Haverford College, a small liberal arts college in southeastern Pennsylvania, his colleagues thought he was crazy. But 22 years later, Partridge says it was the best decision he ever made. "Sure, there's times when I wish I was in the fast lane," says Partridge, now Haverford's provost. "But I'm more fulfilled personally in this setting. I've been able to maintain a research career that made me happy, it's a pleas

PARENTHOOD AND SCIENCE CAREERS: THE MYTHS VS. THE REALITIES Author: LINDA MARSA Sociologists of science and scientists who are parents agree that there are many misconceptions about combining parenthood with careers in science. These myths, they say, stand in the way of making progress on work/family issues because they reinforce the mistaken notion that a satisfying family life is incompatible with a meaningful science career. The most prevailing myths--and the actual conditions

"I've been tired for six years," says Judith C. Gasson, a molecular biologist and an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine. She's only half joking. Since the 40-year-old scientist became a mother six years ago, time has become her most precious commodity. Says Gasson, "I have to be extremely organized." Her days are a blur of activity, bracketed by breakfast and dinner with her husband, an attorney who shares parenting chores, and their two child

Throughout his academic career, Frank Brown, a 29-year-old, fourth-year medical student at the University of Southern California, has sought--and heeded--the counsel of mentors. "When I'm groping for answers, I believe the best way to make a decision is to talk to people who have already been through the process," he says. When Brown was an undergraduate, he considered being a physical therapist, but his adviser, a professor of chemistry, encouraged him to get his Ph.D. and do research. Later

Last July, James Fallon, a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine, traveled on a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Nairobi, Kenya, to build a neuroscience laboratory on the campus from the ground up. "I hadn't taken a sabbatical in 12 years," Fallon says, "and I could have gone to some high-profile place like Cambridge. But I thought, `Why not go to a completely different culture?' And the lure of starting something from scratch and making a lasti

In an elegantly staged ceremony in Tokyo last November, representatives from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and from Japan's Committee for Energy Policy Promotion (CEPP) made history. Seated at a table overflowing with flowers and festooned with the flags of Japan and the United States, Syun-Ichi Akasofu, director of the university's Geophysical Institute, and Gaishi Hiraiwa, chairman of CEPP and of the Tokyo Electric Power Co., signed English and Japanese versions of an agreement establ

This past March, more than two dozen scientists gathered in a small conference room at Merck Sharp & Dohme Research Laboratories (MSDRL) in West Point, Pa. They were there for a half-day seminar on the signal transduction of receptors, the first in a five-part, company-sponsored lecture series on receptors. The instructor, Ben Margolis, an assistant professor in the department of pharmacology at New York University Medical Center, told his audience he wanted the talk to be informal--and it was.

This year, five graduating seniors from Atlanta's Morehouse College, one of the top historically black institutions in the United States, plan on attending graduate school in science. "That's up from zero last year, so this represents a giant step forward," says J.K. Haynes, chairman of the biology department at Morehouse. "If one college can place five minority students in graduate science programs every year, that's making a major contribution. And we see this trend continuing." Haynes belie

Colleen Buggs longed to pursue a career in biomedical research. But Buggs, a black woman, noted how few minorities had appointments on medical school faculties and wondered if it would be more prudent to steer away from academic medicine. During Buggs's first year at Harvard Medical School, however, she met a faculty member whose very presence exemplified what Buggs herself was capable of achieving. Maria Alexander-Bridges, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard--and a black woman--had gra

When Dennis Slamon and Michael Press met on their first day of medical school at the University of Chicago in September 1970, they had no reason whatsoever to believe that their chance encounter would lead to a significant scientific advance.