Baltimore's Passano Foundation Honors UCSD Neurobiologist With $15,000 Prize

Baltimore's Passano Foundation Honors UCSD Neurobiologist With $15,000 Prize Philadelphia's Wistar Institute appoints Giovanni Rovera As Its New Director Obituary Roger Tsien, a professor of pharmacology and chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, has won the Passano Foundation's 1991 Young Scientist Award. Tsien accepted the $15,000 prize last month. The Baltimore-based foundation was established in 1943 to encourage medical research in the United States. Tsien, 39, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, is perhaps best known for developing fluorescent molecular probes that indicate the concentration of calcium in a cell. Since publishing this work in 1985, Tsien and colleagues have gone on to design and synthesize fluorescent dyes sensitive to sodium, hydrogen, and, most recently, cyclic AMP. These probes are capable of detecting and imaging minute changes inside living cells. Tsien's current research involves intracellular signal transduction in the brain. Tsien says that his laboratory is unique because his team is not only conducting basic neurobiological research, but also developing many of the important tools for carrying out this research. In addition to molecular probes, Tsien and his colleagues are currently developing a confocal microscope "specially designed to look at high-speed signaling in various tissues, such as neuronal tissues." Tsien says that although methods and instrumentation research is sometimes looked down on by those who concentrate solely on basic science, it is an important aspect of his team's work. "It's a nice ecological niche for us," he explains. "There's a hundred times more people who want to use the dyes than create them." Tsien received his Ph.D. in 1977 from the University of Cambridge, England. He joined the faculty of UC-Berkeley in 1982, where he remained until joining the UC-San Diego faculty in 1989. --Rebecca Andrews Giovanni Rovera has been named director of Wistar Institute, the 99 year old biomedical reseaarch facility based in Philadelphia. Rovera who had served as associate director since 1988 succeds Hilary Koporowski, the institutes director for 34 years, who has been appointed to the new post of president. Rovera, 54, says that in his new position he will have "full authority in administering and deciding about the scientific direction of the institute." As president, he explains, "Dr. Koprowski will maintain his research programs. But as a president he will be more free from the administering of the institute." Rovera says one factor influecing the decision of the board of managers to appoint a new director was that "they wanted some tigher control of the budget for the institute." Declining royalities from some vaccines developed at Wistar are necesitating reductions in expenses, he explains. Although the need to cut expenses is challenging, says Rovera, "as associate director, i have had to adminster the institue in the last three years, so for me the job is not a totally new task." Rovera says he does not plan any major changes: "Because Hilary is still here and he's still active and he's still participating, and all of us realize that he is the one who built the institue clearly there is no sense [in makinga] sudden turn." Rovera is, however, planning one alteration in the way the institute is administered: "I'm going to name chairmen of programs-senior investigators that are natural leaders within their programs. by decentralizing this kind of responsibility, I feel i can free more of my time to dedicae myself to research interests." Rovera's research focuses on cancer, particularly childhood leukemias. he received his M.D. in 1964 from the University of Torino, italy, and then came to Temple University in Philadelphia on a fellowship. He did his residency in pathology at Temple and worked there as an assitant professor before coming to Wistar in 1975. -Barbara Spector Nicholas E. Davies, president-elect of the Philadelphia-based American College of Physicians (ACP), was killed April 5 in a plane crash in Georgia. All 23 people on board the airplane were killed in the crash, including former United States Sen. John Tower of Texas. Davies, a clinical professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, was to assume office at the ACP's 72nd Annual Session in New Orleans on April 13. He was 65 years old. Davies received his bachelor's and medical degrees from the University of Virginia in 1949 and 1952, respectively. Davies had been a member of ACP since 1959, and was active in its leadership since 1975. From 1976 to 1980, Davies served as governor for the Georgia chapter of the association, and since 1984 he had sat on its board of regents. In addition, he was closely involved in ACP's publications effort. He was a member of the editorial board of Annals of Internal Medicine, the association's flagship journal, from 1980 to 1983, and chaired ACP's publication policy committee from 1988 to 1990. Davies spearheaded ACP's efforts to reform the United States' health care system, and testified before Congress on the problems many Americans have obtaining access to adequate health care. Eugene A. Hildreth, ACP chairman for the past two years, was named president for the term that was to have been served by Davies. Orville Vogel, whose wheat breeding made the "Green Revolution" possible, died of cancer April 12 in Lacey, Wash. He was 83. Vogel was a U.S. Department of Agriculture wheat breeder stationed at Washington State University from the time he received his Ph.D. there in 1939 until his retirement in 1980. He led the team that developed the Western Hemisphere's first commercially successful semidwarf wheat varieties, released to farmers in 1961. The plants produce heavy yields without falling over from the weight of the grain. In Washington alone, Vogel's new varieties were credited with adding $50 million per year to the value of the state's wheat crop, through a 25 percent increase in yields. In addition to his wheat breeding, Vogel invented and built miniature equipment to automate the planting and harvesting of research plots. Vogel's equipment is used for agricultural research in at least 50 countries, and many agricultural re- searchers say this may, in fact, have been his greatest contribution to the field. Vogel recently received the 1990 John Scott Award, given by the city of Philadelphia's Board of Directors of City Trusts (The Scientist, Jan. 7, 1991, page 26). His other honors include the 1975 National Medal of Science and Washington's first Medal of Merit in 1987.

Baltimore's Passano Foundation Honors UCSD Neurobiologist With $15,000 Prize

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