Columbia Emeritus Chemistry Professor Receives $225,000 Robert A. Welch Award, UC-Berkeley Neurobiologist Gets Prize Honoring Silvio Conte

The Houston-based Robert A. Welch Foundation has selected Gilbert Stork, a professor, emeritus, of chemistry at Columbia University, to receive its 1993 award in chemistry. The 39-year- old foundation presents the award annually to a chemist credited with significant research contributions that have had a positive influence on humankind. Stork will receive $225,000 and a gold medallion at a formal ceremony in Houston on October 25. Stork's research has involved the organic synthesis of complex molecules. "This part of chemical science is more closely related to architecture than it is to physics or mathematics," he says. "What we deal with is really structure, often in three dimensions." Stork, 71, introduced methods related to chemoselectivity, or how to get a reaction to take place at the site of one particular functional group of molecules. "Putting together a building is more than just assembling the right number of windows, bricks, and doors," he says. "Clearly, they have to be put in the right place to have the entire operation function." He says that, throughout the years, his lab has dealt with two problems of selectivity. The first, he says, is regioselectivity- -exploring the question of "Can you get the reaction where you want it?" The second problem is getting the reaction to occur not only in the right functional group, but also at the right place in three dimensions, which is known as stereoselectivity. Stork's methods of chemo-, regio-, and stereoselectivity are apparent in a 1986 paper in which he explains the construction of complex molecules such as prostaglandins (G. Stork, "The enamine alkylation and acylation of carbonyl-compounds," Engineering Technology & Applied Science, 17:14, 1986). He says his lab has attempted to synthesize nearly every classical compound, including alkaloids, like quinine and germine, as well as prostaglandins and steroids. Although many advances in the field have been made, there is much more work to be done, according to Stork. "Synthetic chemistry develops extremely slowly over the years," he says. "If you took a great organic chemist from the past and brought him back, he could probably catch up on any new advance within a weekend." Stork has written one paper that, according to the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia, has been cited more than 1,100 times ("Enamine alkylation and acylation of carbonyl compounds," Journal of the American Chemical Society, 85:207, 1963). Stork's next most-cited paper has been referenced more than 300 times ("Isolation of ketone enolates as trialkylsilyl ethers," Journal of the American Chemical Society, 90:4462, 1968). Born in Brussels, Belgium, Stork received his B.S. from the University of Florida in 1942 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 1945. He joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1946 and in 1953 moved to Columbia as an associate professor. From 1973 to 1976 he was chairman of Columbia's chemistry department. He became an emeritus professor last year. The Welch Foundation funds basic research in chemistry at Texas universities and colleges. Since its inception in 1954, the foundation has awarded more than $258 million in research grants to scientists at 58 Texas institutions. The National Foundation for Brain Research has presented its 1993 Silvio O. Conte Decade of the Brain Award to Carla J. Shatz, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. The award posthumously honors Rep. Conte (R-Mass., 1921-1991), who, according to the foundation, "worked tirelessly to increase public recognition and support for research on the brain and its disorders." The ceremony occurred May 11 at the foundation's annual symposium in Washington, D.C. In her research, Shatz, 45, explores the prenatal and postnatal process involved with the wiring connections between the eye and the brain in the mammalian visual system. "My contribution to the question of, `How do connections form during development?' " she explains, "is to show that this process of nerve cell signaling does not just occur after birth and rely solely on experience, but that it occurs in utero, when the axons and connections are first forming." She has determined that the fetus, even though its eyes contain no rods or cones, which are essential for sight, begins to wire up the eye-brain connections necessary for normal vision (C.J. Shatz, "The developing brain," Scientific American, 267[3]:61, 1992). "My research involves discovering how the brain has to use its standard methods of communication--that is, signaling by action potentials and synaptic transmissions--even early in development to help produce the precision connections that are present in adulthood. "This is, sort of, the big nature-vs.-nurture conversation that biologists have." Shatz studies fetal brain formation in cats, rats, and ferrets. Her work has led to the discovery "that at these early times in development, the eye is sort of doing automatic signaling to the brain in the absence of vision." She says the ultimate goal of her research is to explain the origins of neurological birth defects, such as cerebral palsy, and various behavioral disorders. "This raises the question that some forms of unexplained birth defects might be due to wiring defects rather than to the defects of the organization of the cells of the brain," she says. Shatz received a B.A. in chemistry from Radcliffe College in 1969 and a Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard Medical School in 1976. In 1978, she joined the faculty of Stanford University and attained the rank of professor of neurobiology in 1989. She moved to UC-Berkeley last year. Shatz is the third winner of the Decade of the Brain Award. The 1991 winner, Harvard professor Louis Kunkel, received the award for discovering the gene for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Last year's winner, Washington University neuroscientist Marcus Raichle, was honored for developing positron emission tomography (PET) scanning. J.B. Horner Kuper, a nuclear physicist and longtime researcher at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., died June 8 at the age of 83. Kuper received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1938. From 1941 to 1946 he was associate group leader at the radiation laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He worked at Brookhaven from its inception in 1947 until his retirement in 1974. From 1948 to 1970, Kuper was chairman of the lab's instrumentations and health physics department. Masao Kotani, former president of Tokyo Science University, died June 6 in Tokyo at the age of 87. Kotani's work concerned the theory of magnetrons and microwave circuits. Born in Kyoto, Kotani received his B.S. in physics in 1929 and his Ph.D. in science in 1943 from the University of Tokyo. He was a member of university faculty from 1932 to 1965. He then joined Osaka University from 1965 to 1969 before serving as president of Tokyo Science University from 1970 until his retirement in 1982.

Columbia Emeritus Chemistry Professor Receives $225,000 Robert A. Welch Award, UC-Berkeley Neurobiologist Gets Prize Honoring Silvio Conte

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of