Judy Lieberman, senior investigator at the Immune Disease Institute and the program in cellular and molecular medicine at the Children’s Hospital Boston, came to be a physician through an unusual pathway. Before attending medical school, Lieberman earned a doctorate in theoretical physics, but turned to a career in medicine so she could directly impact peoples’ lives. “I wanted to do something more socially useful,” says Lieberman, also a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. So she began researching HIV/AIDS. After reading the 1998 paper by Andrew Fire and Craig Mello describing RNAi, she continued asking questions to see if their work would help suppress HIV. She describes what she’s found on p. 42.
Rice University sociology professor Elaine Ecklund is interested in how the public views scientists. “The popular image is that scientists are godless atheists, and that science had turned them away from religion,” she says. Intrigued by ...
