For The First Time, A Nutritionist Is Named As Winner Of $200,000 World Food Prize

For The First Time, A Nutritionist Is Named As Winner Of $200,000 World Food Prize Harvard Microbiologist Huang Assumes Newly Created Post, NYU Dean of Science For The First Time, A Nutritionist Is Named As Winner Of $200,000 World Food Prize Nevin S. Scrimshaw, director of the Food, Nutrition, and Human Development Program for the United Nations University of Tokyo and a member of Harvard University's Center for Population Studies, has been named the recipient of the 1991 World Food Prize. The prize, which includes a cash award of $200,000 and a sculpture by Saul Bass, will be given to Scrimshaw at a ceremony in Des Moines, Iowa, today. It is the largest prize given for accomplishments in food and agriculture. Scrimshaw's selection as the 1991 World Food Prize laureate marks the first time that the five-year-old award has honored a nutritionist. Previous winners have been botanists or biologists whose work has helped increase the world's food supply. "There is a natural tendency to think of world hunger as due to lack of food, and that it can be alleviated by increased food production," says Scrimshaw. "This year's award is recognition that the conquest of hunger depends not only upon food production, but also upon food consumption, the domain of the nutritionists [who are] struggling with the problems of overcoming overt and hidden hunger through facilitating consumption of an adequate diet." The World Food Prize Foundation, which awards the prize, has been sponsored by the John Ruan Foundation of Des Moines since 1990. Ruan's business interests include transportation, commercial banking, financial services, international trading, and real estate development. Iowa State University serves as secretariat of the prize. From 1986 to 1990, the prize was sponsored by the General Foods Fund, but General Foods discontinued sponsorship when its parent company, Philip Morris Inc., merged it with Kraft Inc. (The Scientist, Feb. 19, 1990, page 25). Scrimshaw says the reasons the prize came so close to being discontinued "were circumstantial and, I believe, quite unrelated to any lack of recognition of the importance of research on the world's food supply and how it is used. The award was established by a large U.S. food company with global vision and interests, and this company was taken over by a company without these." Scrimshaw, 73, received a bachelor's degree from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1938, a master's degree in biology from Harvard University in 1939, a Ph.D. in physiology from Harvard in 1941, and an M.D. from the University of Rochester in 1945. In 1949, he became the founding director of the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama (INCAP), a specialized center of the Pan American Health Organization. In association with INCAP, he developed INCAPARINA, an inexpensive, protein-rich food product used as a weaning food to prevent kwashiorkor, a fatal disease affecting young children lacking adequate protein in their diets. In the 1950s, he persuaded Central American governments to require iodation of salt to combat endemic goiter. In 1959, Scrimshaw earned a master of public health degree from Harvard University. Two years later, he became a professor and head of the then-new department of nutrition and food science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1976, he established MIT's International Food and Nutrition Planning Program, which provided training in nutrition research for scientists in developing countries. He became an Institute Professor at MIT in 1980, and retired from the school in 1988. In 1975, Scrimshaw initiated the World Hunger Program during the early development stages of the United Nations University in Tokyo, which works through other institutions to help countries deal with problems of human survival and welfare. Since 1981, he has directed the World Hunger Program's successor, the Food, Nutrition, and Human Development Program. He has created educational and training programs in food and nutrition for scientists in underdeveloped nations. Says Scrimshaw, "Since leaving INCAP in 1961 to come to MIT, at least one-third of my time each year has been spent in developing countries." --Barbara Spector Harvard Microbiologist Huang Assumes Newly Created Post, NYU Dean Of Science Alice S. Huang, formerly professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Harvard Medical School, has been appointed dean of science in New York University's Faculty of Arts and Science. Her appointment became effective last month. Huang's job at NYU is a new position, which she says was created in response to complaints that the university had "no one who could speak for scientists." Her job will involve working with NYU's arts and science dean, enabling school administrators to "focus much more on science than they would be able to or have the expertise to deal with" in the absence of an administrator who is also a working scientist. Among her first tasks, she says, will be "looking at the support systems that are available to make doing science at NYU easier." The new position, according to Huang, demonstrates NYU's "major commitment to improve the sciences," particularly with regard to undergraduate education. So far, she says, the school has strengthened its chemistry and neurobiology departments; the next stage involves plans "to infuse a great deal of support into biology." During the year preceding her appointment at NYU, Huang had been on leave from her position at Harvard. During that time, she moved to New York with her husband, Rockefeller University president David Baltimore, and "set up some systems at the president's house at Rockefeller for development activities and the entertaining that the president has to do, so that I can spend as little time as possible" assisting with those functions. "I'm glad I took the time" to put those systems in place, she says. While she established herself in New York and conducted a job search, "I kept my lab functioning at Children's Hospital [in Boston, where she had been director of the Laboratories of Infectious Diseases]; so I commuted back and forth for a little while." Huang has moved her research laboratory to NYU, where she plans to continue her work in virology, spending "50 percent of my time as dean for science, and 50 percent on research." After two years, she says, "it will be critical for me to decide to go back to research full-time or be a dean full-time. I have that window partially because my lab is fully funded for three years." In two years' time, she says, she will have to decide whether to reapply for funding. Huang, 52, received her undergraduate education at Wellesley College and Johns Hopkins University, where she received a B.A. in human biology in 1961. She received her M.A. and, in 1966, her Ph.D. from the department of microbiology at Johns Hopkins, and did postdocs at the Salk Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been a visiting professor at Rockefeller University, National Taiwan University, and the University of Mississippi. --Barbara Spector

For The First Time, A Nutritionist Is Named As Winner Of $200,000 World Food Prize

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