Geophysicists Receive Filmmakers' Award For Video On Earthquakes In Holy Land

Geophysicist Receive Filmakers Award for Video On Earthquakes in Holyland UCSF'S Leonard Hayflick Awarded 1991 Sandoz Prize for Gerotological Research Judith Rodin John D. Minna Daniel F. Veber Frederick A. Murphy Esther M. Cromwell Alfred S. McLaren Amos Nur, Wayne Loel Professor of Earth Sciences and chairman of the geophysics department at Stanford University, and Chris MacAskill, a former student of Nur's who is currently manager of developer partnerships at NeXT Inc., Redwood City, Calif., have won the Silver Apple Award in Physical Sciences for their video, "The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Earthquakes in the Holy Land." The duo received the award last month at the National Educational Film and Video Festival in Oakland, Calif. MacAskill convinced Nur to make a documentary about earthquakes in the Jordan rift zone after hearing his former professor give a presentation. "I had sort of a slide show that I showed around," says Nur. "It never occurred to me that a film could be much more beautiful, and could have much more impact, than just a slide show." Some of the research on which the video was based was originally published in Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors (12:1-50, 1976). Nur served as producer and host of the documentary; MacAskill, who received a master's degree under Nur's tutelage about 10 years ago, was the director. "It's a labor of love," MacAskill says. "We did it because we love the story and wanted to tell it." Nur first began studying ancient earthquakes in the Holy Land in an attempt to infer a regular pattern in which earthquakes occur, which could aid in the prediction of future quakes. "There are very few places on earth where you have a continuous historical record [the Old and New Testaments] that goes back in time, to indicate where a pattern might exist," he says. "The Holy Land is unique in this respect." Nur says he learned a couple of things about the art of filmmaking during the course of the shooting: "One of the most surprising things was the need to be concise, in a way that you never have to be as a scientist. Most scientists tend to ramble on; papers are quite long." In filmmaking, by contrast, he says, "you can only spend 15 to 25 seconds [talking about a topic] before you move on to something otherwise, it gets too boring." The Public Broadcasting System plans to air the documentary later this year. Nur and MacAskill, assisted by two Israeli photographers, shot the documentary without a script. "Before we left [to begin shooting in Israel], people thought if we didn't have a script, we would fail," Nur says. "But we couldn't bring ourselves to write a script. We thought we would go there and explore with the camera in place--and it turned out to be just right." The first screening of the documentary, which deals with history and archaeology as well as seismology, took place at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco last December 5. "We were working until midnight on December 4," MacAskill recalls. Nur received his undergraduate degree from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1962 and his Ph.D. in geophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969. He joined Stanford's geophysics department in 1970 and became its chairman in 1986. --Barbara Spector Leonard Hayflick, a professor of anatomy at the University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco, has been named a cowinner of the International Association of Gerontology's 1991 Sandoz Prize. Hayflick, who won the prize in the category of biological sciences, will share the 50,000 Swiss Franc prize with Hans Thomae, a sociologist from Bonn, Germany. The award will be presented this October at the Fourth Asia-Oceania Congress of Gerontology, in Yokohama, Japan. Hayflick is being recognized for his contributions to establishing the field of cellular aging research. Prior to his work in the early 1960s, it was believed that cells cultured in vitro were immortal, and hence any aging of cells in vivo was due to environmental factors. In 1961, Hayflick discovered that, in fact, normal cells cultured in vitro have a finite potential to divide. This discovery had profound implications for the study of aging, says Hayflick, because it pointed research into the cell to find the causes of aging, rather than looking to the cell's environment. A sidelight of his early work was the sensitivity of the cell line he was working with, WI-38, to human viruses. Today, he says, "hundreds of millions of people worldwide are vaccinated with WI-38" or similar cells. In the late 1970s, Hayflick was caught up in a lengthy dispute (settled out of court) with the National Institutes of Health regarding ownership and profits from the cell line. In further work, Hayflick and colleagues have found that before aging cells stop dividing, they "incur hundreds of biological changes," involving DNA, proteins, lipids, behavior, and size. "This used to be called a model for aging," he says. "Now we believe it is aging." Hayflick is currently searching for the genetic clock that controls cellular aging. He is also writing a book, The Biology of Aging, to be published by Random House in 1992. --Rebecca Andrews Judith Rodin, Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology at Yale University and chairwoman of Yale's psychology department, has been appointed dean of Yale's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, succeeding the retiring Jerome J. Pollitt. Rodin will oversee academic policies involving about 2,500 graduate students and 600 faculty members. Her five-year term begins July 1. She will become the first woman in the university's history to serve as dean of the graduate school. Rodin is also professor of medicine and psychiatry at Yale's medical school. In 1983, she was appointed chairwoman of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Center for Studies of Health and Behavior. The center, which is based at Yale but is composed of researchers from various institutions, conducts multidisciplinary studies of how genetic, biological, environmental, and psycho- social factors interact in health-promoting and health-damaging behavior. Rodin received her bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966 and her doctorate in psychology from Columbia University in 1970. She joined the Yale faculty in 1972 and has chaired the psychology department since 1989, a position she will relinquish when she assumes the deanship. She received awards for distinguished scientific contributions from the American Psychological Association in 1977 and 1980 and from the Gerontological Society of America in 1987. John D. Minna, formerly chief of the National Cancer Institute Navy Medical Oncology Branch in Bethesda, Md., has been appointed director of the new Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Minna will also hold the Lisa K. Simmons Distinguished Chair in Comprehensive Oncology. Minna's research has focused on the cellular and molecular biology of lung cancer, as well as its clinical treatment. He was the first to find that lung cancer cells make their own growth factors (Nature, 316:823-26, 1985). At UT-Southwestern he will be recruiting cancer researchers and clinicians, and plans to have a staff of 100 full-time faculty by the end of the decade. Minna earned his undergraduate degree in 1963 from Stanford University and his M.D. in 1967 from Stanford Medical School. He did an internship and residency in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston before joining the National Institutes of Health. He moved to the National Cancer Institute in 1975. Daniel F. Veber, senior director of medicinal chemistry at Merck Sharp & Dohme Research Laboratories in West Point, Pa., has been selected as the recipient of the eighth Alan E. Pierce Award. The award, presented every two years and sponsored by the Pierce Chemical Co. of Rockford, Ill., was given at the 12th American Peptide Symposium, held earlier this month at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The award honors Veber's research contributions in the chemistry of amino acids, peptides, and proteins. It is given in recognition of basic research contributions and for accomplishments related to the chemical synthesis of enzymes. Veber received his B.A. in 1961, his M.S. in 1962, and his Ph.D. in 1964, all from Yale University. He joined Merck as a senior chemist in 1964. Frederick A. Murphy, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, has been named dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis. He will also serve as director of veterinary medicine programs for the University of California system's Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Murphy, 56, succeeds Edward A. Rhode, who is retiring. Murphy's appointment is effective August 9. Murphy, who has been the director of the Center for Infectious Diseases since 1987, served as director of the CDC's Division of Viral Diseases from 1983 to 1987 and as chief of viral pathology from 1964 to 1978. From 1978 to 1982, he was associate dean and professor of microbiology at Colorado State University's College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. Murphy received his Ph.D. in comparative pathology from UC-Davis in 1964. He earned his B.S. in bacteriology and his D.V.M. from Cornell University in 1957 and 1959, respectively. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Archives of Virology and coeditor of Advances in Virus Research. His research focuses on virology and viral diseases, particularly rabies, encephalitis, and hemorrhagic fevers. Esther M. Conwell, a research fellow at Xerox Corp.'s Webster Research Center in Webster, N.Y., has received the Xerox President's Award for outstanding achievement, the highest honor presented by Xerox. Conwell is one of only two women to have been elected to both the National Academy of Sciences (1990) and the National Academy of Engineering (1980). At Xerox, where she has worked since 1972, her research has concentrated on integrated optics and the use of polymers as semiconductors in copiers and electronic devices. Earlier in her career, her work at Bell Telephone Laboratories (now AT&T Bell Laboratories) in Murray Hill, N.J., and at GTE Laboratories' Bayside Research Center in Bayside, N.Y., led to improvements in television sets, radios, personal computers, and other devices that use transistors. Conwell received her B.A. in 1942 from Brooklyn College and her M.S. in physics in 1945 from the University of Rochester. She received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1948. Alfred S. McLaren, senior research associate at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Boulder, Colo., and an associate professor in the department of geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has been named president of Science Service Inc., a Washington, D.C., nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the public's understanding of science. McLaren succeeds Edward G. Sherburne, Jr., who is retiring. McLaren, a career naval officer for 26 years, has participated in three Arctic expeditions on nuclear submarines, one of which was the first submerged survey of the Northwest Passage en route to the North Pole. From 1978 to 1980, he served as commanding officer of the Naval Underwater Systems Center, a Department of Defense laboratory. He retired as a captain in 1981. McLaren received his Ph.D. in the physical geography of the polar regions from the University of Colorado in 1986. He received a M.Phil. degree in polar studies from the University of Cambridge, England, in 1982 and an M.S. in international affairs from George Washington University in 1968. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1955. Science Service publishes Science News, a weekly magazine, and administers the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (The Scientist, April 15, 1991, page 20).

Geophysicists Receive Filmmakers' Award For Video On Earthquakes In Holy Land

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