Happenings

Peter Day, director of the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge, U.K., has been named director of the new Center for Biomolecular Research in the Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences at Rutgers University's Cook College. Day, a leading authority in agricultural biotechnology, will take on his new position this summer. The new $30 million center is expected to open later this year. Frederick P. Brooks Jr., professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina for the past 22 years, has been nominated to the National Science Board by President Reagan. Brooks has been an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University since 1959. In 1964 he was appointed professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was named Kenan Professor of Computer Science there in 1975. Brooks' six-year appointment to the NSB will end in May 1992. The 24-member Board is the policymaking arm of the National Science Foundation. Awards David M. Blow of Imperial College, London, and Sir David C. Phillips of the University of Oxford will be presented the Wolf Prize in Chemistry by Israel's president, Chaim Herzog, at an awards ceremony in May. The two biochemists are being recognized for their contributions to protein X-ray crystallography and for studies on the structures and mechanisms of enzymes. Blow and Phillips will share the $100,000 award. Gardner Lindzey will receive the 1987 National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Reviewing at the Academy's award ceremony next month. Lindzey is president and director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, Calif., and prior to that was a professor of psychology and vice president and dean of graduate studies at the University of Texas. The award recognizes excellence in scientific reviewing and includes a prize of $5,000. It was established by AnnUal Reviews Inc. and the Institute for Scientific Information in honor of J. Murray Luck. Maxwell Dunbar, professor emeritus at McGill University of Montreal and founder of the Arctic Biological Station, was presented the Arctic Science Prize for distinguished contributions to understanding the natural processes in the Arctic. Dunbar is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and has been on the McGill faculty since 1946. The award includes a prize of $10,000 and is presented every other year by the Assembly of the North Slope Borough of Alaska. Louise Chia Chang and Elizabeth Lee Wilmer took first and second place respectively in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, the first time girls have won the two highest honors in the 46-year history of the awards. Chang, a 17-year-old senior from Westmont, Ill., will receive a $20,000 scholarship for isolating and studying three genes that are more active in cancer cells than in normal cells. Wilmer, a 16-year-old senior from New York City, will receive a $15,000 scholarship for establishing the required properties for making a map three-colorable, with no adjacent regions having the same color. The top 10 winners in the talent search received scholarships totaling $110,000. Thirty other finalists each received $1,000. The awards are sponsored by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation and administered by Science Service. Deaths George H. Vineyard, 66, former director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory and president-elect of the American Physical Society, died of cancer on February 21 in Stony Brook, N.Y. Vineyard joined the faculty of the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1946 and was named a professor of physics there in 1952. He left UMC to join the staff of Brookhaven, first as a physicist in 1954. In 1960 he was named a senior physicist and from 1961 to 1966 he served as chairman of the physics department. Vineyard was named director of the laboratory in 1973 and served in that post for eight years before resigning to return to full-time research in theoretical solid-state physics. In 1985 Vineyard was named chairman of the National Allocation Committee for the John Von Neumann Center of the Consortium for Scientific Computing at Princeton University. He was elected president-elect of the APS in January and would have become president of the 37,000-member organization in 1988. Louis Plack Hammett, a pioneering researcher in the field of physical organic chemistry and a former professor at Columbia University, died February 23 in Medford, N.J. He was 92 years old. Hammett joined the faculty of Columbia in 1920 and was named the Mitchilll Professor Emeritus of Chemistry when he retired 41 years later. In 1940 he wrote the now-classic book Physical Organic Chemistry, the first widely-used text of its kind. From 1946 to 1947 he was chairman of the National Research Council's chemistry and chemical technology division. In 1961 Hammett was board chairman of the American Chemical Society and in 1967 he received the National Medal of Science, the nation's top award for scientific excellence. Edward Herbert, director of the Institute for Advanced Biomedical Research at the Oregon Health Sciences University, died of cancer on February 19 in Portland, Ore. He was 61 years old. Herbert was an internationally recognized biologist and a former vice president of the International Society of Biochemical Endocrinology. From 1955 to 1963 he was on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and from 1963 to 1985 was a professor at the University of Oregon. In Memoriam Steve Prentis, executive director of publications at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and director of the Banbury Center, was killed in a car accident near Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island on February 27. He was 35 years old. In his brief career, Steve excelled in several areas of science writing, editing and publishing. From 1978 to 1985 he worked with Elsevier in Cambridge, U.K. There he was, successively, editor of Trends in Biochemical Sciences, and founder/editor of Trends in Biotechnology and Trends in Genetics. He joined the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory less than a year ago and had developed a new publication, Genes and Development, the first issue of which appears this month. He was author of a popular book Biotechnology: A New Industrial Revolution and a frequent contributor to New Scientist and other publications. Steve's unquenchable enthusiasm for all areas of science and his ability to guide and educate research scientists to communicate with a wide audience will be greatly missed by the many people touched by his tragically shortened life. —Alexander Grimwade

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March 1987

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