Happenings

PEOPLE Melvin N.A. Peterson, former director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s international deep sea drilling project at the University of California, San Diego, was nominated first chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Peterson will be one of NOAA’s chief policy advisers on environmental issues and will serve as its principal spokesman on science and technology. The International Union of Pure & Applied Chemistry voted French inorganic chemist Yves P. Jeannin president-elect. Jeannin currently heads the Pierre and Marie Curie University transition metal chemistry laboratory in Paris. He will succeed Valentin A. Koptyug of the U.S.S.R. as IUPAC president in August 1989. The National Science Foundation appointed eight new members to three-year terms with its 1987-88 Advisory Committee to the Di- rectorate for Science and Engineering Education: C. Diane Bishop, Arizona State Department of Education; Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas; Mary Hatwood Futrell, president, National Education Association; Roald Hoffmann, Cornell University chemistry department; Donald Kennedy, president, Stanford University; Freda Hyams Nicholson, chief executive officer, Science Museums of Charlotte, N.C.; Albert Shanker, president, American Federation of Teachers; and Marshall S. Smith dean, Stanford University School of Education. Derek Partridge has left the United States and returned to Britain to chair the computer science department at Exeter University. Partridge is an expert in artificial intelligence research and software engineering. He graduated from University College, London, in 1968 and obtained his doctorate at Imperial College. The Open University in Milton Keynes, Britain, appointed three visiting professors last month: C.R. Worthington, Carnegie-Mellon professor of biophysics, visiting science professor; P. Burns, Cranfield Institute of Technology School of Management, visiting professor at the Centre for Continuing Education; and J. Lowy, former professor of biophysics, Aarhus Denmark, visiting science professor. D.M. Gordon, Harvard Society of Fellows, was made science research fellow and J. Hoskin, chairman, Quasar, Ltd., was made technology research fellow. D. Xiao-Man, materials science researcher, Beijing University of Iron and Steel Technology, was made visiting technology research assistant. The Industrial Biotechnology Association elected three new members to its board of directors at its annual meeting last month: Alberto E. Adam, American Cyanamid Co.’s agricultural division vice president; Roger H. Salquist, Calgene Inc. president and chief executive officer; and Mark B. Skaletsky, Biogen Inc. principal operating officer. Patrick Gage, Hoffman-La Roche vice president and director of exploratory research, was elected secretary. Richard D. Godown was reelected president. Martin Smith, former assistant librarian at the Space Telescope Science Institute Library in Baltimore, Md., became chief of the Smithsonian Institution Library’s National Air and Space Museum Branch in August. Smith heads the physical sciences unit of the research services division there. AWARDS Three scientists will share the annual $100,000 Hammer Prize for cancer research, the Hammer Prize Foundation announced October 23: Bernard Fisher, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine; Donald Metcalf, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne, Australia; and Malcolm Moore, Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Rahindra N. Roy, department of chemistry, Drury College, Springfield, Missouri, received the 1987 Burlington Northern Faculty Achievement Award this summer. Drury honored Roy for his outstanding research in physical and analytical chemistry.. He has been with the college since 1966. Donald W King, president of King Research, Inc., Rockville, Md., and former president of the American Society for Information Science, was awarded the 1987 ASIS Award of Merit at the society’s conference last month in Boston. ASIS honored King for work that “advanced the fields of statistics and operations research in raising the level of quantification of information science. The American Chemical Society announced three new national award winners last month: Raymond Calas, University of Bordeaux, France, the Frederic Stanley Kipping Award in Organo-silicon Chemistry sponsored by Dow Corning Corp.; Howard Brenner, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ACS Award in Colloid or Surface Chemistry sponsored by Kendall Co.; and Pierre de Gennes, College de France, Paris, ACS Award in Polymer Chemistry sponsored by Mobil Chemical Co. DEATHS Philip Levine, 87, the immunologist and bacteriologist who discovered the Rh factor in human blood, died October 18 in a nursing home in Manhattan. Levine’s pioneering research in serums and antibodies led to his identification of Rh hemolytic disease. Born in Kletsk, Russia, Levine received master’s and doctoral degrees from Cornell University Medical School. He directed the biological division of the Ortho Research Foundation in Raritan, N.J. for 21 years. Soviet mathematician Andrei N. Kolmogorov, 84, founder of modern probability theory, died October 20 in Moscow. Kolmogorov had taught at Moscow University and was a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. His obituary, signed by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, declared that his life “represented an incomparable feat for science. Maxwell Finland, 85, an international expert on infectious disease, died October25 in Faulkner Hospital in Boston. Finland, George Richard Minot professor emeritus of medicine at Harvard Medical School, was a pioneer in antibiotic therapy and the treatment for pneumonia, and was one of the first to identify the hazard of bacterial resistance to antibiotics. Francis Adrian Sooy, 71, University of California, San Francisco, chancellor emeritus and professor of otolaryngology, died in September in a small-plane crash in Rio Vista, Calif. In the 1940s Sooy performed the first stapes mobilization and stapedectomy for otosclerotic deafness. He later became known as a world authority on stapes surgery and was cited as one of “the 100 leaders of tomorrow” in the 1950s by Time magazine. Sooy joined UCSF in 1946 and served as chancellor for 10 years beginning in 1972. Malcolm R. Irwin, 90, a pioneer of immunogenetics, died October 9 in Madison, Wisc., due to complications from a stroke. His work led to the eradication of brucellosis of cattle in the 1940s and the development of a standardized system of blood typing to determine the parentage of cattle, sheep and pigs, and to identify human individuals. Irwin chaired the University of Wisconsin genetics department from 1951 to 1965.

Happenings

The Scientist Staff

PEOPLE

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