National Academy Pays Tribute To 16 Science And Engineering Notables

Sixteen individuals--one woman and 15 men--from a variety of disciplines in science, engineering, and mathematics are being honored for their scientific and humanitarian achievements at the 132nd annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), scheduled for April 24 in Washington, D.C. Five of the 16 are already NAS members. Also taking place at the convocation will be the election of new academy members and the induction of new members elected last year (N. Sankaran, The Scientist, June 13, 1994, page 1). Researchers from the life sciences are well-represented among the award recipients: Six of this year's 14 prizes will be given to biological investigators. The academy's highest honor (albeit the only award without an accompanying cash prize), the NAS Public Welfare Medal, will be presented to Harold Amos, 78, the Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Microbiology, emeritus, at Harvard Medical School. He is being recognized for "his tremendous success . . . in encouraging and facilitating the entry and advancement of underrepresented minorities into careers in medicine and biomedical research." Amos, a cell biologist whose research concentrates on sugar metabolism, started his volunteer work in the mid-1960s with the New York-based Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. He has been involved in various capacities with the foundation's programs to fund, teach, and encourage underrepresented minorities--from high-school students to junior faculty--in medical and biomedical fields. He has been a member of the foundation's board of directors since 1974. Amos has also been instrumental in setting up minority programs at the National Institutes of Health and the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Most recently, he was the national director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Minority Faculty Fellowship Committee, a position he held from 1983 to 1994. He was also a judge for the 1995 Westinghouse Awards, and he continues to teach a lecture course in cell biology for seventh-graders. Amos emphasizes that, although his volunteer work with various charities, universities, and agencies has been primarily in encouraging minorities to become involved in science, he "would really like to be known as a person who's interested in improving the exposure for all youngsters and students to science." He also serves on committees of the American Cancer Society and several universities and hospitals. Two of the life scientists being honored are receiving awards especially designated for young investigators. Thomas D. Albright, 38, a professor of neuroscience at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in San Diego, will be given the NAS Award for Initiatives in Research, a $15,000 prize presented for "research likely to lead toward new capabilities for human benefit." The award is given annually in different fields; this year systems neuroscience was chosen by the NAS council to be honored. Albright says that the goal of his lab's research is to "understand how the visual system works." Using rhesus monkeys, "we monitor the electrical activity of a single neuron and relate that activity to different aspects of visual perception." Applications of this basic research include understanding what happens to human vision after traumatic injury such as stroke. (For a review, see T.D Albright, G.R. Stoner, "Visual motion perception," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in press.) The NAS Award in Molecular Biology, a gold medal and $20,000 prize that recognizes a "recent notable discovery in molecular biology by a young scientist," will be given to Daniel E. Gottschling, 39, an associate professor in the department of molecular genetics and cell biology at the University of Chicago. In the last five years, Gottschling and his lab team have been studying what role the genes at a little-studied area of the chromosome--its end or telomere--play in DNA replication during the cell cycle. Using yeast chromosomes, his group discovered that genes at the telomere sometimes are silenced, or inactivated, but at other times switch from being silent to active. "Over the past several years we've been trying to figure out what the [molecular] components of the silencing are and what mechanisms are at work behind the silencing," he remarks. (For an example of this work, see M.S. Singer, D.E. Gottschling, "TLC1: Template RNA component of Saccharomyces cerevisiae telomerase," Science, 266:404-9, 1994.) Because researchers have hypothesized that the telomere may play a role in the overall control of cell replication, and ultimately a cell line's life span, gerontological and cancer biologists are especially interested in the work. Douglas A. Melton, 41, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard, has been named the recipient of the Richard Lounsbery Award, a vermeil medal, $50,000 prize, and $20,000 travel stipend, for extraordinary achievement in biology and medicine. A developmental biologist, Melton stresses that the "award is for the body of work done by my colleagues--graduate students and postdoctoral fellows--and myself over the last 10 years." He describes their work as studying "what happens [to cells] in the first few hours after fertilization." To elucidate the cues that signal embryonic cells to specialize in their development, the Melton group has shown that a specific messenger RNA found in eggs induces a frog embryo to make an entire body axis, which includes head, spinal cord, and muscle tissue cells (D.S. Kesler, D.A. Melton, "Vertebrate embryonic induction: mesodermal and neural patterning," Science, 266:596-604, 1994). He says the lab's work helps to connect molecular and developmental biology. Ralph S. Wolfe, 73, a professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois, will receive the Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology, a $5,000 prize. Wolfe is best known for describing the steps and enzymes in the biochemical pathway used by microbes to reduce carbon dioxide to methane. "I've been interested in co-enzymes and their function since graduate school days," relates Wolfe. "Working out this pathway took about 20 years." He currently works with a small group of undergraduates and postdocs on methanogenic research. He notes: "I like to do exploratory things. Science, to me, is like fishing--you keep casting and casting and hope you get a strike." For a summary of his lifetime work, see his review article "My kind of biology" (Annual Reviews of Microbiology, 45:1-35, 1991). The awards for chemistry are going to two of the field's well-respected and long-time participants, both members of the academy since the 1970s. The NAS Award in Chemical Sciences, a bronze medal and $10,000 prize, was given to the only woman in this year's roster of honorees. Isabella L. Karle, 74, senior scientist in the Laboratory of Structure of Matter at the Naval Research Laboratory, is recognized with this award for her key role in developing multidisciplinary applications for determining crystalline and molecular structures using X-ray and electron diffraction. "It has become a laboratory tool that is now available to many," remarks Karle, who notes that today, organic, pharmaceutical, natural products, and inorganic chemists all use the procedure. She has won several other awards for this work, most recently the 1993 Bower Award and Prize in Science (E.R. Silverman, The Scientist, Jan. 10, 1994, page 4). She's currently involved in determining the folding characteristics of small peptides, a line of research that is useful to medicinal chemists interested in drug design. P. Roy Vagelos, 65, former chairman and CEO of Merck & Co. Inc., Whitehouse Station, N.J., and now chairman of the board of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Tarrytown, N.Y., and chairman of the board of trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, is the recipient of the NAS Award for Chemistry in Service to Society. The $20,000 prize is given alternately to academic- and industry-based chemists for contributions that "clearly satisfy a societal need." "The approach that we brought to drug discovery was based on focusing on specific enzymes in order to chemically modify them and slow their activity," he says. "The Merck group selected a key enzyme in cholesterol synthesis." The cholesterol-reducing drugs resulting from this work, according to Vagelos, have saved lives and reduced health-care costs. Two marine scientists are being honored by this year's earth-science awards. The Alexander Agassiz Medal, a bronze medal and $6,000 prize that honors original contributions in oceanography, goes to Victor V. Vacquier, 87, a professor, emeritus, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California, San Diego. He is most noted for surveys of magnetic-field variations in the Pacific Ocean seafloor. These studies, conducted in the late 1950s, contributed to the theory of seafloor spreading, which later became a cornerstone in the theory of plate tectonics and continental drift adopted in the early 1960s. David L. Jones, 64, a professor of geology and geophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, who works in the marine environment, received the Mary Clark Thompson Medal for service to geology and paleontology, a gold-plated bronze medal and $7,500 award. He is being honored for his contributions to tectonic theory, and his mapping of the geology of the westernmost parts of North America and the stratigraphy of deposits of deep-sea animals called radiolarians. Innovators For the first time, the field of mathematics is recognized by the NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing. The $5,000 prize will be given to Robion C. Kirby, 57, a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. The award acknowledges his achievements in low-dimensional topology, a subdiscipline of pure mathematics that deals with the geometry of surfaces and shapes (R. Kirby, "Problems in low-dimensional manifold theory," Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics, 32:273-312, 1978). Kirby notes that his compilations arose from conversations and workshops at conferences starting in the late 1970s. An updated list is due out later this year. Sharing another honor in mathematics--the NAS Award in Applied Mathematics and Numerical Analysis, a $10,000 prize--are Julian D. Cole, 69, the Margaret Darrin Professor of Applied Mathematics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Joseph B. Keller, 71, the Lewis M. Terman Professor of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. Cole is being honored for his work in applied mathematics, while Keller is being recognized for his contributions to the geometrical theory of diffraction and water-wave propagation. In psychology, the annual Troland Research Awards--$35,000 given to each of two recipients, one for quantitative and one for physiological investigations in psychology--go to Michael S. Faneslow, 40, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Robert M. Nosofsky, 38, a professor of psychology at Indiana University. Faneslow is known for his research on fear and how it translates into specific behaviors; Nosofsky studies how humans process information. Two engineers will also be honored. William Rees Sears, 82, a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Arizona, is the recipient of the NAS Award in Aeronautical Engineering--a $15,000 prize--for contributions to education, aerodynamics research, and aircraft design. The Gibbs Brothers Medal--a vermeil medal and $5,000 award--this year recognizes the achievements of Owen H. Oakley, 80, a retired naval architect, in naval architecture and marine engineering.

National Academy Pays Tribute To 16 Science And Engineering Notables

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