National Medal Of Science Winners Contributed To Birth Of Their Fields

Their Fields Author: Neeraja Sankaran SIDEBAR: Technology Medalists Life scientists whose work has shed new light on genetic disorders and the basic mechanisms and structure of RNA were prominent among the individuals President Clinton presented with the National Medals of Science on October 18. The medals-the United States' highest scientific honor-were given to seven men and one woman. The event also featured the awarding of the National Medal of Technology to three scientists and business executives, a research team, and two companies. The studies of many of the various medalists have had a profound effect on the biomedical sciences, and a number of the medalists were present at and contributed to the dawn of their fields. Hailing from such varied disciplines as molecular biology, pure mathematics, psychology, astronomy, and electrical engineering, the science medal winners are: Thomas Cech Hans Dehmelt Peter Goldreich Thomas R. Cech, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator there; Hans G. Dehmelt, a professor of physics at the University of Washington, Seattle; Peter M. Goldreich, Lee A. DuBridge Professor of Astrophysics and Planetary Physics at the California Institute of Technology; Hermann Haus Isabella Karle Louis Nirenberg Hermann A. Haus, Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the departments of electrical engineering and computer science; Isabella L. Karle, senior scientist and head of the X-ray analysis section at the Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D.C.; Louis Nirenberg, emeritus director and a professor of mathematics at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences; Alexander Rich Roger Shepard Alexander Rich, William Thompson Sedgwick Professor of Biophysics at MIT; and Roger N. Shepard, a professor of psychology and Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Social Science at Stanford University. Administered for the White House by the National Science Foundation, the science medals are given annually to up to 20 scientists in recognition of their outstanding achievements. The president makes the final selections from a list of recommendations presented to him by a committee that reviews nominations from various institutions. A similar selection process is followed for the National Medals of Technology, which are administered by the United States Department of Commerce (see list of winners on page 8). A winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize in chemistry, Thomas Cech, 47, was selected for his ground-breaking research on catalytic RNAs. His research team at Colorado showed that RNA molecules, such as proteins, could act like enzymes in living cells. Specifically, he described a "self-splicing" RNA from the cells of the organism Tetrahymena, an RNA molecule capable of catalyzing the excision of pieces of RNA from a transcript. In the seminal paper describing this work-K. Kruger et al., "Self-splicing RNA-auto-excision and auto-cyclization of ribosomal RNA intervening sequence of Tetrahymena," Cell, 31:147-57, 1982-the authors coined the term "ribozyme" to describe such molecules. This paper has been referenced in more than 300 subsequent publications. Since these initial discoveries, Cech notes, "more than 300 ribozymes have been described from other organisms." His laboratory has "stuck closely with the first type that was discovered," working on "trying to understand the mechanisms of RNA catalysis, using the concepts and experimental methods of protein enzymology." Besides studying ribozymes for their inherent scientific value, Cech adds that his laboratory and other scientists have also begun to investigate the potential therapeutic value of these molecules. "Recently we showed that the same [self-splicing] ribozyme can repair defective transcripts by removing faulty portions and replacing them with [unmutated] sequences [B.A. Sullenger, T.R. Cech, Nature, 371:619-22, 1994]," he explains. Warning that "this is still a new, very uncertain technique, and whether it can be used in gene therapy remains to be seen," Cech speculates that this corrective property may be of value to work in such genetic diseases as cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, and muscular dystrophy. Thomas Cech received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1975. He came to Colorado as an assistant professor in 1978, became a full professor in 1983, and was named an HHMI investigator in 1988. In addition, he heads the scientific advisory board of Ribozyme Pharmaceuticals Inc., a Boulder-based company formed in 1993 to commercialize his discoveries. Cech has won numerous awards and honors in addition to his Nobel Prize, including the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 1988. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1987. Another medalist this year is also a Nobel laureate. Hans Dehmelt shared his 1989 physics prize with Wolfgang Paul and Norman Ramsey. Dehmelt is perhaps best known for developing methods to trap and immobilize subatomic particles. He and his colleagues were the first to isolate and detect an individual proton, a positron, and a barium ion, in addition to being the first group in 1986 to report observing a "quantum leap"-whereby a barium ion viewed in blue light became invisible as it jumped to a higher energy state, turning visible again as it returned to its normal state (W. Nagourney et al., Journal of the Optical Society of America B-Optical Waves, 3:252-3, 1986). A native of Germany, Dehmelt, 73, obtained his Ph.D. in physics from the Georg- August Universit&aauml;t in Göttingen. After doing postdoctoral research there and at Duke University, he moved to Washington in 1955, where he became a full professor in 1961. He was elected to NAS in 1978, and received the Rumford Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985. Honored for his work on the structure and function of nucleic acids, MIT's Alexander Rich, at 70, can lay claim to work that "goes back to the beginning of the discipline" of molecular structural biology. In 1956, for instance, he and a colleague showed that "when we mixed two polynucleotides in solution-themselves unstructured in any way-they formed a double helix. "This was the first demonstration of a hybridization reaction, which is the basis for many of the techniques in modern molecular biology," states Rich. The original paper-A. Rich, D.R. Davies, "A new two-stranded helical structure: polyadenylic acid and polyuridylic acid," Journal of the American Chemical Society, 78:3548, 1956-has been cited in nearly 200 other articles. "Shortly thereafter, we also discovered the formation of a triple helix [G. Ffeld et al., JACS, 79:2023-24, 1957], which is used quite often in biotechnology today in attempts to turn off genes," he adds. The demonstration of the formation of hybrid helixes between single strands of DNA and RNA (A. Rich, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 46:1044-53, 1960) "suggested for the first time how DNA might transfer its information to RNA," Rich explains. In the early 1970s, his group was among the first to "solve the three-dimensional structure of a transfer RNA molecule" (S.H. Kim et al., Science, 179:285-8, 1973). Alexander Rich's group was also responsible for the discovery of the occurrence of Z-DNA, a form of the DNA double helix with a left-handed twist (A.H.J. Wang et al., Nature, 282:680-6, 1979). Rich obtained an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1949. He worked as a research fellow under Linus Pauling at the California Institute of Technology from 1949-54, and served as the chief of the section on physical chemistry at the National Institute of Mental Health from 1954-58. Rich has been at MIT since 1958, when he joined the department of biophysics as an associate professor. He was elected to NAS in 1970. Hermann Haus, also from MIT, is an electrical engineer who has made many fundamental contributions to the field of laser optics that have practical applications in long-distance communications as well as in the development of instrumentation and techniques for eye surgery. Haus's research has revolved around quantum optics. His work has ranged from fundamental investigations of quantum uncertainty to the practical generation of ultrashort optical pulses-10,000 times shorter than a billionth of a second. "The only reason I'm successful is because of the excellent work going on all over the world," maintains the 70-year-old scientist, who is member of both NAS (since 1987) and the National Academy of Engineering (1976). Haus studied electrical engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute (M.S. in 1951) and MIT (Sc.D. in 1954), and joined the MIT faculty in 1954 as an assistant professor, and has stayed at the institution ever since. NRL's Isabella Karle, 74, was responsible for developing a method-called the symbolic addition procedure-for determining the crystal and molecular structures of complex substances by X-ray analysis. The method is the basis for present-day computer programs for X-ray structural analysis. The process-which she has taught to numerous researchers worldwide-has led to an explosion of crystal structure analyses being published since the mid-1960s. She herself has applied the method to elucidate molecular formulas and conformations of peptides, steroids, alkaloids, frog toxins, and photoarrangement products. Karle, who taught herself X-ray crystallography from textbooks, has stressed that it was her husband, Jerome, who developed theories about X-ray crystallography that she pursued (E.R. Silverman, The Scientist, Jan. 10, 1994, page 4). Jerome Karle shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research in mathematics for determination of phase information from X-ray diffraction patterns. Isabella Karle trained as a physical chemist, receiving her M.S. in 1942 and Ph.D. in 1944 from the University of Michigan. She joined the staff of NRL in 1946. Among her numerous awards are the Garvan Medal from the American Chemical Society in 1976, the Bower Award in 1993, and the NAS Award in Chemical Sciences earlier this year. Both Peter Goldreich and Louis Nirenberg are theoreticians who have made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of astrophysics and mathematics, respectively. Nirenberg's expertise is in the area of mathematical analysis and partial differential equations, the fundamental mathematical tools used in modern science. He developed intricate interactions among mathematical analysis, differential geometry, and "complex analysis" and applied them in the studies of fluid flow and other physical phenomena. Louis Nirenberg, 70, received both his M.S. and Ph.D. from NYU's Courant Institute, where he subsequently obtained a faculty appointment. He served as the institute's director from 1970 to 1972, and continues to work there today. He was elected to NAS in 1969, and in 1982 was the first winner of the Crafoord Prize, created by the Royal Swedish Academy as a Nobel Prize equivalent for fields in which the Nobel is not awarded. Goldreich has spent his career working on a large variety of problems in the planetary sciences that have led to insights on such questions as why there are sharp edges on the rings of Saturn, and how distant stars emit laser-like coherent microwaves. He describes himself as a "general-purpose theoretician" in astrophysics, typically spending a number of years on a particular problem, writing up his findings, and moving on to another topic. Currently he is working on the phenomenon of turbulence in magnetized fluids. The 56-year-old planetary scientist earned a B.S. in engineering from Cornell University in 1960 and his Ph.D. in physics 21/2 years later, under the guidance of physicist Thomas Gold, also at Cornell. He has been an NAS member since 1972. Roger Shepard, 66, is a psychologist who has used basic mathematical theories to understand how human thought is structured. This research laid the theoretical groundwork for such applications as enhancing radiologists' ability to diagnose breast cancer, and the prediction of performance and abilities in prospective airline pilots. Much of his research has been based in generalization, a fundamental problem in human and animal learning that is the process of responding to a new situation based on past experience. The ability to generalize sensory input keeps organisms from being confused by sensory stimuli they are constantly receiving. With a doctoral degree in experimental psychology from Yale University in 1955, Shepard worked from 1958 to 1966 as a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., and as a professor at Harvard University from 1966 to 1968, before coming to Stanford. He was elected to NAS in 1977. (The Scientist, Vol:9, #21, pg.3,8 , October 30, 1995) (Copyright © The Scientist, Inc.)

National Medal Of Science Winners Contributed To Birth Of Their Fields

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