Notebook

PETERSEN LEAVIN NSF: Deputy director Anne Petersen will become senior vice president at the Kellogg Foundation Expect to see several new faces at the National Science Foundation this fall. Deputy director Anne C. Petersen, the first woman ever to serve in that position, will leave in September for a new post, as senior vice president for programs at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Mich. "They focus on areas that I really care about," says Peterson, cofounder of the Society for Research on Adolescence. "Youth, of course, is the area in which I've done my research. That is something that I care deeply about. They also focus on higher education, health care, food systems. They have other cross-cutting areas that also attract me. . . . There's a real opportunity to really have an impact to do something that would have a positive effect on the nation." Meanwhile, President Clinton has nominated eight people to replace outgoing members of the National Science Board (NSB), NSF's governing body. The board's 24 members, drawn from industry and academia, are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Members serve six-year rotating terms, and eight members are appointed every two years. Clinton's new nominees are John A. Armstrong, the former vice president of science and technology and member of the Corporate Management Board at IBM Corp. in Armonk, N.Y.; physiologist and nutritionist M.R.C. Greenwood, chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and former associate director for science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; electrical engineer Stanley Vincent Jaskolski, the chief technical officer and vice president of technical management for the Eaton Corp. in Cleveland; Vera C. Rubin, a research astronomer with the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C.; engineer and sociologist Bob H. Suzuki, the president of California Polytechnic University in Pomona; Mary K. Gaillard, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a faculty senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; economist Eamon M. Kelly, the president of Tulane University; and Richard A. Tapia, the Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University. Finally, NSB recently selected current members Richard N. Zare, a professor of chemistry at Stanford University, to serve as chairman, and linguist Diana Natalicio, the president of the University of Texas at El Paso, as vice chairman. INNOVATOR: The scientific community mourns the passing of Washington University's Oliver Lowry. Renowned biochemist and citation superstar Oliver H. Lowry, 85, died June 29. He had suffered from Alzheimer's disease. Lowry, Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, of molecular biology and pharmacology at Washington University's School of Medicine, began his career at the St. Louis-based school in 1947. William H. Danforth, the chancellor of Washington University from 1971 to 1995, describes Lowry's passing as a "great loss," calling him "a model for other scientists." Specifically, Danforth cites Lowry's "infectious enthusiasm" for his work; his "openness" in sharing his results with colleagues; and the opportunities he bestowed on young scientists. One such researcher, Philip Needleman, chief scientist at St. Louis-based Monsanto Inc., remarks that Lowry "loved science for its own sake." Needleman was a postdoc in Lowry's lab in the early 1960s. After receiving both a Ph.D. in physiological chemistry and an M.D. in 1937 from the University of Chicago, Lowry became an instructor at Harvard University for five years. Later, while working at the Public Health Research Institute of the City of New York from 1942 to 1947, he developed methods to detect minuscule amounts of substances in the blood. It was during this time that he began to develop the protein assay-the "Lowry method"-for which he later became famous. In 1951, Lowry and colleagues published a simple and highly sensitive procedure for quantifying the total amount of protein in solution (O.H. Lowry et al., "Protein measurement with the Folin phenol reagent," Journal of Biological Chemistry, 193:265-75, 1951). Because of the assay's ubiquity and resilience, the paper became the most cited research article in history, according to the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information. As of May, it had been cited more than 244,500 times. Researchers were worried when the National Science Foundation's Science and Technology Centers (STCs) program was launched in 1987. NSF lays out some $64 million annually for 25 centers for long-term, multi-investigator collaborations in areas as diverse as particle astrophysics, cognitive science, and molecular biotechnology. Yet some scientists were concerned that the new program might funnel funds away from individual investigators and instead fill the coffers of large, bureaucracy-laden research centers, slowing innovation and resulting in poorer-quality work. A new report seems to allay those fears. The Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP)-a joint committee of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine-has concluded that the program should continue. "The panel strongly recommends continuing an STC program," says panel member Scott E. Fraser, Anna L. Rosen Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology. "We believe that what made it work was its multi-investigator-initiated research community dictating where the funding would go, just like an individual investigator would." One concern of researchers was that large projects "would be cumbersome and have a large administrative burden," Fraser says. And while the panel report notes that some management problems did occur during the program's start-up phase, much of the center research would not have been possible without the coordination of a large, centralized structure. The New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) opened its doors in 1896, a year following its creation by forward-thinking legislators in Albany. A century later, the United States' first institute dedicated to psychiatric research is still going strong and will celebrate its landmark birthday with a convocation, scientific symposium, and party in late October. The speakers will include Herbert Pardes, dean of the Columbia University Medical School; Eric Kandel, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and director and University Professor of Physiology, Cellular Biophysics, and Psychiatry in the Center of Neurobiology and Behavior at NYPSI; and Solomon Snyder, director of the department of neuroscience and Distinguished Service Professor of Neuroscience, Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences, and Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. Actress Mary Tyler Moore will serve as guest of honor at the party, and Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.) is one of four who will receive awards. Among the institute's "firsts" were lithium therapy, the linking of psychiatric illnesses to genetic causes, and the discovery that general paresis is caused by Syphilis trepenema. "In a lot of ways, the history of psychiatry in the United States and the history of the Psychiatric Institute in the 20th century are co-extensive," contends Jack Gorman, NYSPI's deputy director and chairman of its centennial committee. "We want to celebrate the 100 years of the Psychiatric Institute, acknowledge the great contributions of the state of New York, and emphasize the dramatic changes in the understanding of psychiatric illnesses in the 20th century." ADVOCATE: Baylor's Savio Woo sees a bright future for gene therapy. Geneticist Savio Woo, a professor of cell biology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, is gung-ho about gene therapy. A December panel report commissioned by National Institutes of Health director Harold Varmus called for, among other things, more stringent peer review of protocols and a shift of funding to basic research on gene therapy (K.S. Brown, The Scientist, Feb. 19, 1996, page 1). It also warned biotechnology companies about overselling results to win investors. Woo, speaking to about 20 science journalists at the Jackson Laboratory's annual Press Week in Bar Harbor, Maine, on July 25, commented: "The wonderful thing about that report is that now people are thinking more objectively and scientifically, and clinical trials will be more scientifically based." While he acknowledged that gene therapy is further along clinically than is the supporting basic science, gene therapy is "becoming a real scientific discipline," he declared. Woo, who is moving to the Mount Sinai School of Medicine-New York University Medical Center (see story on page 1) next month to head a new institute for gene therapy and molecular medicine, contended that gene therapy is making tremendous progress through developing new technologies. "It will be something to be reckoned with," he said, adding: "In the last decade it has become another weapon in our medical arsenal to treat genetic disease. There's no question in my mind that we'll get there one day. We're not talking about cures through gene therapy. How many medicines cure [disease]? The public needs to be patient with us." CONTRACTION ATTRACTION: In the quest for a mate, muscles of the male toadfish swimbladder vibrate a record 200 times per second to produce a boat whistle-like call. Researchers working at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Mass., recently discovered the fastest known vertebrate muscle in a most unlikely species. The swimbladder muscles of the slow-moving toadfish-the couch potato of the piscine world-contract at a record 200 times per second, according to the investigators. "It's an amazing dichotomy," remarks Lawrence Rome, an associate professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania. The next-fastest vertebrate muscle is the shaker muscle, found on the tip of a diamondback rattlesnake's tail, which vibrates at 90 times per second. Rome, along with fellow Penn physiologist Stephen Baylor and other colleagues, recently published a comparison of how the rattlesnake and toadfish muscles work (L.C. Rome et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 93:8095-8100, 1996). Rome, Baylor, and associates did the work at MBL, where they have been spending part of the year. Rattlesnakes shake their distinctive rattles to ward off predators, whereas male toadfish use their swimbladders to attract females. Most fish species use swimbladders to stay afloat, but in the sedentary toadfish the muscles enveloping the heart-shaped organ produce a mating call that sounds like a boat whistle, explains Rome. Although used for completely different purposes, both species have evolved similar modifications in order to achieve such high frequencies: The sound-producing muscles pump calcium-the molecular trigger for contraction-50 times faster than in other muscles. Because this superfast calcium cycling is energetically costly, these muscles are held in reserve for special events. Still, says Rome, the male toadfish can sustain an intermittent whistle for several hours in the quest for a mate.

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of