Notebook

The 1995-96 Wolf Prizes, given annually by the Israel-based Wolf Foundation, will be presented March 24 by the president of Israel, Ezer Weizman, at the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem. Each award of $100,000 will be given for outstanding achievements in mathematics, medicine, chemistry, agriculture, and the arts. According to a statement by the Wolf Foundation, chemists Gilbert Stork of Columbia University and Samuel J. Danishefsky of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and Columbia will share the Wolf Prize for chemistry for their research leading to the synthesis of complex molecules that made possible the development of new biological and medicinal compounds. REASON TO HOWL: Stanley Prusiner won a Wolf Prize for medicine. Robert Langlands of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and Princeton University professor Andrew Wiles, also affiliated with the institute, will share the prize for mathematics for their ground-breaking work in number theory. Stanley Prusiner of the University of California, San Francisco, will receive the prize for medicine for his discovery of prions, a new class of pathogens that cause neurodegenerative disease by inducing changes in protein structure. The winners in agriculture are Morris Schnitzer of the Centre for Land and Biological Resources in Ottawa, Canada, and Frank J. Stephenson at the University of Illinois, for their pioneering contributions to understanding soil organic matter and its application to agriculture. Conductor Zubin Mehta of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in Tel Aviv and composer Gyory Ligeti of the Hochschule fur Musik in Hamburg, Germany, will receive the Wolf Prize for arts. Transporter rooms, warp speed, tractor beams. It was the public's familiarity with these terms and others that in part prompted physicist-author Lawrence Krauss, chairman of physics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, to write about "Star Trek," the popular television and movie series. Krauss, who had authored previous popular books about physics, wanted a new way to relate his excitement about physics as a part of everyday life. The result is The Physics of Star Trek, which explains the science behind the show. This latest attempt to bring physics to the masses has the considerable name of physicist Stephen Hawking behind the effort, as well. Hawking, a professor at Cambridge University in England and an avid "Star Trek" fan, has written the book's foreword. "'Star Trek' has endured because people get excited about the possibilities of the physics," Krauss contends. "It's important that physics become more a part of our popular culture. What better way to convey my excitement about the real world of physics than to pick something that already captured people's imagination?" In the book, Krauss explains the plausibility and, in some cases, implausibility of Trekian staples as warp speed and time travel. "At this point we can't rule them out," he says, noting that Hawking actually changed his mind on the latter during their conversations. The idea for the book, which has been in stores since November, came out of a joke during a brainstorming session with his editor at publishing house Basic Books, a division of HarperCollins. "I thought about the transporter, and if you wanted to build one, there's so much neat physics you could talk about." In his chapter on the transporter, he notes that while the transporter itself may be implausible, parts of the technology are theoretically possible. "It's amazing that no one has ever written about this before," he says, adding that besides answering requests for lectures and interviews, "so many people have written to me thanking me for writing a book they always wanted to read. It really hit a nerve." Still, the project was hardly easy. To write the book, Krauss immersed himself in "Star Trek" series episodes-three a night for several months. "It was quite daunting. There are millions of 'Star Trek' experts out there, so I had to watch every episode three or four times and consult books and encyclopedias." His favorite episode: "'City on the Edge of Forever,' which, fittingly, revolved around time travel." He's already considering a sequel, tentatively titled The Physics of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Krauss. Physicist Ugo Fano, a professor, emeritus, at the University of Chicago, is one of the last living former students of famed physicist Enrico Fermi, who led the first self-sustained, controlled nuclear reaction under the west stands of the Amos Alonzo Stagg Field at the university in 1942. Now, along with chemist Martin Kamen, Fano will share the 1996 Enrico Fermi Award from the Department of Energy for his pioneering contributions over six decades to the fields of theoretical atomic and radiation physics, work that had great implications for nuclear medicine. Kamen, a professor, emeritus, in the chemistry department at the University of California, San Diego, and at the University of Southern California, will receive the DOE-sponsored award for his discovery of carbon-14 and his development of its use as a tracer atom and for his work on photosynthesis. Pending schedule changes resulting from the recent government shutdown, say DOE officials, the award ceremony is slated for late March at the White House. Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary will present the awards. Fano's research contributed to the understanding of the basic physics underlying the development of the gas laser, a ubiquitous tool of all physical and biological sciences. He also contributed to understanding the interaction of radiation and matter, which has benefited the field of nuclear medicine. The 83-year-old Fano takes note of a few changes that have occurred in his profession over the years. "Physics is totally different from when I started," he says. "There might have been 1,000 physicists worldwide; now there are more than 40,000 in just the American Physical Society alone." He laments the field's specialization, adding: "It bothers me that it has become so difficult for physicists to talk." According to DOE, Kamen's work changed biochemistry in a fundamental way. Carbon-14 is used to understand all biochemical reactions that involve carbon. Chemists, biologists, archaeologists, geologists, and others use it for applications as diverse as dating archaeological finds and tracking carbon dioxide in the environment. Kamen's past is colorful, as well. During World War II, his "liberal ideas and outgoing personality" aroused attention from the FBI. He was eventually declared a security risk and fired from Berkeley's Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, now the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Years later, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. It took him a decade to clear his name and reclaim his passport, which had been denied whenever he had been invited to attend meetings abroad. The Fermi award, the U.S.'s oldest in science and technology, was established in 1956. The prize, which carries a $100,000 honorarium and a gold medal for each of the winners, is granted for a lifetime of achievement in the field of nuclear energy. IN THE MONEY: William Kelley says Penn will recruit with HHMI funds. Earlier this month, 30 United States medical schools received a much-needed shot in the arm. Seventeen public and 13 private schools will share $80 million in grants from the Chevy Chase, Md.-based Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Each institution will receive between $550,000 and $1 million annually for the next four years from this one-time program. HHMI decided to pick up the funding slack for medical schools as a result of "reductions in patient care revenues and restrictions on government research spending," said institute president Purnell Choppin in an HHMI statement. The monies will go primarily to maintain research infrastructure and aid younger faculty in launching their research programs. "It will allow us to recruit several individuals in developmental biology who will contribute to the basic science of the field as it relates to the developing fetus and the aging process," remarks William N. Kelley, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, whose institution will receive a total of $2.2 million. "We'll be able to build a new kind of interconnection between these two extremely important programs with clinical potential." The Museum of Scientific Discovery in Harrisburg, Pa., is looking for the answers and, more urgently, sources for the answers. The museum is seeking volunteer scientists and individuals to participate in its "Science & Math Helpline." The helpline is an Internet project currently under development that aims to link parents, students, and educators with experts in a variety of disciplines in science, mathematics, and engineering. When a question is asked via the museum's World Wide Web home page, volunteers linked directly into the helpline will send their answer within 24 hours via E-mail. "Our target date for operation is September 1996," states executive director Tom LeCrone. "However, our potential funding source would like us to determine how many volunteers are available and interested in the project." To that end, the museum would like potential volunteers to help charter this program. To register as a volunteer, contact the museum's home page: http://www.net-works.net/community/msd/ or by E-mail at msd@net-works.net. Why do some people take to skydiving and rock climbing, while others are content for a night at the movies or the bowling alley? Blame it partly on our genes, scientists say. Researchers are trying to pin a genetic link on thrill-seeking behaviors. Two teams of researchers reported in separate papers in January in the journal Nature Genetics (R.P. Ebstein et al., 12[1]:78-80, 1996; D.H. Hamer et al., 12[1]:81-4, 1996) that they had uncovered a partial genetic explanation for a personality trait known as "novelty seeking." These people tend to be extroverted, impulsive, extravagant, quick-tempered, excitable, and exploratory, according to the researchers. The scientists discovered that novelty seekers tend to have a particular variant of a gene that allows the brain to respond to the chemical messenger dopamine. Richard P. Ebstein and his colleagues at Herzog Memorial Hospital in Jerusalem and at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva, Israel, authored one paper. The other was written by Jonathan Benjamin, Dean Hamer, and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health. In both studies, researchers measured novelty-seeking behavior through personality inventories that gauged four dimensions: novelty-seeking, harm avoidance, reward dependence, and persistence. The scientists also analyzed blood samples from subjects. They found that those who scored highest in novelty-seeking-impulsive, quick-tempered, and fickle-were more likely to have long repeats of DNA subunits in their D4 dopamine receptor gene. The New York Times (N. Angier, Jan. 2, 1996, page 1A) cited the new report of the genetic link as the first clear evidence of a connection between dopamine and the personality type. It is also the first known report of a link between a particular gene and a specific normal personality trait. "The significance of the discovery is that this is the first normal human behavioral trait [linked to a gene] that's been replicated," comments C. Robert Cloninger, Renard Professor of Psychiatry and Genetics at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "That's a welcome assurance, given the inconsistent findings with an unknown mode of inheritance in diseases such as schizophrenia." He adds: "This may be a model of how we should approach unraveling some of these complex diseases." Cloninger, who first proposed a connection between dopamine and novelty-seeking behavior a decade ago (C.R. Cloninger, Archives of General Psychiatry, 44:573-8, 1987), and colleagues note in an accompanying editorial to the papers that "success in mapping genes for a normal personality trait may signal a fruitful way to map genes for psychopathology as well." The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation in New York is accepting proposals from academic institutions for its Postdoctoral Program in Environmental Science. The two-year awards-an annual stipend of $35,000 in direct support, $5,000 a year in fringe benefits, and $5,000 annually for research support-is for postdoctoral chemists and chemical engineers to work with experts in specialized areas in environmental science. Institutions that receive awards under the program may appoint either a new Ph.D. recipient or a senior chemical scientist, as a visiting scientist. Examples of research areas include air and water pollution and remediation, hazardous waste reduction and disposal, and elimination of toxic byproducts in chemical manufacture. The deadline for institutional applications is February 29, with announcements to be made by the end of July. For information, contact Robert L. Lichter, Executive Director, Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation Inc., 555 Madison Ave., Suite 1305, New York, N.Y. 10022-3301; (212) 753-1760.

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of