Notebook

Zoning In Overcoming Bigotry -- And Then Some Women In Math Award Oncology On The Internet Atlanta Team Captures Science Bowl Inventive Minds Forrest M. Mims III, a science writer who last year won a 50,000-Swiss-franc (about $32,500) Rolex Award for inventing a hand-held ozone-monitoring device called a total ozone portable spectroradiometer, or TOPS (Notebook, The Scientist, June 28, 1993, page 4), detected record-low ozone levels last month in South Central Texas using an instrument built with the Rolex funds, a MicroTOPS (microprocessor- controlled TOPS) ozonometer. Mims found that ozone fell about 20 percent below the mean level for the area, as measured by NASA's former ozone satellite, Nimbus-7, in 1978-82. In 1992, Mims, using TOPS, detected an error in the calibration of Nimbus-7, proving NASA's measurements wrong. His study was conducted through his Sun Photometer Atmospheric Network, or SPAN, which measures ozone, water vapor, and ultraviolet-B radiation in three states, with six more locations to be added soon. The SPAN Data Center is based at Colorado Christian University in Lakewood. "I didn't go purposely to look for a Christian school" to house the center, says Mims, who in 1990 was removed from an assignment to write "The Amateur Scientist" column in Scientific American because of his belief in creation (F.M. Mims III, The Scientist, Feb. 18, 1991, page 11). "They're the only school that offered to take over my network," he says. "Just as I don't like being discriminated against because I'm a Christian, I don't discriminate against schools because they're not. I'll work with anybody--I just want to get good data." During a ceremony earlier this month at which the first Weizmann Women and Science Award was presented to biochemist Joan A. Steitz of Yale University School of Medicine (B. Spector, The Scientist, June 13, 1994, page 3), speakers referred repeatedly to the lack of recognition given women scientists and decried the chauvinistic assumption that research is incompatible with femininity. But the winner of the award told the attendees that "an overt act of prejudice against women in science turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me." When she was a graduate student at Harvard University in the 1960s, Steitz said, she approached the professor who was her first choice for a thesis adviser and was told, "You're a woman, you're going to get married and have kids--what future do you think you have in science?" In the face of this rejection, she went to her second choice--the legendary James D. Watson, codiscoverer of the DNA double helix--and became the first woman graduate student he ever sponsored. As a postdoc, Steitz said, she followed her husband to Cambridge, England, where Watson encouraged his colleague Francis Crick to make room for her in his crowded lab. "That's how I came to work with the two giants in biology in the 20th century," Steitz told the audience. Jing-Rebecca Li, a junior at the University of Michigan, has won the Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize, awarded to an undergraduate woman for excellence in mathematics. Sponsored by the College Park, Md.-based Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), the honor comes with a cash prize of $1,000. Li, a mechanical engineering student with a published paper on the deformation of bicrystals, switched to math only last fall and is in the math honors program at Michigan. Since then, according to AWM, "she has excelled in demanding undergraduate and graduate courses, performing on the level of the best graduate students." For information on the prize, contact Joanna Wood Schot, AWM executive director, at 4114 Computer and Space Sciences Building, University of Maryland, College Park, Md. 20742-2461; (301) 405-7892. E-mail: awm@math.umd.edu. As the result of frustration at not being able to find current, cancer-related information for themselves and their patients, two researchers from the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center's Department of Radiation Oncology--E. Loren Buhle and Joel W. Goldwein--have started Oncolink. It is an Internet-based multimedia resource that can be accessed through World-Wide Web and gopher software. "There is no end to the types of information we can post on Oncolink: clinical trials; case-of-the-month studies, complete with moving, audible images; resident handbooks; and new research," said Goldwein in a statement. Since its inception in early March, Oncolink has averaged 2,000 responses per day. For information, contact Buhle at (215) 662-3084 or via E-mail at buhle@xrt.upenn.edu; or Goldwein at (215) 662-7147 or via E-mail at goldwein@xrt.upenn.edu. A team from Atlanta's Westminster Schools beat out a squad from Langham Creek High School in Houston in the finals of the 1994 National Science Bowl, held over two days in late April in Washington, D.C. The two teams were all that remained from 52 regional competition winners, who vied with each other in a question-and-answer format at the national championships, sponsored by the Department of Energy and Cray Research Foundation. Renee Landrum, Susan Born, Peter Chan, Si Hwang Chin, Shireen Haque--the winning Westminster team--along with their coach, Penney Sconzo, will spend July 9-16 in Geneva at the Fifth International Wild Animal Research Week. The team was sponsored by DOE's Atlanta Support Office. The runners-up from Houston, sponsored by DOE's Dallas office, will attend the 36th London International Youth Science Forum. Overall, more than 7,000 students and 1,400 high schools took part in this year's Science Bowl. (The Scientist, Vol:8, #13, pg.1, June 27, 1994) Five scientists from Dow Chemical Co. in Freeport, Texas, have been presented with the 21st annual National Inventor of the Year Award from Intellectual Property Owners (IPO), a Washington, D.C.-based association that represents companies and inventors who own patented inventions. Researchers Pak- Wing S. Chum, George W. Knight, Shih-Yaw Lai, James C. Stevens, and John R. Wilson were honored with the award for their creation of a new family of plastics that "significantly expands plastic processing and performance options," according to IPO. In addition, the organization recognized Harvey M. Severson, an 82-year-old independent inventor from Minneapolis, with its Spirit of American Ingenuity award for inventing a machine in his home shop that converts waste wood into biodegradable packing material. Last year's Inventor of the Year honors went to a research team from Merck and Co. Inc. in Rahway, N.J., who developed Proscar, the first drug for treating benign prostate enlargement.

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of