People - Penn State Researcher Chosen for ACS Bader Award; Illinois Congressman honored; Torrey Botanical Club's new president

Stephen J. Benkovic, a professor of chemistry at the Pennsylvania State University at University Park, has been named as the winner of the American Chemical Society's 1995 Alfred Bader Award in Bioinorganic and Bioorganic Chemistry. He will receive the award at ACS's national meeting next spring in Anaheim, Calif. Benkovic's research over the years has focused on understanding how enzymes catalyze chemical reactions. "My early work involved looking at the mechanisms of organic reactions of small molecules that mimic biological processes, and extrapolate that information to how an enzyme might work," he explains. During his years as a graduate student at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.--where he received a doctorate in 1963--and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he coauthored a two-volume set of books defining the subject of bioorganic chemistry along with his research supervisor, Thomas Bruice (Bioorganic Mechanisms, Vols. I and II, New York, Benjamin, 1966). "Over the years my work evolved to the study of the enzymes themselves," adds Benkovic, who now does research on a variety of enzymes and catalytic antibodies, and recently reported an antibody that catalyzes peptide synthesis. (R. Hirschmann et al., Science, 265:234-7, 1994). Benkovic, 56, conducted his undergraduate studies in both literature and chemistry at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pa., before going on to Cornell. The chemist, who has been at Penn State since 1967, serves as Evan Pugh Professor and holds the Eberly Family Chair in the chemistry department there. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1985. The American Association of Immunologists presented Rep. John Porter (R-Ill.) with a Public Service Award during a special ceremony held at the United States Capitol on September 20. Porter is the first recipient of an award that the 6,000-member, Bethesda, Md.-based scientific society established to recognize individuals from the lay community who have demonstrated the im-portance of basic biomedical research to the public. The congressman was honored for promoting the importance of the National Institutes of Health and its research on Capitol Hill. As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, and the ranking Republican on the committee's Labor, Health and Human Services subcommittee--which funds NIH research--Porter has made basic biomedical research a priority. Last year, he played a leading role in ensuring that the 1994 budget supported NIH research with a 6 percent increase, rather than the 1 percent recommended in President Clinton's first budget. "That level of funding would have proved devastating to biomedical research," Porter maintains, adding that the budgetary increase to NIH was appropriated without spending additional money. Porter, 59, received his J.D. degree from the University of Michigan Law School in 1961, and practiced law in Evanston, Ill., until his election to Congress in 1980. He says that, in supporting basic research, "it is very, very important that politicians don't put themselves in the position of managing science. Our role is to give it the tools for advancement." Torrey Botanical Club Elects New President The Torrey Botanical Club, one of the oldest professional societies in the United States, has elected a new president, Steven N. Handel, an associate professor of plant ecology in the department of biological sciences at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J. Handel, who will serve a one-year term during the 1995-96 academic year, was installed as president-elect last month. Handel succeeds Margaret Basile, a botanist who is currently a research associate at the City University of New York's Lehman College in the Bronx. Named after 19th-century botanist John Torrey, the club was initially founded in 1866. Current worldwide membership stands at about 650. Although it has no official headquarters, it holds monthly meetings at the Bronx (N.Y.) Botanical Gardens and hosts a symposium at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, a Washington, D.C., organization of professional societies. "One of the things I hope to do as president is to arrange a symposium on restoration ecology that gets academics, city officials, and public-policy regulators together in one place to talk about what can be done in big cities like New York," says Handel, 49, who specializes in reproductive ecology in plants and the evolution of pollination systems. He currently is involved in a project--jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and New York City's sanitation department--to see how plant ecology can help in restoring native vegetation in landfill sites in the New Jersey and New York area. He is a visiting professor at Macquarie University in Sidney, Australia, where he studies pollination in orchids.

People - Penn State Researcher Chosen for ACS Bader Award; Illinois Congressman honored; Torrey Botanical Club's new president

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