People: Noted Tropical Rainforest Advocates Receive 1994 Tyler Prize For Environmental Achievement, Two California Scientists Will Share Israel's Wolf Prize In Chemistry

Date:January 23, 1995, pp.24 Arturo Gomez-Pompa, a professor of botany and plant sciences at the University of California, Riverside, and Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, have been honored as corecipients of the 1994 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. They divided a cash award of $150,000 and each received a gold medallion at ceremonies in Los Angeles on December 2. "Considering the list of distinguished recipients, it is a very great honor to have been selected," says Raven, 58. "[The prize] tends to be given for lifetime accomplishments instead of short-term accomplishment, so that makes it all the nicer." Gomez-Pompa, 60, notes that he was particularly heartened by the prize because his nomination came from a longtime colleague and friend, the late Enrique Beltran, former director of the Mexican Institute of Renewable Resources. "When I received word that he nominated me, I was really quite touched because of the past history of my relationship with him," Gomez-Pompa comments. The Tyler Prize is named for John Tyler, founder and former chief executive officer of Los Angeles-based Farmer's Insurance Group, and his wife, Alice Tyler. The award is funded by an endowment and is administered by the University of Southern California. It was established in 1973 to recognize accomplishments in environmental science and protection. Both the 1994 awardees are well known internationally for their work in both of those areas. Gomez-Pompa is noted for his studies in forest ecology in his native Mexico, where he established two research institutions: the National Institute of Biotic Resources and the biological station at Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz, a facility of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he received his Ph.D. in biology in 1966. It was from data collected at the Los Tuxtlas station that Gomez-Pompa and two graduate students framed a seminal paper entitled "The tropical rain forest: a nonrenewable resource" (A. Gomez-Pompa, C. Vazquez, S. Guevara, Science, 177:762-65, 1972). Raven is widely recognized for his coauthorship on a 1964 paper (P.R. Ehrlich, P.H. Raven, "Butterflies and plants: a study in coevolution," Evolution, 18:586-608, 1964) that introduced the concept of coevolution--the mutual evolution of interacting species. This article was already recognized as a "Citation Classic" in the Sept. 10, 1984, issue of Current Contents. It has been referenced in more than 380 publications to date. Raven, a member and home secretary of the United States National Academy of Sciences and chairman of the Report Review Committee of the National Research Council, received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1960. "What I've tried to do for the last 30 years is be very consistently international and try to boost the capabilities and efforts of other countries," he notes. Since 1971, the Missouri Botanical Garden--under Raven's direction--has been undertaking a systematic program to collect, study, and preserve the plants of Africa as well as Central and South America. Gomez-Pompa, a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the Third World Academy of Sciences and adviser to the president of Mexico, says that, through his work in tropical ecology and conservation, he's "joined many other voices in trying to put some sense into [the debate concerning] the very fast rate of deforestation that is happening all over the tropics." Raven and Gomez-Pompa have worked together for the past 15 years. Gomez-Pompa was a member of the NAS Committee on Research Priorities in Tropical Biology, which Raven chaired. --Karen Young Kreeger Date:January 23, 1995, pp.24 Richard A. Lerner, 56, president of the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, Calif., and Peter G. Schultz, 38, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, have been named to share the 1994-95 Wolf Prize in chemistry. The $100,000 prize, awarded annually by the Israel-based Wolf Foundation, will be presented by Israeli President Ezer Weizman in a ceremony at the Knesset in Jerusalem in March. The prize recognizes the two researchers "for their work converting antibodies to enzymes, thus permitting the catalysis of chemical reactions considered impossible to achieve by classical chemical procedures." Lerner and Schultz, both members of the National Academy of Sciences, made their discoveries independently and nearly simultaneously. The papers originally reporting the work were published back- to-back in Science in 1986 (A. Tramontano, K.D. Janda, R.A. Lerner, 234:1566-70; S.J. Pollack, J.W. Jacobs, P.G. Schultz, 234:1570-3). Through 1994, Lerner's paper had been cited 211 times by colleagues, Schultz's 179 times; not surprisingly, in the vast majority of cases, papers citing one also cited the other. Lerner, who describes his relationship with Schultz as one of friendly competition, notes that the power in their discovery is that scientists can now make enzymes--even ones not occurring naturally--at will. "The way it's been done up to now is that nature makes a catalyst and then you try to unravel how it works," says Lerner. "Here, you can work forward, because you make the catalyst according to first principles. Ultimately, these catalysts will be used in medicine as well as the chemical industry." Wolf Foundation officials called the work a "marvelous illustration of how deep knowledge of biological processes, combined with very sophisticated chemistry," can add to the capabilities of researchers in each discipline. "We now understand enough about catalytic antibodies that we can make antibodies do reactions no known enzyme does," Schultz said in a statement. "At the same time, we can control chemical reactions in ways chemists cannot." Lerner graduated from Northwestern University in 1959 and Stanford University Medical School in 1964. In 1965, he joined Scripps as a research fellow in experimental pathology. After a two-year stint at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia from 1968 to 1970, he returned to Scripps, rising to become chairman of the department of molecular biology in 1982, director in 1987, and president in 1991. Schultz received his B.S. from California Institute of Technology in 1979 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the same institution in 1984. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined the department of chemistry at UC-Berkeley in 1985 and was promoted to professor in 1989. Since 1985, he has also been a principal investigator at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley, Calif. According to Lerner, one way of viewing the process of creating enzymes from antibodies is to see them as an accelerated form of evolution. "Evolution goes by trial and error," Lerner comments. "If the reaction is better by virtue of the enzyme, then that's selected in a positive way. But evolution doesn't deliberately go down a chemical route, it just finds it by accident. What we did is figure out a way to give a chemical education to a protein." The Wolf Foundation was established in 1976 by the late Ricardo Wolf, an inventor, diplomat, and philanthropist, to honor scientists in agriculture, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, and physics, as well as artists. Award winners are chosen by international selection committees of top scientists and others. To date, 14 scientists who first received the Wolf Prize have later won Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, or physiology or medicine for the same accomplishments. --Franklin Hoke

People: Noted Tropical Rainforest Advocates Receive 1994 Tyler Prize For Environmental Achievement, Two California Scientists Will Share Israel's Wolf Prize In Chemistry

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