Scientist Recipients Of MacArthur Fellowships An Eclectic Collection

As the school year commences, returning scientists are again applying for grants, awards, and other financial support to pursue their various disciplines. But six academic scientists among the 24 recipients of this year's John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowships--popularly known as the "genius awards"--are in an extremely fortunate position: Their explorations for the next five years will extend as far as their imaginations will take them. "When the director called me up to congratulate me, she said, `If you want to quit science to write a novel, feel free!'" recalls fellow Michael A. Marletta, 44, a medicinal chemist at the University of Michigan. TESTING LIMITS: Medicinal chemist and MacArthur fellow Michael Marletta says the foundation "tends to look at people who are pushing at the very edge of their field." "There are no strings attached," confirms program director Catharine Stimpson. Recipients are not obliged to report what they do with the money. Established in 1981 by the Chicago-based foundation, the fellowship program grants them anywhere from $150,000 to $375,000--depending upon the age of the fellow--as well as full health coverage over a period of five years. The other MacArthur fellowship recipients are: Jed Z. Buchwald, 46, a professor of the history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Sharon B. Emerson, 50, a research professor in the department of biology at the University of Utah; Susan W. Kieffer, 52, a geologist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; Pamela A. Matson, 42, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Berkeley; and Nicholas J. Strausfeld, 52, a neurobiologist at the University of Arizona. The foundation aims to recognize people whose achievements in the arts, humanities, sciences, social sciences, and public affairs show the promise of even greater accomplishments in the future. "It is an act of faith--both in creativity as well as in particular people," stresses Stimpson. "We believe that they have amazing things yet to do." MacArthur fellowships cannot be applied for; rather, candidates are drawn from a pool of initial nominations by an anonymous group of 100 people. These nominees are further reviewed by a 12-member selection committee. The committee creates a short list from which the recipients are selected by the foundation's board of directors. Of the 458 fellows named to date, 140 have been involved with the sciences, including the late Barbara McClintock, who subsequently won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1983; mathematician and geneticist Eric Lander of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass; and Harvard University astronomer Margaret Geller. "We're in incredibly good company," notes Strausfeld. Marletta, John G. Searle Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacognosy at the College of Pharmacy as well as a professor of biological chemistry at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, in speculating on why he and his fellow awardees may have been chosen, comments, "I think the MacArthur Foundation tends to look at people who are pushing at the very edge of their field." His own research is in the area of nitric oxide (NO) biochemistry in mammals. "The biochemistry was well beyond what even the wildest imagination could come up with," he asserts. "A lot of people didn't believe that NO--which was a gas and toxic at that--could be present in human cells, much less act as a neurotransmitter. One of Marletta's most referenced papers--drawing nearly 750 citations over the period of seven years--is one that identifies NO as an intermediate in mammalian cells: M.A. Marletta et al., Biochemistry, 27:8706-11, 1988. "This field was very unpopular," he recalls, referring to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he began this work as a postdoc in the laboratory of Christopher Walsh at MIT. Since then, he points out, there had been a complete reversal in opinion from the scientific community, as evidenced by the fact that the journal Science declared NO the "Molecule of the Year" in 1992. Despite the total freedom afforded by his $275,000 fellowship, Marletta says, "I think I'll stay in science. There are a lot of interesting possibilities. "I'd like to take a chance on some more risky ideas--who knows where they'll lead?" he adds. "By the year 2000 or 2002 A.D. I hope that we [his laboratory] would be working on something totally different; I'd like to be able to look back several years and say that the reason for it was the MacArthur fellowship." A quality shared by several fellows is the eclectic nature of their research. "One of the things that this fellowship recognizes is how interdisciplinary my work has been," Matson observes. Specializing in the study of interactions between the atmosphere and biosphere, her work entails being able to "talk to and work with atmospheric chemists, remote-sensing scientists, economists, and crop management experts." VERSATILE: MacArthur Foundation fellow Susan W. Kieffer has degrees in math, physics, geology, and planetary science. Similarly, Kieffer, a professor in the British Columbia geological sciences department and one of the few fellows living outside the United States, says that over the course of her career, "I ended up studying a lot of unconnected phenomena: meteorite impact, geyser dynamics, volcanic eruption, and river floods" as a result of her focus on "very, very high-speed flows. "All these are tied together by high-speed fluid dynamics--an area which is quite unusual for geologists." Another aspect of Kieffer's work has been a strong environmental focus. Her latest paper (W. Alvarez et al., Science, 269:930-5, 1995) deals with the Chicxulub meteorite impact in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, believed by some scientists to have caused the mass extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. "We recently came up with a theory--described in the paper--that the impact caused the vaporization of a lot of limestone, which would have resulted in massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and, thus, had a major influence on environmental conditions," ultimately resulting in the extinction, she states. As to what she'll do with her $315,000 MacArthur fellowship, she says, "Having just come off a very busy summer with the review, I haven't had time to even think about it, although my subconscious must be making all sorts of plans." TAG ALONG: Pamela Matson says she'll use part of her award money to bring her children with her to the field. Matson, on the other hand, has more concrete plans for how she will use her $260,000. Currently, she is on parental leave from her post as a professor in the department of environmental science, policy, and management at UC-Berkeley. She intends to "use part of the money to help pay for quality child-care" for her infant daughter and seven-year-old son. "My work requires a fair amount of travel, and I'd like to bring my children along with me when I can, and still be able to concentrate on work." An ongoing project of Matson's is investigating "the causes and consequences of intensive fertilization in Mexico. I talk to the farmers to see why they use fertilizers, and what it means to crop yields." One of the main goals of the project, she adds, is to use this information to find "alternative practices which would reduce the nitrogen losses form the soil--which would save the farmers money--and reduce the environmental costs at the same time." One advantage of her fellowship, she says, will be her ability to expand this line of investigation: "I think I'd like to set up an interdisciplinary collaborations in developing countries." Emerson, a research professor of biology at Utah, is yet another fellow whose investigations straddle many areas. "I tend to bring together a lot of different disciplines--functional morphology, biomechanics, evolution, molecular biology and hormone biology [endocrinology]--to bear on my main interest, which is the evolution of novel structures in animals," she explains. Examples of such novelties include "flying in species of tree frogs found in Borneo, saber teeth in cats, and fangs in frogs. I am interested in finding out why these structures evolved." One of Emerson's contributions to the field of evolution has been in showing that the development of morphological structures is only partly related to ecological functions. "There is a very interesting interaction between different kinds of forces at work," she points out. "Our studies on the changes in performance of the flying frogs under different conditions showed how both behavior and morphology interacted to produce unique changes, which could not be predicted on the basis of adaptive mechanisms alone." Emerson's work has always involved extensive travel to "be able to observe these animals in their natural habitat." She says the $300,000 MacArthur foundation grant will be useful in allowing her to continue her trips. With multiple appointments at the University of Arizona--as a professor of entomology, neurobiology, anatomy, and ecology and evolutionary biology in addition to an adjunct professorship in the department of art--Strausfeld's interests also cover a wide area, scientifically and geographically. At the core of these various studies, he says, lies the insect brain, which he has been scrutinizing at various levels since his days as a graduate student at the University College in London (1961-68). ART IMITATES SCIENCE: Polymath Nicholas Stausfeld uses insect brains as visual aids for his art class. His earliest work involved an examination of the "organization of the brain of flies at the level of a single cell. These anatomical studies revealed the immense complexity and extraordinary beauty of the brains of organisms that people typically thought were very simple," he says. His extensive research in this area led to his authorship of the Atlas of an Insect Brain (Berlin, Springer, 1976), which has been referenced in more than 700 subsequent publications. In it, Strausfeld says, "I tried to combine science with a sense of aesthetics; the illustrations in the book approached the quality and detail of the lithographic style of the late 1920s." Currently, Strausfeld leads a research group that uses insect brains to understand how visual information is processed, "particularly, how motion is perceived." He has also done work on how these movements are related to flight behavior. He relates the insights gleaned from this research to a class he teaches in the department of art, where he lectures students on "how the visual system analyses form and color, and on the perception of depth, texture, and motion. In addition to his MacArthur fellowship of $315,000, Strausfeld received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship last year. These awards, he says, will enable him to pursue a project he initiated about three years ago on the evolutionary biology of the arthropod brain. "I have been fascinated by the questions of how various insects have been so successful-they have `done it all' and occupy nearly every ecological niche on land," he declares. "I am interested in seeing whether these capabilities are endowed-at least in part-by certain distinguishing features of the brain, and how these may have evolved." To this end, he has embarked upon an effort "to compare the brains of insects as well as related organisms--other arthropods, including spiders, scorpions, and crustaceans--to see if there is a common thread." He will be using his fellowship money to travel to different places-including Australia, Japan, and possibly Antarctica (in search of a sea spider) in order to collect rare specimens at different stages of evolution, he says. However his first expense will be that of "a sturdy vehicle to go to the hard-to-access areas in the desert," closer to home in search of various insects for his project. MIT historian of science Buchwald also is enthused over the luxury of travel afforded by the fellowship, which amounts to $285,000 in his case. "The money will be useful for spur-of-the-moment trips to various archives," he states. Other than that, "I have no idea what I'll be doing with the fellowship at the moment. I'm too busy with running the new institute," he notes, referring to the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, of which he is a founding director. Established in 1992 and housed on the MIT campus, the institute is an independent organization whose aim is to foster scholarship in various arenas of the history of science and technology, "with a special focus on the exact sciences," Buchwald explains. His own work has concentrated on the development of experimental physics in the 19th century. "I try to figure out what happened in the context of the times, rather than explain what scientists did then in terms of modern science," he comments. "I try to figure out what they were thinking when they approached a problem in a certain way." His recent book, The Creation of Scientific Effects: Heinrich Hertz and Electric Waves, (University of Chicago Press, 1992), reflects this approach. (The Scientist, Vol:9, #17, pg.3,6-7 , September 4, 1995) (Copyright © The Scientist, Inc.)

Scientist Recipients Of MacArthur Fellowships An Eclectic Collection

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