Frank H.T. Rhodes, president of Cornell University for the past 10 years, was nominated to the National Science Board by President Reagan last month. He will succeed Donald B. Rice of the Rand Corporation on the 24-member policymaking board of the National Science Foundation. Before joining Cornell, Rhodes was a professor of geology and mineralogy at the University of Michigan from 1968 to 1977, serving for three years as dean of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts and later as vice president for academic affairs. Prior to that he was a professor and head of the Department of Geology at the University of Wales, Swansea from 1956 to 1968. Rhodes' nomination is subject to Senate confirmation.
James Green, Daniel Prince and June Bradlaw have been appointed to the 13-member Scientific Advisory Board of the International Foundation for Ethical Research. Green is director of toxicology at CIBA-GEIGY, Prince is vice president of research and development at Gibraltar Biological Labs in Fairfield, N.J. and Bradlaw is with the genetic toxicology branch of the Food and Drug Administration. The Foundation was established last year as a nonprofit organization aiming to promote alternatives to the use of live animals in teaching and research.
Herwig Kogelnik has been elected vice president of the Optical Society of America for 1987. He will become president-elect of the OSA in 1988 and president in 1989. Kogelnik is director of AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J. and since 1983 has also directed the Photonics Research Laboratory there. The new president of the OSA is Robert G. Greenler of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and the 1987 president-elect is William B. Bridges of the California Institute of Technology's Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Robert A. Plane has been named director of the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, N.Y., part of Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. As the station's 12th director, Plane will be responsible for research in laboratories on its 700 acres of farmland, as well as laboratories at two other New York sites. Before joining the Experiment Station, Plane was president of Clarkson University from 1974 until his retirement in 1984.
AWARDS
Arnold 0. Beckman, founder of Beckman Instruments (now SmithKline Beckman Corp.) was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame last week to honor his invention of the pH meter in 1936. At the same ceremony, three other inventors were inducted posthumously: William S. Burroughs for his calculating machine invented in 1888, Igor Sikorsky, for his 1943 patent on the helicopter, and Andrew Jackson Moyer for developing a method to mass produce penicillin in the 1940s. The National Inventors Hall of Fame, founded in 1973, is located at the Patent and Trademark Office in Arlington, Va.
Britton Chance, professor emeritus of biophysics and physical biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, has been selected winner of the 1987 American Physical Society Biological Physics Prize. He will receive the award at the APS general meeting in New York next month. Chance joined the University of Pennsylvania in 1940 and from 1949 to 1975 chaired the department of biophysics and physical biochemistry. He is currently director of the Institute for Structural and Functional Studies at the University City Science Center in Philadelphia. He is being honored for his outstanding contributions to biological physics research, including his early use of spectrometry to study electron transfer processes in living systems.
Robert J. Birgeneau has been chosen to receive the 1987 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize of the American Physical Society. Currently the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT, Birgeneau is being honored for his neutron and X-ray scattering experiments to determine the phases and phase transitions of low dimensional systems. The Buckley Prize was established in 1952 to honor outstanding contributions to condensed matter physics, and carries an award of $5,000.
Harland G. Wood will receive the 1987 Rosenstiel Medallion of Brandeis University next month for his pioneering research in microbial biochemistry and the use of radioactive isotopes to study metabolic processes. The Rosenstiel award, which includes a prize of $10,000, is sponsored by Brandeis' Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center to honor outstanding contributions to biomedical research. Wood is the emeritus University Professor in Biochemistry at Case Western Reserve University. He has been at Case Western since 1946 and founded the biochemistry department at its medical school.
David H. Templeton and Lieselotte K. Templeton of the University of California at Berkeley will receive the third A.L. Patterson Award at next month's American Crystallographic Association Meeting. The husband and wife team are being honored for their pioneering contributions to the understanding of anomalous scattering of X-rays.
James A. Shannon was presented the second annual Philip Hauge Abelson Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at the AAAS Annual Meeting last week. As director of the National Institutes of Health between 1955 and 1968, Shannon was influential in the development of public policy to support medical research. He is being honored for his notable service to the scientific community and his distinguished career in biomedical research.
The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Canada's largest research-granting agency, presented its highest award, the annual E.WR. Staecie Memorial Fellowship, to four Canadian scientists last month: Luc Devroye, an electrical engineer at McGill University; Grenfell Patey, a theoretical chemist from the University of British Columbia; André-Marie Tremblay, a physicist from the University of Sherbrooke; and Robert Kerrich, a geochemist from the University of Saskatchewan. The Fellowship was established in 1964 in memory of E.WR. Staecie, a physical chemist and president of the National Research Council of Canada from 1952 to 1962. It provides an opportunity for promising young scientists and engineers to work full time on research, without teaching or administrative responsibilities, by covering the recipient's salary for two years and providing a supplemental grant.
DEATHS
Allen V. Cox, 60, in internationally recognized geologist and dean of earth sciences at Stanford University, died January 27 in Woodside, Calif. from injuries sustained when his bicycle hit a tree. Cox's research focused on paleomagnetism and plate tectonics theory. He is perhaps best known for his studies of the earth's magnetic field. By showing that the field has reversed several times, he confirmed theories of seafloor spreading and continental drift. Since 1967 Cox had been a professor at Stanford and was appointed dean in 1979.
Vincent E. McKelvey, a geologist and former director of the U.S. Geological Survey, died January 23 at his home in St. Cloud, Fla. He was 70 years old. McKelvey originally joined the Geological Survey in 1941 as a geologist overseeing post-World War II uranium explorations. In 1962 he was promoted to chief geologist and was appointed director of the Geological Survey in 1971.
