Swedish Academy Of Sciences Awards Crafoord Prize To Carnegie Astronomer

Allan R. Sandage, an astronomer at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution, in Pasadena, Calif., has been chosen to receive the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' 1991 Crafoord Prize. The $260,000 Crafoord Prize has been given annually, on a rotating basis, since 1982 for contributions in fields not recognized by the Nobel Prizes--mathematics, astronomy, geosciences, and biosciences. According to the award citation, Sandage was honored for his contributions to "the study of galaxies, their populations of stars, clusters and nebulae, their evolution, the velocity-distance relation (or Hubble relation), and its evolution with time." Sandage, 65, attributes his lifelong interest in astronomy to the two years he lived near Philadelphia as a child. When he was 11, his neighbor had a telescope in his backyard. "I looked through the telescope, and it was the greatest experience in my life, at that time," recalls Sandage. "I knew immediately I had to be an astronomer." Every Saturday thereafter, he says, as long as he lived in the area, he visited the Fels Planetarium at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute. Since that time, Sandage has looked through some of the biggest telescopes in operation, including Carnegie's 2.5-meter telescopes at Las Campanas, Chile, and Mount Wilson, Calif., and the California Institute of Technology's 5-meter Hale Telescope at Palomar, Calif. For the last 30 years, he says, he has observed the skies an average of 100 nights each year. In 1949, when Sandage was a graduate student at Caltech, he began working as Edwin Hubble's research assistant at Palomar and Mount Wilson. He became a staff member of the Carnegie observatories in 1952, and received his Ph.D. in 1953. Sandage's work has been primarily geared toward determining the age of the universe and its rate of expansion, two closely related problems. With colleagues, he used evidence from the motions of old stars to show that the Milky Way galaxy was formed by collapse of a pregalactic cloud. Using theoretical models developed by Princeton University's Martin Schwartzschild for determining the ages of stellar systems, Sandage determined that stars in several globular clusters were at least 10 billion years old, thereby establishing that the universe is at least that old. Sandage has also been involved with an extensive observational effort to determine the "Hubble Constant"--the coefficient of expansion of the universe. Sandage says he believes that the next decade will bring answers to fundamental questions about cosmology, and that the Hubble Space Telescope will be crucial to finding these answers: "I believe [the Hubble telescope's] problems will be solved, and it will go on to solve the controversy of the value of the rate of expansion of the universe." Sandage is currently writing a two-volume work, The Carnegie Atlas of Galaxies, a photographic atlas of the 1,245 brightest galaxies in the sky. The atlas, to be published in 1992, has taken 30 years to complete, says Sandage, adding that the last photographs were finally obtained in 1985 at the Las Campanas Observatory. "Whatever this prize is about," says Sandage of the Crafoord Prize, "I hope it might serve as an inspiration to the young, as to what can be accomplished without genius, but [with] only hard work." Sandage has been the recipient of many awards, including the Pope Pius XI Gold Medal of the Pontifical Academy of Science (1966), the National Medal of Science (1971), the American Astronomical Society's Russell Prize (1973), and the Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (1975). --Rebecca Andrews Two well-known biologists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will be exchanging jobs this summer. Effective July 1, Phillip A. Sharp, currently director of MIT's Center for Cancer Research, will become head of the institute's department of biology. The present biology department head, Richard O. Hynes, will assume Sharp's position as center director. The switch, the two researchers say, was prompted by the requirements of Hynes's position as an investigator of the Bethesda, Md.-based Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). HHMI administrators, Hynes explains, "don't like [investigators] having major administrative positions, and they were not keen for me to continue as chair." Adds Sharp, "We decided that we could accommodate [Hynes'] interest in being [center] director, my interest in being [biology department] chair, and Howard Hughes' interest in having him decrease his administrative workload, all by flipping these two positions." Hynes has headed the biology department since July 1989 and was associate head from 1985 to 1989; he has been an HHMI investigator since February 1988. Sharp, who is MIT's John D. MacArthur Professor of Biology, has headed the cancer center since 1985 and served as associate director from 1983 to 1985. The center's staff numbers about 175. The biology department includes 60 faculty members, 260 undergraduate students, 207 graduate students, and about 285 postdoctoral fellows. Sharp's previous career decision resulted in considerable speculation on the part of the news media. In February 1990, the biologist accepted a nomination as MIT president but reversed his decision a week later, saying that he could not bear to give up his research. Assuming the job of biology department head, he emphasizes, is not as drastic a change as taking on the presidency would have been: "That position takes you out of science and into administration. This is administration related to science and engineering. This is a different type of decision." Sharp acknowledges, however, that the department chairmanship "will require more time of me in an administrative role" than was necessary in the center director's post. The biologist, who plans to maintain a lab in the cancer center, says he'll have to "further restrict my traveling outside MIT to find enough time" to continue his research while serving as department head. Hynes, for his part, notes that as center director, "I can contribute some administrative and managerial skills . . . more than I could have if I just went back to the lab." He adds that once he is at the helm of the center, he "would like to take up some new directions in the research; I would like to hire some people in the area of signaling mechanisms." Hiring staff to fill positions that have become vacant through attrition, he says, will be one of his top priorities. Sharp says that one of his goals will be to strengthen the department's neurobiology program. In addition, he says, "I'd like to see [the department] mature in terms of its interactions with other departments at MIT." Hynes says a major challenge facing Sharp will be "the fact that MIT is likely to introduce biology as a requirement for all undergraduates" in 1993, which will necessitate "reorganizing the undergraduate teaching." Sharp received his B.A. in chemistry and mathematics from Union College, Barbourville, Ky., in 1966, and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Illinois in 1969. He joined the MIT faculty in 1974. Sharp, who is well known for his research on gene regulation and his discovery of the phenomenon of RNA splicing, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Hynes received his B.A. in biochemistry in 1966 and his M.A. in 1970 from Cambridge University, England. He received his Ph.D. in biology in 1971 from MIT and joined the MIT faculty in 1975. His research focuses on the molecular basis of cell structure and adhesion. --Barbara Spector Freelance writer Richard Maurer of Holden, Mass., has been selected to receive the American Institute of Physics' 1991 Science Writing Award in Physics and Astronomy for Articles or Books Intended for Children. The award honors Maurer's book Airborne (New York, Simon & Schuster Inc., 1990). The book, published in association with WGBH Boston (producers of the television show "Nova"), recounts the history of airplane flight and describes some of the latest breakthroughs in the field. The book was selected from 62 entries by a panel of six judges. Maurer received a cash award of $3,000 and an inscribed Windsor chair. The author, along with Simon & Schuster and WGBH, will be presented with certificates at the American Physical Society's spring meeting later this month. Maurer, who has written two other science books for children, has organized shows on space photography for the Smithsonian Institution and for the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. He has also served as a writer and photo researcher for various aquariums, zoos, aerospace museums, and science and technology centers. Richard O. Roblin has been named associate director for science at the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), the international repository for biological reference cultures based in Rockville, Md. Roblin will have overall responsibility for ATCC's scientific departments, develop new research activities, and represent ATCC's interests in the international scientific community. Roblin received his undergraduate degree from Williams College in 1960 and his Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology in 1968 from Harvard University. He served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute and then returned to Harvard to teach at its medical school; during this time, he served on the National Academy of Sciences committee that organized the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA. Stanley Bruckenstein, A. Conger Goodyear Professor of Chemistry at the State University of New York, Buffalo, has received the Charles N. Reilley Award. The award, given by the Society for Electroanalytical Chemistry for outstanding performance in the field, was presented to Bruckenstein last month at the Pittsburgh Conference and Exposition on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy. Bruckenstein is considered a pioneer in the use of very low-level mass measurements to probe surface chemical and electrochemical reactions. He has used the technique to study ion transport in conducting polymers, among other phenomena. He was recently selected to serve on a four-member scientific review panel appointed by Utah's fusion advisory council to assess the quality of research at the National Cold Fusion Institute, affiliated with the University of Utah. In 1964, he participated in an exchange between the National Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Sciences in the USSR, doing research at the Institute of Electrochemistry in Moscow and at the State University of Moscow. Bruckenstein has served on the editorial board of Analytical Chemistry. He has been secretary-treasurer, vice chairman, and chairman of the Physical Electrochemistry Division of the Electrochemical Society as well as a director of the Society for Electroanalytical Chemistry. Bruckenstein received his bachelor's degree from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1950 and his doctorate from the University of Minnesota in 1954. He was a professor and chief of the division of chemistry at the University of Minnesota before coming to SUNY-Buffalo in 1968. Protein chemist Stephen B.H. Kent has joined the new department of cell biology of the Research Institute of Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, Calif. Kent previously was a professor and associate dean of the Graduate School of Science and Technology at Bond University, Queensland, Australia, and director of the joint research program in AIDS drug development between Bond University and Burroughs Wellcome Co., based in Research Triangle Park, N.C. Kent is best known for the preparation by total chemical synthesis of the HIV protease, an enzyme essential for the replication of the AIDS virus. This led to the first crystal structure of a component of the AIDS virus. He plans to continue this work at the Scripps Clinic, along with research on the application of mass spectrometry to protein chemistry. A native of New Zealand, Kent received his bachelor's degree in chemistry and biochemistry in 1968 from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and his master's degree in 1970 from Massey University, Palmerston, New Zealand, also in chemistry and biochemistry. He received his doctorate in organic chemistry in 1975 from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1974 to 1981, Kent worked at Rockefeller University, first as a research associate in the lab of R.B. Merrifield (who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1984), and later as an assistant professor. From 1983 to 1989, Kent was a senior research associate in the California Institute of Technology's division of biology, where his research focused on molecular aspects of lymphokines, hepatitis B, and AIDS. Marvin L. Deviney has been appointed an institute scientist in the San Antonio, Texas-based Southwest Research Institute's chemistry and chemical engineering division. Prior to joining the institute, Deviney served as principal project coordinator at Ashland Chemical Inc. of Columbus, Ohio, where he did research on a high-strength copolymer that has potential aircraft, naval, and electrical applications. His career at Ashland Chemical spanned 25 years. He has experience in advanced polymer composites, rubber technology, catalyst characterization, instrumental microanalysis, carbon technology, and electro- chemistry, among other areas. Deviney received his bachelor's degree in chemistry and mathematics from Southwest Texas State University in 1949. He received his master's degree in 1952 and his doctoral degree in 1956, both in physical chemistry from the University of Texas, Austin.

Swedish Academy Of Sciences Awards Crafoord Prize To Carnegie Astronomer

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