Two Americans Win 1993 Japan Prizes, Astronomical Society Honors Young Researcher, Researchers Share Environment Prize

Frank Press, outgoing president of the National Academy of Sciences, and chemist Kary B. Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), have been selected as winners of the 1993 Japan Prize. Press and Mullis will each receive 50 million yen (about $385,000), a gold medal, and a certificate from the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan during a ceremony to be held at the National Theatre in Tokyo on April 28. The award has been given since 1985 in two categories that change annually. Press, a geophysicist, is receiving the award in the category of Safety Engineering and Disaster Mitigation. He is regarded by the presenters as one of the pioneers in modern earthquake seismology for using the surface wave motion and ruptures of the Earth's crust and upper mantle as predictors of quakes. In 1957, Press was instrumental in creating the International Geophysical Year, a decade-long effort that mapped and measured geophysical phenomena. Press received his B.S. from the City College of New York in 1944 and his Ph.D. in geophysics in 1949 from Columbia University. He has held professorships in geophysics at Columbia (1945-55) and the California Institute of Technology (1955-65) and is currently an emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In four months, Press, 67, will leave his post at NAS after serving two consecutive six-year terms. Prior to serving at NAS, Press was the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and science adviser to President Jimmy Carter. He says future plans include coauthoring with Harvard geophysicist Raymond Siever a new introduction to their 1982 book, Earth (W.H. Freeman & Co., New York). The new volume, which will be published by W.H. Freeman & Co. later this year under the title Introduction to Earth, will include a heavy concentration on environmental concerns. "The environmental sciences could be just hot air or it could be firmly grounded in some of the basic disciplines, like chemistry and geology," Press says. Mullis, 47, was awarded the Japan Prize in the category of Molecular and Cellular Technology in Medicine for his 1984 invention of PCR. The technique enables researchers to produce specified DNA sequences quickly and without cloning. PCR is sensitive enough to detect a single DNA molecule in nearly any type of sample, living or dead. Mullis, who lives in La Jolla, Calif., is vice president for research at Atomic Tags Inc. in La Jolla, a small startup that began in July and is working with scanning probe microscopy. "I am of the opinion that we can work out methods using scanning probe microscopy in clinical chemistry," he says. "I can see a time not too long from now when a small sample of blood taken in a clinical diagnostic test would be routinely tested for 200 to 300 things--looking at various things like proteins and hormones- -rather than just one thing." Mullis's other project is Stargene Inc., based in San Rafael, Calif. He identifies this as a "hobby business" he began this past year with two friends to make interesting DNA sequences available to the public. "We're creating sort of a baseball card made of plastic that would contain a description, picture, and amplified DNA of some hero or rock star. So, for example, you could compare the mitochondrial DNA sequences of Jerry Garcia to those of Mick Jagger," he says. Mullis received his B.S. in chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1966 and his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972. From 1979 to 1986, he was a research scientist at Cetus Corp. in Emeryville, Calif. John F. Hawley, an astronomer at the University of Virginia haas been selected as the 1993 recipient of the Helen B. Warner Award, given by the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Hawley will become the 42nd person to receive the award at the January 1994 AAS meeting in Washington, D.C. The honor is bestowed annually by AAS for significant contributions to observational or theoretical astronomy by an investigator under 36 years of age living in North America. Former winners include Princeton astrophysicist John N. Bahcall (1970) and University of California, Los Angeles, astronomer Ben Zuckerman(1975). Hawley, 34, was cited for his innovation in using supercom-puters to facilitate magneto-hydrodynamic simulations of the behavior of accretion disks, the hot plasma that orbits black holes and neutron stars. These disks, however, do not simply orbit these high-density objects, like Saturn's rings, but turbulently spiral downward. "These disks are hot enough to be a plasma rather than solid water or gas...often producing X-rays or jets of matter," he explains. "You can't see the black hole itself, but this hot gas around the black hole will give off lots of light and high-energy radiation, so that's what you would detect." Using the Cray supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Hawley, along with colleague Steven Balbus, determined that the reason for this spiraling activity is the presence of weak magnetic fields, which astronomers previously assumed were inconsequential to the disk's activity (S.A. Balbus and J.F. Hawley, "A powerful local shear instability in weakly magnetized disks," Astrophysical Journal, 376:214-33, 1991). "The tendency has been to put aside the magnetic fields and concentrate on the fluid dynamics under the idea that you would understand the simplest things first and start adding more complexity," he says. This turbulence, in turn, is responsible for the viscosity that permits angular momentum to be transported outward so material can flow in. "But what we found was that even a very weak magnetic field, whose strength was traditionally thought to be ignorable, in these disks produces the instability which leads to the disks being turbulent." Hawley received his B.S. in physics and astronomy from Haverford College in Haverford, Pa., in 1980 and his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 1984. He joined the faculty of Virginia in 1987 and is currently an assistant professor of astronomy. This year, the $260,000 Volvo Environment Prize, created to promote and support scientific and technical innovation in environmental research, will be shared by Norman Myers, a zoology professor at Oxford University, and Peter H. Raven, a botany professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Myers, author of the book Primary Source: Tropical Forests & Our Future (New York, W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1984), was one of the first scientists to warn of the possible extinction of animals as a result of tropical deforestation. A native of Yorkshire, England, Myers received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973. In addition to his professorship at Washington University, Raven has been director of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis for 21 years. He was one of the first to advance the notion that there is a correlation between rainforest deforestation and global warming. Raven received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1960. The Volvo Prize was created in 1988 by the Volvo North America Corp. of New York City.

Two Americans Win 1993 Japan Prizes, Astronomical Society Honors Young Researcher, Researchers Share Environment Prize

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