UC-Santa Cruz Chemist And Entrepreneur Wins ACS Award For Molecular Modeling

UC-Santa Cruz Chemist And Entrepreneur Wins ACS Award For Molecular Modeling Tufts Professor named Editor-In-Chief Of New England Journal Of Medicine Obituary Todd Wipke, professor of chemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and cofounder of Molecular Design Ltd., a leading molecular modeling software company based in San Leandro, Calif., has been selected to receive the 1991 Herman Skolnik Award, presented by the American Chemical Society's Division of Chemical Information. The award was established in 1976 to recognize outstanding contributions to the theory and practice of chemical information science. Wipke will receive the honor at the ACS national meeting in New York in August. Wipke has used computers in molecular modeling and design since he was a graduate student at UC-Berkeley in the early 1960s. He was the first to develop a computer program that allowed chemists to search a chemical database by structure, rather than by molecular formula or name. In the late 1960s, first as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University and later as an assistant professor at Princeton University, Wipke helped create the first program that, in addition to storing and retrieving chemical structures, could actually perform chemical manipulations, such as simulating reactions or other chemical changes. This program, named SECS (Simulation and Evaluation of Chemical Synthesis), was first licensed to the chemical industry in 1974 and is still being used today, says Wipke. Wipke is currently developing chemical programs that, he says, reason in the same way as humans. For example, his recently developed program, AIMB (Analogy and Intelligence in Model Building), builds three-dimensional models of molecules by searching a database for structures similar to the intended molecule. This program, says Wipke, builds structures "much like a chemist does, by trying to find the closest analogy to known geometries." The program's power comes from its capacity to deal with imprecision and "close matches" when searching a database for a structure, rather than requiring an exact match. This ability to reason analogously makes for a very efficient program,according to Wipke. Whereas in typical expert systems, execution time increases as rules and data are added to a system, AIMB runs faster as the database expands. "This is the way human beings behave," he says. "If you compare a naive chemist to an expert chemist, the expert has a much greater knowledge base, and the time needed to solve a given problem will be shorter." Wipke received his Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley in 1965. Following postdoctoral work at Harvard, he became an assistant professor of chemistry at Princeton University in 1969, and joined the faculty of UC-Santa Cruz in 1975. Molecular Design Ltd. was formed in 1978. The company's products include MACCS and REACCS, the first commercial chemical structure retrieval systems that could be used directly by bench chemists. The company also markets CHEMLAB-II, a molecular modeling system widely used by the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. --Rebecca Andrews Jerome P. Kassirer, associate physician-in-chief at the New England Medicine Center in Boston and Sara Murray Jordan Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, has been named editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), effective July 1991. Kassirer will succeed Arnold Relman, who announced his plans to retire last July after 14 years as the journal's top editor. Kassirer, a nephrologist and internal medicine specialist with extensive experience in writing and editing, says that under his direction, the journal will evolve. However, at present he is reluctant to predict the types of changes he will institute. "The same principle that holds to taking care of the sick holds to taking care of a prestigious medical journal," says Kassirer. "Primum non nocere--first do no harm." Kassirer is well known for his research into diagnostic reasoning and therapeutic decision making, examining how doctors evaluate the complex trade-offs of risks and benefits of tests and treatments. Although Kassirer, who is also vice chairman of the medical school's department of medicine, will be giving up research and clinical practice for his new job, he hopes to continue to "do some teaching here and there." In 1989, Kassirer received the Distinguished Clinical Science Teacher Award from the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society, and he has been voted outstanding teacher by Tufts medical students on eight separate occasions. "I teach a lot about reasoning and how to think about clinical medicine," says Kassirer. He stresses the need for "a critical approach to data," and notes that his editorial work with NEJM will supplement this aspect of his teaching. Kassirer is a former member of NEJM's editorial board. He received his M.D. from the School of Medicine of the State University of New York, Buffalo, in 1957. He joined the New England Medical Center in 1962. --Rebecca Andrews John Bardeen, emeritus professor of electrical engineering and physics at the University of Illinois, and the first person to win two Nobel Prizes in the same field, died January 30, at the age of 82, of a heart attack at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. He had been visiting Boston to consult with specialists about his health problems. In 1947, Bardeen, along with Walter Brattain and William P. Schockley, developed the first semiconductor transistor at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J. The invention was first used commercially in telephone switching equipment in 1952. The three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956 for their invention, which heralded the dawn of modern electronics by replacing the vacuum tube. In 1951, Bardeen joined the University of Illinois faculty, where he would develop a theory of low-temperature superconductivity, which he considered his greatest professional accomplishment. In 1972, he won his second Nobel Prize for this research, along with two scientists who worked with him as graduate students, Leon Cooper and J. Robert Schreiffer. He retired in 1975. Bardeen received his B.S. in 1928 and his M.S. in 1929, both in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. After working as a geophysicist at Gulf Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh from 1930 to 1933, he earned a Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Princeton University in 1936. He was a fellow at Harvard University and taught at the University of Minnesota before World War II; during the war, he was a physicist with the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington, D.C. Afterward, he joined the newly formed research group in solid-state physics at Bell Labs. Bardeen served on the President's Science Advisory Committee from 1959 until 1962 and on the White House Science Council in the early 1980s. In addition to his Nobel Prizes, he won the National Medal of Science in 1965, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976, the Lomonosov Prize from the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1988, and the Third Century Award from President Bush in 1990. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Salvador E. Luria, a biologist who shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology, died February 6, at the age of 78, of a heart attack at his home in Lexington, Mass. Luria, who since 1984 had been a senior scientist at the Repligen Corp., a biotechnology company in Cambridge, Mass., was also Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a title MIT bestows as a special honor to distinguished faculty. Luria was a member of the MIT faculty from 1959 until his death. He won his Nobel Prize, along with Max Delbruck of the California Institute of Technology and Alfred D. Hershey of the Carnegie Institution's genetics research laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., for the trio's investigations of the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses. Luria discovered virus host restriction in bacteria; this research led to the discovery of restriction enzymes, which formed the basis of modern recombinant DNA technology. He also organized a program in microbiology at MIT and founded the MIT Center for Cancer Research, which he directed from 1972 to 1985. An advocate of scientists' involvement in the humanities, he also taught a graduate course in world literature. Luria was born in Turin, Italy. He went to Paris to escape the fascists in 1938, working as a research fellow at the Institut du Radium. He came to the United States in 1940 and did research at Columbia University until 1942. Under a Guggenheim Fellowship, he then worked at Vanderbilt and Princeton universities. He became a U.S. citizen in 1947. From 1943 until 1959, Luria taught at Indiana University, Bloomington. One of his graduate students there was James D. Watson, who shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 for the discovery of the structure of DNA. Throughout his life, Luria was an active member of the peace movement. He opposed the Vietnam War and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and called for an end to the building of new atomic power plants. In 1969, he was among 48 scientists blacklisted by the National Institutes of Health for his political activity. In 1974, Luria won a National Book Award in the Sciences for his first nonacademic book, Life: The Unfinished Experiment (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973). In 1969, he and Delbruck received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for their work on genetics of bacteria and bacteriophage. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

UC-Santa Cruz Chemist And Entrepreneur Wins ACS Award For Molecular Modeling

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