It's that time of year again: On March 14 President Bill Clinton will hand out the country's highest science and technology awards, the National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology. Of this year's 17 recipients, announced on January 31, Clinton said: "We honor these exceptional U.S. scientists and engineers for their achievements, contributions and innovations that have sustained U.S. leadership across the frontiers of scientific and technological knowledge, thereby enhancing our ability to shape and improve our nation's future." Our yearbook of the winners follows:

Biology

David Baltimore
Professor of Biology and President of the California Institute of Technology

Education:
Swarthmore College, B.S., 1960
Rockefeller University, Ph.D., 1964

Baltimore is perhaps best known for his identification of the enzyme reverse transcriptase, which earned him a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1975. He was only 37 years old at the time. The discovery shed new light on the behavior of retroviruses, such as HIV. Baltimore was named head of the National Institutes of Health AIDS Vaccine Research Committee in 1996. As an administrator, Baltimore has also served as president of the Rockefeller University and as a founding director of M.I.T.'s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Baltimore has written for Scientific American.

Jared Diamond
Professor of Physiology
University of California, Los Angeles
School of Medicine

Education:
University of Cambridge, Ph.D.

Diamond is recognized for applying theories of Darwinian evolution to physiology, ecology, conservation biology and human history. He has also won fame as a science writer. Diamond has authored best-selling books, such as The Third Chimpanzee, and more than 200 articles for popular science magazines. In 1998, he won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

Lynn Margulis
Distinguished University Professor, Geosciences
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Education:
University of Chicago, A.B., 1957
University of Wisconsin, M.S., 1960
U. California, Berkeley, Ph.D., 1963

Margulis is acclaimed for her ideas proposing that cellular organelles and cells themselves have evolved by way of hereditary symbiosis. In short, the theory holds that components of cells (such as plastids and mitochondria) began as independent biological widgets (in this case, cyanobacteria and respiring bacteria, respectively) and, through cooperation with one another, eventually became part of the same living machine. She has also written popular works for the public, including an article for Scientific American and a 1998 book, Symbiotic Planet: A New View of Evolution.

Chemistry

Stuart Rice
Frank P. Hixon, Distinguished Service Professor
The James Frank Institute, University of Chicago

Education:
Brooklyn College, S.B., 1952
Harvard University, A.M., 1954; Ph.D., 1955

Rice will be awarded the National Medal for "changing the very nature of modern physical chemistry"--a feat he has accomplished through research in two main areas. His first focus has been finding ways to actively control quantum dynamical processes and so manipulate which products are formed during chemical reactions. Also, Rice is interested in the properties of liquid-vapor and liquid-solid interfaces and, more generally, the properties of quasi-two-dimensional systems.

Read Comments (0) | Post a comment 1 2 3 4 Next >