all A Life in Science stories

Geology is destiny

404132862 — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:51:17 -0400

As a teenager in Toronto in the 1950s, Paul Hoffman would spend hours in the Royal Ontario Museum studying its collection of rocks and minerals. He became a passionate collector, trading rocks with friends and exploring abandoned mines in search of crystals.

During his freshman year at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Hoffman landed a summer job with the Ontario Department of Mines, which dispatched him on a four-month journey to map rocks in northern Ontario. It was 1961 and his first field season.

Scholar makes robots that detect land mines

50443248 — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:29:33 -0400

On Oct. 10, 2005 — he remembers the date exactly — Thrishantha Nanayakkara was driving down a country road, headed for a science workshop at Jaffna Central College, a high school in the far north of Sri Lanka. The event was designed to distract potential child soldiers from the allure of war.

His cell phone rang. It was a government official, with a tip-off. “Turn back,” the caller said, in so many words, “or you will be killed.”

Carol Robinson: Pushing a technology’s boundaries

50443248 — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:17:36 -0400

The distinguished chemist Carol Robinson has used mass spectrometry throughout her career to tackle increasingly complex problems in biology. When she delivered the Radcliffe Institute’s first Lecture in the Sciences of the academic year, last Oct. 6, she chose the title “Reading Between the Spectral Lines,” referring to the jagged lines of data produced by the mass spectrometer.

This technology allows scientists to analyze the chemical structure of a sample by determining the precise mass (or size) and charge of particles in it.

Climate change an ‘opportunity’ as well as a threat

50443248 — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:58:27 -0400

Conservation pioneer Russell A. Mittermeier started this year’s Roger Tory Peterson Memorial Lecture (April 5) with a quiz. In front of several hundred listeners at Harvard’s Science Center he turned on a small recorder.

The sudden call of an animal — piercing and reedy — shot like an alarm across the expanse of Lecture Hall B.

Mittermeier, president of the biodiversity protection group Conservation International, asked: What is it?

Countway marks development of ‘the pill’

50443248 — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:49:48 -0400

The birth control pill, which revolutionized contraception and sparked a cultural reassessment of the purpose of sex and the sanctity of life, was developed by a Harvard fertility doctor who believed people should have children early in life — and as many as they could afford.

Narayanamurti named director of Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at Belfer Center

50443248 — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:48:43 -0400

Venkatesh “Venky” Narayanamurti will be the new director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

Skin biology illuminates how stem cells operate

50443248 — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:13:51 -0400

As a girl, Elaine Fuchs borrowed her mother’s old strainers and mixing bowls to collect polliwogs, an activity she credits for her present-day career as a biologist.

It also helped that her father was a geochemist who studied meteorites, her aunt a radiation expert, her older sister a neuroscientist.

Going on to study science “was almost a no-brainer,” said Fuchs, who did her Ph.D. at Princeton University.

Computer science pioneer Barbara J. Grosz awarded Allen Newell Award

50443248 — Mon, 04 May 2009 13:19:11 -0400

Barbara J. Grosz, Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, was awarded the Allen Newell Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)/Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The Newell Award recognizes career contributions that have breadth within computer science or that bridge computer science and other disciplines.

First Suzanne Murray Professor named

50443248 — Tue, 05 May 2009 12:37:42 -0400

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study has named Nancy E. Hill, a leader in the study of cultural influences on parenting and adolescent achievement, the first Suzanne Murray Professor. Hill has also been appointed a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), where she has served as a visiting associate professor. Both appointments are effective July 1, 2009.

The Murray professorship allows a newly tenured Harvard faculty member to spend four semesters as a Radcliffe Fellow during her or his first five years at Harvard. In addition, Hill’s research ideally positions her to collaborate with Radcliffe faculty leaders on the institute’s new policy studies initiatives as well as other academic activities.

Connie Cepko

404132862 — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:21:38 -0500

In some ways, Connie Cepko’s job has gotten easier.

The Harvard Medical School genetics professor is working to uncover the mysteries of the eye, to understand how it develops and what can go wrong. Her work ranges from understanding the genetic roots of diseases like retinitis pigmentosa, which afflicts 100,000 Americans, to basic genetic research using the latest technology.

Microbiologist Gary Ruvkun:

404132862 — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:31:00 -0500

Gary Ruvkun has made a career out of imagining the unimaginable, and of surrounding himself with like-minded thinkers who let the wheels of thought spin until they catch on something hard, gain traction, and take off.

Driven:

404132862 — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:29:50 -0400

When the baby vomited again, Gail Melton knew something was seriously wrong with her second child, a son she and her husband, Doug Melton, had named Sam.

Peter Ashton: A legacy written in trunk, limb and leaf

404132862 — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:39:47 -0400

They were in a bind, no doubt about it.

Wearing little but cotton shorts, the four men huddled on a streambank deep in the Bornean rainforest. Water dripped from their soggy clothes, making muddy pools around their feet as they assessed the situation.

They were surrounded by a forest so vast that it would take three days walking just to reach the nearest house. They had no food, no shoes, not even a knife.

Louise Ivers: 'I can’t sleep at night because of the things that I see.'

404132862 — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:27:17 -0400

Louise Ivers gently lifted the 7-month-old by his forearms, hoping he would pull himself up as a healthy child a third his age might.

But his head hung limply back, eyes wide, upper body slack.

At 7 months, when a healthy child would be sitting up on his own and thinking about crawling, this baby boy was unable to control his head, unable to pull himself from the sheets. Gently, she laid him back.

M. Judah Folkman, biomedical pioneer, dies at 74

404132862 — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:55:01 -0500

One of Harvard Medical School’s (HMS) most forward-looking and innovative physician-scientists, M. Judah Folkman, died suddenly Monday (Jan. 14) after suffering a heart attack at the Denver International Airport in Denver. He was 74.