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The Innerspace/Outerspace Connection: History and Progress Report
Leon M. Lederman
Former faculty member at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, former director of Nevis Laboratory and Fermilab, Leon M. Lederman is Pritzker Professor of Science, Illinois Institute of Technology, and science advisor to the governor of Illinois. Born and bred in New York City, Lederman received his B.A. from City College in 1943, majoring in chemistry with a minor in physics, and (after a stint in the U.S. Army) his Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University in 1951. Lederman spent the next twenty-eight years at Columbia, directing Columbia's Nevis Labs from 1961 to 1978, and doing research there and elsewhere around the world. He became the second director of Fermilab (Chicago) in 1979. In 1989 he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, and is now at IIT.
In 1983 he received the Wolf Prize, and in 1988 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Mel Schwartz (Distinguished Science Lecturer, September 26, 1992) and Jack Steinberger. His work: With over two hundred research papers to his credit, Dr. Lederman is perhaps best known for his discovery of the B-quark (Wolf Prize) and the muon neutrino (Nobel Prize). Increasingly he has dealt with the more administrative aspects of high energy physics in particular and science in general. He was initiator and founding member of the governmental High Energy Physics Advisory Panel. During his term a director of Fermilab, the TEVATRON (the first superconducting synchrotron) was constructed and the SSC (the superconducting supercollider) was proposed. He has recently served as chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was founding trustee of a· residential public school for gifted children, and co-chairman of the board of a teacher's academy. Finally, he has worked for investment in science and technology enterprises in Illinois.
(Text taken from the Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series Program 1993-1994).
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Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series Program 1993-1994
Bard College
Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series Brochure 1993-1994, published by the Bard Center
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A Scientist Looks Back
Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat
Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat is professor emeritus in the Department of Molecular Biology, University of California at Berkeley. He received his M.D. from the University of Breslau in 1933 and his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1936. Before joining the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, Dr. Fraenkel-Conrat held research fellowships in the laboratories of Max Bergmann (Rockefeller Institute), K. Slotta (lnstituto Butantan, Sao Paulo, Brazil), and H. M. Evans (Institute for Experimental Biology, University of California at Berkeley). He had also served for eight years as senior chemist at the Western Regional Laboratory of the United States Department of Agriculture in Albany, California. Dr. Fraankel- Connrat rnoved to the Virus Laboratory (founded by Wendell M. STanley) of the Department of Virology, University of California at Berkeley, in 1952; the department was later renamed the Department of Molecular Biology. Among his hundreds of scientific publications are the books Design and Function at the Threshold of Life: The Viruses; The Chemistry and Biology of Viruses; Catalogue of Viruses (Volume 1 of Comprehensive Virology); Virology (with P. Kimball); and Catalog, Characterization, and Classification of Viruses, a volume in The Viruses series. He has served on numerous editorial boards, including those of Biochemistry, Virology, and Intervirology, and he is editor (with R. R. Wagner) of the multivolume series Comprehensive Virology and of the newer series, The Viruses.
Dr. Fraenkel-Conrat is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has received the Albert Lasker Award and the Alexander von Humbolt Prize, and was the first California Scientist of the Year.
His work: Best known for his famous mixed reconstitution of the tobacco mosaic virus (H. Fraenkel-Conrat & B. Singer, "Virus reconstitution IL Combination of protein and nucleic acid from different strains," Biochimica et Biophysica Acta 24: 540-548, 1957), which very elegantly demonstrated, once and for all, that nucleic acid, not protein, determined heredity, Dr. Fraenkel Conrat was also the first to demonstrate enzymatic peptide bond synthesis and the first to demonstrate the existence of RNA-directed RNA polymerases in plants.
(Text taken from the Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series Program 1993-1994).
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From Perspective to Fractals: Relations Between Geometry, Science, and Art
Benoit Mandelbrot
Benoit Mandelbrot is an IBM Fellow at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, International Business Machines, Inc., and Abraham Robinson Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. He is a graduate of the Paris Ecole Polytechnique, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of Paris. He has held positions at CNRS in Paris, MIT, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Harvard, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and the • University of Paris-Sud. The father of fractal geometry, Professor Mandelbrot received the 1993 Wolf Prize in Physics for "having changed our view of nature." In addition, he has received many other awards and prizes including the 1985 F. Bernard Medal for Meritorious Service to Science granted by the National Academy of Sciences and Columbia University, the 1988 Science for Art Prize from Moet-HennessyLouis Vuitton, and a Distinguished Service Award for Outstanding Achievement from the California Institute of Technology. He has received honorary degrees from several universities including Syracuse University, Boston University, and the State University of New York. His work: For forty years, Professor Mandelbrot has been seeking a measure of order in physical, mathematical, or social phenomena that are characterized by abundant data but extreme variability. He is best known as the founder of fractal geometry. The surprising esthetic value of many of their discoveries and their unexpected usefulness in teaching have made him an eloquent spokesman for "the unity of knowing and feeling." He is the author of the books Les objets fractals (1975, 1984, 1989) and The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982).
(This information was taken from the Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series Program 1991-1992).
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Genes and the Origins of Cancer
Robert A. Weinberg
Robert A. Weinberg is a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Robert A. Weinberg received his S.B. in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 and his Ph.D. from the same institution in 1969. After four years of postdoctoral research with Ernest Winocour at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovoth, Israel, and Renatto Dulbecco at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, Dr. Weinberg returned to his alma mater in 1972 to work as a research associate with David Baltimore. In 1973 he was made a faculty member in the Department of Biology, where he continues to work today. In addition to his position at MIT, Dr. Weinberg became a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in 1982. Included in Dr. Weinberg's list of over twenty-five honors are the Discover Magazine Scientist of the Year Award (1982), the Armand Hammer Cancer Prize, the Bristol-Meyers Award for Distinguished Achievement in Cancer Research, election to the National Academy of Sciences, and the Sloan Prize of the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation. His work: Dr. Weinberg has a long publication record (in both the technical and more popular literature) on the molecular basis of cancer, or more specifically, how normal cells become "transformed" into cancer cells. His lab is currently investigating the regulation of the ras family of oncogenes, which are found in an unregulated form in cancers of the bone marrow, bladder, breast, skin, lung, colon, and brain. He is also interested in the activity of the retinoblastoma gene, a so-called tumor suppressor gene. He is coauthor (with Harold Varmus) of Genes and the Biology of Cancer, a volume in the Scientific American Library series.
(This information was taken from the Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series Program 1993-1994).
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