Showing posts with label molecular biology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label molecular biology. Show all posts

Thursday, October 08, 2009

National Medal of Science Winners

Yesterday President Barak Obama presented the National Medal of Science to nine "eminent researchers" and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to four inventers, the "highest honors bestowed by the United States government on scientists, engineers, and inventors."

Three women were honored this year with the National Medal of Science.

Dr. Joanna Fowler, Senior Scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York

[. . . ] for her pioneering work in chemistry involving the synthesis of medical imaging compounds and her innovative applications of these compounds to human neuroscience, which have significantly advanced our understanding of the human brain and brain diseases, including drug addiction.



Dr. Elaine Fuchs, Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor and Investigator, HHMI at the laboratory of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development, The Rockefeller University, New York
[. . .] for her pioneering use of cell biology and molecular genetics in mice to understand the basis of inherited diseases in humans and her outstanding contributions to our understandings of the biology of skin and its disorders, including her notable investigations of adult skin stem cells, cancers, and genetic syndromes.

Dr. JoAnne Stubbe, Novartis Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
[. . . ] for her groundbreaking experiments establishing the mechanisms of ribonucleotide reductases, polyester synthases, and natural product DNA cleavers -- compelling demonstrations of the power of chemical investigations to solve problems in biology.

One woman was honored with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation:

Dr. Esther Sans Takeuchi, Greatbatch Professor of Advanced Power Sources in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
[. . . ] for her seminal development of the silver vanadium oxide battery that powers the majority of the world's lifesaving implantable cardiac defibrillators, and her innovations in other medical battery technologies that improve the health and quality of life of millions of people.



Three women National Science Winners in a single year is a record high - and historically that number has frequently been zero. While that may seem like an encouraging upward trend, if you check the stats, more women were NMoS recipients in the 1990s (15) than in the 2000s (10). Hopefully, the 2010s will see an improvement in those numbers.

The National Medal of Technology and Innovation doesn't provide a way to search recipients by gender (and some winners are actually companies), but looking through the list it appears that Esther Sans Takeuchi is the first woman to win since Stephanie Kwolek in 1996.

Watch the awards ceremony on YouTube:


(President Obama also said some good things about supporting research and math and science education in his speech.)

Tags: ,, , , ,

Categories: , , , , ,

Posted by Peggy K at 7:12 PM 14 comments

Monday, October 05, 2009

Blackburn and Greider win the Nobel for Medicine: the first time two women share the prize

Today it was announced that Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak would share the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase". The award shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the modern biological sciences, since their work was indeed groundbreaking. It wasn't a matter of "if" they would win, but "when".

Telomeres are stretches of repetitive DNA that protect the ends of chromosomes during cell division - Blackburn has compared them to the tips on the ends of shoelaces1 that keep them from unraveling. As cells divide the telomere sequences get shorter and shorter, which limits cells to a fixed number of divisions. Telomere shorting is thought to be responsible for aging on a cellular level. Cancer cells, which divide indefinitely, carry mutations that allow the maintenance of telomere length.

You can find out more about the science by exploring the history of telomere research on the Lasker Awards site and by watching Blackburn's 2008 Women@GoogleTalk about telomeres and aging.

Some of the other awards won jointly by Blackburn and Greider:

Elizabeth Blackburn

Elizabeth Blackburn is a native of Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, the daughter of two physicians, a fact that Blackburn has noted helped shape her view of pursuing a career as a woman:

The main influence my parents' careers had on me was that it gave me the idea that women and men were equivalent in careers. They were both physicians, they grew up at the same time, and they trained at the same time. Probably, the other influence it had was showing me that motherhood and career can go together. My mother worked part-time much of the time, as I was one of seven children!

After receiving her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Melbourne, she moved to the UK, where she earned her doctorate from the University of Cambridge in the laboratory of biochemist Frederick Sanger, who pioneered methods of nucleic acid sequencing. She moved to the United States in 1975 for postdoctoral work in the lab of Joseph G. Gall2 at Yale.

It was in Gall's laboratory that Blackburn analyzed the structure of the chromosomes of the fresh water protozoan Tetrahymena, discovering that the DNA sequence ends of chromosomes consisted of simple repeated DNA sequences. As Gall has recalled,3 they didn't fully appreciate the revolutionary nature of the discovery at that time.
The work Liz was doing in my lab was technically advanced, because she was using techniques learend in Sanger's lab, and virtually no one else in the world was doing that kind of work. We were interested in sequencing partly because it was something you could do and we knew there were unusual features about these molecules. At the time, we didn't say, Eureka, we found what the ends of chromosomes are like. She had made a discovery whose significance we didn't yet appreciate completely. I knew Liz was extremely good, but I didn't know she as a superstar until she started doing her own independent work.
After completing her postdoc, Blackburn joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley in 1978, where she continued her study of telomere biochemistry. There she and one of her graduate students, Carol Greider, discovered telomerase, the enzyme that adds telomere DNA sequences to the ends of chromosomes (read more about that below). In 1990 Blackburn moved her lab to the University of California at San Francisco, where she continues to study telomere function and biochemistry.

Blackburn has also been involved in the political side of science. In 2001 she was appointed by the Bush administration as a scientist member of the President's Council on Bioethics. Blackburn and fellow panelist Janet Rowley were very critical of the scientific content of the Council's reports on stem cell research and aging. Her removal from the panel in 2004 drew criticism from scientists who believed she was removed because of her advocacy for human embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning.

A few key publications:
Additional information about Elizabeth Blackburn:
Carol W. Greider

Carol Greider grew up in Davis, California, the daughter of two scientists: her mother was a biologist, who died when Greider was six and her father was a physicist at UC Davis.

Greider got her first taste of hands-on research when she was a freshman at the University of California at Santa Barbara under the mentorship of Bea Sweeney, and ended up working in several labs before deciding that she wanted to pursue biochemistry. She applied to a number of graduate programs, but ran into a problem:
“I had great research experience, great letters of recommendation, and outstanding grades, but I had poor GREs.” Although she did not know it growing up, Greider suffers from dyslexia, which affected her scores on standardized tests. Only two schools—the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, CA) and the University of California, Berkeley— offered her an interview. When she met with cell biologist Elizabeth Blackburn in Berkeley, things clicked again. “I really liked my conversations with Liz, and there were a number of other people in the department that would be potentially fun to work with, so I went there,” says Greider.
It was while working in Blackburn's lab in 1984 that Greider discovered telomerase, an enzyme that maintains telomere sequences. The account of her discovery in the biography published upon her election to the National Academy of Sciences explains the skill and hard work that went into that achievement:
"If you were easily intimidated, you wouldn't take on that kind of project," Blackburn says. "We had to be both rigorous and enterprising, and those are exactly the characteristics that Carol has. the combination is a great strength." For her part, Greider worked 12-hour days and supplemented her existing biochemistry knowledge with DNA cloning techniques and other skills needed for the project.

Nine months after she began the project, and after much trial and error finding the right substrate and assay, Greider identified the first signs of her enzyme. On Christmas Day in 1984, she developed one of her gels and saw a ladder of the characteristic Tetrahymena 6-base telomeric repeats - exactly the pattern that would be expected from a telomere-synthesizing enzyme.
Of course that was just the beginning. Greider and Blackburn had to rule out the possibility that the results were an artifact. It wasn't until June of 1985 that they were completely convinced that they had isolated the correct enzyme. Greider and Blackburn seem to have had a very good working relationship, which likely contributed to her success.

After receiving her PhD, Greider continued research on the biochemistry of telomerase and the biological function of telomeres at Cold Spring Harbor, first as an independent fellow and then as an Investigator. She moved her lab to the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1997 where she is continues her research today.

A few key publications:
Additional information about Carol Greider:
Of course Jack Szostak also made important contributions to the understanding of telomere function (among other achievements), and you can read about his work in some of the other posts in the blogsphere about the award:
1. Aglets, as any regular crossword puzzle worker knows.
2. Joseph Gall was (and is) well known for providing a supportive environment for women scientists in his lab. Many successful women scientists have been members of his lab, including Blackburn, Mary-Lou Pardue, Susan Gerbi, Joan Steitz and Virginia Zakian.
3. Quoted in Elizabeth Blackburn and the story of telomeres; deciphering the ends of DNA by Catherine Brady.

Photos: Left is Eliabeth Blackburn, right is Carol W. Greider. Both taken by Wikipedia Author Gerbil in March 2009. Licensed by Attribution Share Alike 3.0
Tags: , ,

Categories: , , ,

Posted by Peggy K at 6:00 PM 4 comments

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

2009 MacArthur Fellows: Lin He and Beth Shapiro

Recipients of the 2009 MacArthur Fellowship - sometimes referred to as the MacArthur "genius grant" - are an interesting mix of writers, artists, journalists, scientists, attorneys, entrepeneurs and physicians who have one thing in common: they have demonstrated "exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future". The 24 fellows will receive a $500,000 stipend over the course of five years, no strings attached.

This year's winners include two young women scientists:


Lin He is an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies the role of microRNAs in the development of cancer:

Lin He's research involves a class of small ribonucleic acid, or RNA, that are not transcribed into protein like messenger RNA. Instead, these microRNAs or miRNAs bind to messenger RNA to regulate the amount of protein produced. This entirely new level of dosage regulation in mammals was not realized until 2000, even though miRNAs were first discovered in 1993. Now, miRNAs have been shown to be involved in many aspects of development and diseases, He said.

"MicroRNAs are a mechanism to fine-tune gene expression simultaneously in many different pathways, achieving a homeostasis very much needed for many biological processes," He said. "In the case of cancer, where some microRNAs behave abnormally, detrimental effects will occur due to the loss of proper gene regulation by microRNAs."

He has shown that miRNAs play a role in a broad range of cancers, in particular those such as lung cancer that involve mutations in the p53 tumor suppressor gene. She is also investigating the role of miRNA in the development of B cell lymphomas.

"In an area that has generated intense effort among many leading researchers, Lin He has established early in her career the capacity to make significant advances with direct implications for the development of future cancer treatment strategies," the MacArthur Foundation noted.

More information about Lin He:

Beth Shapiro is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at Pennsylvania State University. She is "an evolutionary biologist who integrates molecular phylogenetics with advanced computational biostatistics to reconstruct the influences on population dynamics in a wide variety of organisms." She is using the methods she and her colleagues developed to study the population history of recently extinct (like the dodo) or currently threatened species to assess the effects of environmental change on polar bear populations, an approach that will help in shaping conservation efforts. She also has been studying the evolution of RNA viruses in individual patients, an approach that may help in understanding the development of virulence in human pathogens.

Prior to joining Penn State in 2007, Shapiro was director of the Ancient Biomolcules Centre at Oxford University. She was also named one one "America's Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences" by Smithsonian Magazine.

Here Shapiro explains "How to Clone a Mammoth":


More information about Beth Shapiro:
Also included among this year's recipients are two women physicians:
  • Jill Seaman, Infectious Disease Physician in Old Fangak, Sudan
  • Mary Tinetti, Geriatric Physician at the Yale School of Medicine

Photos courtesy of the MacArthur Foundation
Tags: , ,

Categories: , , ,

Posted by Peggy K at 9:14 PM 1 comments

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Maxine Singer: Biochemist

This week's woman of the week at CR4 is biochemist Maxine Singer, and it reminded me that I've had a post about her in my draft queue for a while that deserved to see the light of day (glow of the internet?).

Maxine Singer earned her PhD from Yale just a few years after Watson and Crick published the structure of DNA. Her thesis advisor, protein chemist Joseph Fruton, advised her to focus on the then-relatively obscure field of nucleic acid biochemistry. In 1956 she joined Leon Heppel's lab at NIH as a post doc, one of the few labs at the time that was focused on nucleic acid chemistry. Singer synthesized specific RNA base sequences that were used to determine how those sequences were translated into the amino acid sequences of polypeptides. She and her colleagues were pioneers in the fledgeling field of molecular biology. Two years later NIH offered her a job with a lab of her own.

Apparently both as a graduate student at Yale and as a postdoc in Heppel's lab, Singer didn't notice that she was treated any differently because she was a woman. As she said in a 1992 interview:

It was like being a woman. It wasn't an issue where I was; I was very lucky. I was very naive. In those days, people didn't discuss the problem, and I've never heard anybody discuss it. I've been very, very fortunate in college to be in a place where it didn't matter and where most of the people who were really smart in science were women, just by dumb luck, in my class. I went to graduate school in a place that was very welcoming of women and I had no idea it was any problem. And then I went to the NIH as a postdoc and within a year and a half they offered me a job, so I never ever worried about it and I didn't think about it.

In retrospect, the first time it had ever become an issue was when I realized I was having trouble getting postdocs to work in my lab and I went to the chairman of our department and said, "You have a lot of postdocs applying; how come I never got one in my lab?" And he was very straight with me; he said, "Nobody wants to come and work with a woman." So that was the first time that I really hit it, so I never had any kind of bad experiences, or I never noticed them. I'm not really sure which, but I didn't pay any attention, I was naive about it. So I wasn't looking.

But just because Singer didn't see it then doesn't mean there wasn't a problem. As she noted in that 1992 interview - which was taken at a symposium on DNA - she seemed to be a token woman speaker:
Sure, there's a problem. I was pretty dumb not to know it. But there is a problem. Look at this symposium. Liz Blackburn is one of the moderators, that is, she's introducing people, and I'm the only woman who's speaking in the whole program. And that's crazy, because there's a lot of terrific young women who are doing marvelous science and speak very well. It's kind of crazy that I'm the only one in the Symposium. And I suspect that that's why I'm here. They must have looked at the list that they had and said, oh, we can't do this, someone will complain.
(As an aside, I know from my own experience that it can be easy not to notice bias if you are really focused on your work, and you aren't blatantly affected by it. But it's like one of those magic eye pictures where it looks like a bunch of dots, and then, suddently the 3D image jumps out at you - and that 3D image is easier to see every time you look. And sometimes I wonder how I could miss something so obvious. But I digress.)

She and her husband, attorney David Singer, also had three children. She told a Washington Post columnist in 1960 ("Motherhood 'Myth' Miffs Mother Who Works" (pdf)) that she didn't think her children would "turn out terrible" because she spent little time with them on weekdays.
"... I think my children are happy, alive, interested in the world around them, and not difficult to deal with," she said last week.
Mrs. Singer always tries to get home on time from her job at the [NIAMD] to play with the children before their bedtime. Even when she is in the middle of an experiment and is "tempted to stay late" in the laboratory, she heads for home, "taking my paper work with me to do late at night. The men around here can work much longer hours than I, but that's one of the compromises one has to make."
The last part doesn't sound much different from what many women scientists who are also mothers say today.

Singer continued her research in nucleic acids and was intensely involved in developing related policy. In she co-chaired the 1973 Gordon conference where the potential risks of recombinant DNA technology and helped organize the famous 1975 Asilomar conference that assembled guidelines for use of the technology in research.

She eventually rose to head the Laboratory of Biochemistry at the National Cancer Institute. Even though much of her time was spent on administrative duties, the research in her lab during that period made significant contributions to understanding the structure of the human genome.
Singer had begun to focus on a large family of repeated stretches of mammalian DNA called LINEs, or long interspersed nucleotide elements, that are present with very little variation in the genomes of all mammals. Focusing on LINE-1, a DNA sequence repeated and interspersed thousands of times in human chromosomal DNA, Singer concluded that it is capable of transposition, or movement and insertion into new places on chromosomal DNA. (It is, in fact, to this point the only known human transposable element.) She studied the precise mechanism whereby LINE-1 replicates and disperses copies to new locations along the genome. She also posited that the insertion of transposable genetic elements into new genomic locations can induce mutations in nearby genes, and that LINE-1 transposition played an important role in genetic diseases. Researchers later confirmed Singer's suspicion when they found that LINE-1 insertions into a gene whose protein product is required for blood clotting are associated with hemophilia.
 In 1988 she became President of the Carnegie Institution, a post she held until 2002. While she was there, she established the Carnegie Academy for Science Education (CASE), which worked to increase teachers' knowledge of science and provide them tools for teaching.

Over the years she has held a number of other posts, and amassed numerous awards and honors, including:
Read more about Maxine Singer:
Tags: ,

Categories: ,

Posted by Peggy K at 9:54 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Hina Chaudhry: Interesting Science from a Lab-Worn Doctor-Lady

Over on my Biology in Science Fiction blog I recently posted about an article by Tom Junod in men's magazine Esquire profiling UW scientist Mark Roth. The article was bad, in part because it painted a picture of Roth as an genius maverick who couldn't get a grants because his ideas were too brilliant, unlike the plodding never-had-a-fresh-idea scientists actually funded by the NIH. But it wasn't just that. It was the writing, which read like a transcribed conversation with a valley dude who was completely unfamiliar with science and the way it's practiced.

Now Carl Zimmer points out another article in the latest Esquire - this one by Lisa Taddeo - that's equally bad. There's the flip conversational tone and use of odd analogies*, and, as a bonus, "who'd believe this normal-looking woman is a scientist."

But now look here, a woman. She is a pretty lady of Pakistani heritage who highlights her soccer-mom layers, which you don't expect from a lab-worn doctor-lady. And she's got ideas. Wild ones. Hina Chaudhry believes she can do what the body can't: fix the dead parts.
Highlighted layers and ideas? Amazing! And is the "soccer-mom" description a dig at her style?

It's a shame the writing is so bad, since Chaudhry's research sounds quite interesting. She's been studying the role of the cell-cycle regulating protein cyclin A2 in heart development.

From the Esquire article:
Chaudhry says it was women's intuition. The holy-shit solution. It came to her during a seminar at UPenn when she was twenty-nine. They were discussing fruit-fly genes. How the head segment knows it's going to form a head and how the tail segment knows it's going to be a tail. "I just had this sudden realization that heart cells don't divide after birth in any mammal. They divide in the embryo, but they stop after birth," she says. "So I thought, That's it! We have to go back and study the basics of why and when heart cells stop dividing." If they could do that -- figure out what causes heart-cell division to turn off -- then perhaps they could find a way to turn it back on.
She's devised a method of introducing an expressed version of cyclin A2 into adult heart cells, which appears to allow the heart to recover from a heart attack. It's been successfully tested in rats and ultimately she hopes that the method can be used in humans.
Her idea was laughed at, at first. In part because she was young and a woman, she says. But now the medical world is sitting up, taking notes.

Chaudhry was recruited to Mount Sinai's Cardiovascular Institute by the director of Mount Sinai Heart, Dr. Valentin Fuster, and the medical center's Cardiovascular Research Center director, Dr. Roger Hajjar. She calls them the two greatest visionaries in the cardiac world. Along with their chosen one, this bright many-schooled angel, they are going to make Mount Sinai the leading thinker in the heart world. "We've had no therapies to reverse heart failure, to make a diseased heart normal again," says Hajjar. "This therapy may finally do that."

An angel and "chosen one" - that's a lot to live up to. Heart attacks are a top killer here in the United States, so anything that improves the survival rate would be a significant achievement. I suspect, though, that Chaudhry's methodology is further from being a clinical reality than the article might lead you to believe.
---

* From the description of what happens during a heart attack.
"Suddenly, soldier, this part of your heart is dead, only it's still in your body, attached to the good section -- the 90210 ventricle -- and the good part is smirking, it's saying, "Come on, rebuild yourself, man!"
Science articles rarely juxtapose a reference to a teen drama and a quote from an anthropomorphized internal organ in the same sentence (not to mention the gratuitous "soldier" reference), so this is very special.

Tags: ,

Categories: , , ,

Posted by Peggy K at 5:22 PM 6 comments

Monday, November 10, 2008

Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse: Wildlife Zoologist

Today's post is about a woman scientist doing some cool research.

Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, a Research Fellow at the Institute of Zoology at the Zoological Society of London, studies resistance to disease in wildlife, including wild boars and sea lions. However, some of her research subjects are much larger: the blue whales, gray whales, and sperm whales that migrate along the Gulf of California. She's trying to understand what diseases wild populations of these whales carry, but taking blood samples - the usual method of analysis - is impossible. Instead she and her research team have devised a novel method of sample collection (picture):

Her new technique involves using a 3.5-foot (about a meter) remote-controlled helicopter with Petri dishes attached to the craft's bottom. When the equipment is ready, Acevedo-Whitehouse and her colleagues work aboard a small boat, scanning the ocean for the whales' blows, which appear as a sprinkler mist shooting from the ocean surface. The mist contains the whale's exhalation of air, water vapor and sometimes mucus. Once the whale is spotted, an operator directs the helicopter directly above and through the mist, which sprays up onto the Petri dishes.
Any microorganisms collected on the Petri dishes are identified by DNA sequence analysis.

I wonder if the members of her research team squabble over who gets to run the mucus-collecting helicopter, which sounds like a lot of fun.

Acevedo-Whitehouse, who is originally from Mexico, chose to pursue her PhD in Europe because there were better opportunities ther for both her and her husband, who is also a scientist. A crude translation into English of what she said in an interview earlier this year:
I decided to come and study in Europe because wanted a place where my husband and I were able to conduct the studies that we are interested. In Mexico there was no chance, not for his area, which is neuroscience, or mine that is the study of diseases with molecular techniques. We're looking at a site where the two could do what we wanted, and found Cambridge.
After earning her doctorate at Cambridge, she joined the Institute of Zoology in London.

Acevedo-Whitehouse's ties to Mexico have been useful in her research. Her whale disease study is in collaboration with colleagues in Mexico, and she currently serves as the European delegate for the Mexican Society of Marine Mastozoology (SOMEMMA).

Tags: , ,

Categories: , , ,

Posted by Peggy K at 11:51 PM 3 comments

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Women Scientist win MacArthur "Genius" Fellowships

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation just named the recipients of the 2008 MacArthur Fellows. Twenty-five winners of the so-called "genius" fellowship will receive $500,000 with no strings attached over the next five years. Among this year's winners are several women scientists:

Andrea Ghez is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at UCLA who helped provide evidence for the first time that the center of our Milky Way galaxy is an enormous black whole. Since that discovery in 1998, she has continued to study the stars to help understand the evolution of galaxies. She commented on what the award means to her and her research:

"I am really thrilled," Ghez said. "I will be able to take more risks with my research than I could before. The current shortage of federal funding for science can lead scientists to take fewer risks, but my selection as a MacArthur Fellow will allow me to pursue new ideas and take risks."

The mother of two sons -- Evan, 7, and Miles, who will turn 3 in October -- says the MacArthur funding is "particularly exciting" for women in science.

"The MacArthur Foundation funding will allow me to be much more effective and flexible and will definitely help with the balancing act," she said.

Read Ghez's MacArthur Fellow profile.

Plant molecular biologist Kirsten Bomblies is a senior postdoctoral research associate in the laboratory of Detlef Weigel at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany. Her research has focused on how new plant species originate. From her MacArthur Fellow profile:
Her findings provide a surprising molecular genetic mechanism linking developmental and evolutionary biology, and thus may represent a key advance in both disciplines.


Rachel Wilson is a an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, who studies how sensory stimuli such as the sense of smell are encoded in the fruit fly brain. She told the Boston Globe:
"We study fruit flies partly because when you sit back and think about it, a little fruit fly is an amazing little creature," she said. "Nobody in the world can build a robot that does everything a fruit fly does."
According to Wilson's MacArthur Fellow profile her research is groundbreaking:
By developing experimental models that integrate electrophysiology, neuropharmacology, molecular genetics, functional anatomy, and behavior, Wilson opens new avenues for exploring a central issue in neurobiology – how neural circuits are organized to sense and react to a complex environment.
Developmental biologist Susan Mango is a Professor in the department of Oncological Sciences at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Her lab studies the development of the pharynx (or foregut) in the nematode C. elegans in order to better understand the formation and physiology of organs. Her research has also uncovered a relationship between calorie restriction and the regulation of genes that may effect lifespan. According to her Fellow profile her research combines approaches from genetics, genomics, ecology and embryology:
Through her multifaceted exploration of the integrative biology of nematode development, Mango provides critical insights into the complex process of organogenesis.
Finally, Sally Temple is the Scientific Director of the New York Neural Stem Cell Institute in Albany, New York. She studies how embryonic neural progenitor cells develop into the diverse types of neurons that form the adult central nervous system. She told the Albany Times Union that being a mother fit well with her scientific career:
Temple said her best creative ideas come to her unexpectedly, when she's relaxed and immersed in her quotidian routine: watching her kids' sporting events, scrambling to put dinner on the table, walking through her neighborhood.

"Being a scientist is a good career for mothers, because you can work at midnight while feeding babies," she said.

Watch her video interview:

Read Temple's official MacArthur Fellow profile.

Two women physicians also were named fellows:
  • Diane Meier is "a geriatrician who is shaping the field of palliative care and making its benefits available to millions of Americans suffering from serious illness.": profile, video
  • Regina Benjamin is the founder of the Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic. "With a deep, firsthand knowledge of the pressing needs and health disparities afflicting rural, high-poverty communities, Benjamin is ensuring that the most vulnerable among us have access to high-quality care.": profile
(hat tip to Steinn Sigurðsson at Dynamics of Cats for noting the awards had been announced)
Tags: , , , , ,

Categories: , , , ,

Posted by Peggy K at 1:28 AM 2 comments

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Science Careers: Why Did You Become a Scientist?

The journal Science has a "Science Careers" Facebook profile that has posted brief videos of scientists talking about why they went into science.

Molecular biologist Fan-Li Chou, PhD is currently an AAAS Diplomacy Fellow and Assistant Trade Director, Africa and the Middle East, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service for the USDA. She's also on the a board member of the San Diego chapter of AWIS. She talks about her research focused on the genetics of disease and her hope for the future of science. There is a bit of "rah rah join AAAS and subscribe to Science", but it doesn't dominate the interview.


Pamela Clark is a graduate student in molecular and cell biology at Howard University. She talks about how her interest in science developed and what she finds exciting about science. Both of her parents are life scientists so she "grew up in the lab".





Katherine Socha, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at St. Mary's College of Maryland. She talks about how she got interested in math and her research using "differential equations to describe the motion of water waves."





Note: You can also watch the videos at AAAS.org if you prefer to watch using RealPlayer rather than Flash.

(via The Urban Scientist's Science, Education and Society blog)
Tags: , ,

Categories: , , , ,

Posted by Peggy K at 7:07 PM 1 comments

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Think Science Now and Supporting Science Education

Big Think: Think Science Now is a project by pharmaceutical company Pfizer and other research organizations that video profiles 10 outstanding scientists. Once you have watched the videos (or even if you haven't), you can vote for your favorite. Pfizer will donate $1 per vote to science projects for classrooms through DonorsChoose.org.

The women scientists profiled so far:

  • Sarah J. Schlesinger, associate professor at The Rockefeller University, who is working on an HIV vaccine
  • Pardis Sabeti, assistant professor at Harvard University, who studies the evolution of the human genome
  • Sonia Patel, pharmacologist at Pfizer
  • Bonnie Bassler, professor of molecular biology at Princeton University, who works on methods to create new antimicrobial drugs

Note that the Think Science Now is only on week 7, so be sure to come back in a couple of weeks.

See DonorsChoose.org for more information on the programs waiting to be funded. You can also donate to the programs directly to get a special thanks.

Every donor receives an email "thank-you" message from the teacher, which is sent about a week after the project is fully funded.

In addition, if you complete a project's funding or give $100 or more, you will receive a "thank-you" package in the mail with student photos and hand-written cards; this usually arrives within 3-6 months of your donation.

(via Sandra at Discovering Biology in a Digital World)
Tags: , ,

Categories: , , , , ,

Posted by Peggy K at 8:06 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Where is she now? Mary-Dell Chilton


Scientific American is running a series profiling past Westinghouse (now Intel) Science talent Search finalists and winners. This week their focus is on Mary-Dell Chilton, who was a finalist in 1956 for "building a long telescope in a short tube." She was interested in pursuing astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but was discouraged from enrolling in astronomy courses.

"As a young female student, I had a hard time being taken seriously in those days," she says. Rebuffed by astronomy, she said, "The hell with that," and "never went back." She majored in physics but fell asleep in lectures and so switched to chemistry to finish her undergraduate degree.
In graduate school she found an interest in the fledgling field of molecular biology, writing her dissertation on bacterial transformation, followed by postdoctoral research at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Indeed, after her postdoc, because she was married to a professor in the chemistry department, she took a temporary job in U.W.'s microbiology department rather than trying to rise through the ranks somewhere else. "I thought to myself, at least I have the advantage of being a woman," she says. "My husband is the breadwinner, so I can just do what is interesting. I don't have to have a high-paying job."
Her research interests lead to a study of Agrobacterium - bacteria that infect plants. She and her colleagues found that Agrobacterium transfers DNA between itself and the genome of the infected plant. '' They further found that the disease-causing genes could be removed and the DNA transfer would still occur, leading to methods that produced the first transgenic plants.
Today [. . .] it's clear that Chilton's work revolutionized plant science. Although genetic modification is sometimes controversial, "the fact that it's possible scientifically and technically is amazing," says Philip Hammer, vice president of Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, which awarded Chilton the Franklin Institute Award in Life Science in 2002. "What she did is incredibly important in our understanding of genetics and relationships between bacteria and plants and bacteria and other organisms."
In 1979 she took a faculty position at Washington University in St. Louis, and four years later left academia to work for what is now Syngenta Corporation in North Carolina. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1985.

Chilton no longer works on company projects, and once again has the freedom to tinker in the lab.
"I work on what amuses me." Currently, this is gene targeting—telling the DNA where to go in the plant genome. No one knows if any useful technology will be developed from this idea, but Chilton is still having such fun that she has no plans to retire. "Not as long as I can get up and go to the lab," she says.
That sounds like a great way to do science.

More:
Image: SBI Distinguished Scientist: Mary-Dell Chilton
Tags: , ,

Categories: , ,

Posted by Peggy K at 11:18 PM 0 comments

Monday, May 12, 2008

Sixteen Women Elected to National Academy of Sciences - Chronicle.com

On April 29, the National Academy of Science announced their newly elected members, and 16 of the 72 inductees were women. The Chronicle of Higher Education points out that this is a significant increase over last year, when only nine women were elected, but still lower than the 2005, when 19 women were elected. The women who were honored:


  • Frances H. Arnold: Dick and Barbara Dickinson Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biochemistry, department of chemistry and chemical engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
  • Emily A. Carter: Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor, department of mechanical and aerospace engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.
  • Maureen L. Cropper: professor of economics, University of Maryland, College Park
  • Margaret T. Fuller:Reed-Hodgson Professor in Human Biology and professor of genetics, department of developmental biology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, Calif.


  • Gail Mandel: investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and senior scientist, Vollum Institute, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland
  • Claire E. Max: professor, astronomer, and director, center for adaptive optics, University of California, Santa Cruz
  • Carol L. Prives: DaCosta Professor of Biology, department of biological sciences, Columbia University, New York City
  • Lisa J. Randall: professor of theoretical physics, department of physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

  • Anjana Rao: professor of pathology and senior investigator, Immune Disease Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston
  • Johanna Schmitt: Stephen T. Olney Professor of Natural History, department of ecology and evolutionary biology, Brown University, Providence, R.I.
  • Theda Skocpol: Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
  • Elizabeth A. Thompson: professor, department of statistics, University of Washington, Seattle
Five of the 18 elected foreign associates were women:

  • Anny Cazenave: senior scientist, Laboratoire d'Etudes en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiales, Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), Toulouse, France (France)
  • Anne E. Cutler: professor, Institute for Cognition and Information, University of Nijmegen, and director, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Heilig Landstichting, Netherlands (Australia)
  • Caroline Dean: associate research director, John Innes Centre, Norwich, United Kingdom (United Kingdom)
  • B. Rosemary Grant: research scholar, department of ecology and evolutionary biology, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. (United Kingdom)
  • Janet Rossant: chief of research and senior scientist, Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario (Canada and United Kingdom)
While it's great to see talented female scientists gaining recognition, it's still appears that women are underrepresented. As Zuska points out, there are a number of arguments that keep getting trotted out in support of the status quo.

One of the favorite arguments seems to be that the percentage of women elected to the Academy is commensurate with the percentage of female science faculty members, so there must not be any discrimination. While it might seem reasonable, my biggest problem with that argument is that it assumes that if the percentage of women scientists elected to the Academy are representative this year, the numbers elected have always been representative. That simply hasn't been the case. According to the Membership Directory, in 1980 only a single women was elected, in 1985 there were only four, and in 1990 and 1995 only five*. In fact less than 10 years ago, in 2000, only 6% of the National Academy's members were women. Some of the recently elected women almost certainly were overlooked for membership in previous years. At the rate they are adding new members, they may never catch up.

* 1980: Eloise Giblett; 1985: Mary-Dell Chilton, Mildred Dresselhaus, Sandra Faber, Martha Vaughan; 1990: Gertrude Elion, Esther Conwell, Nina Federoff, Sarah Hrdy, Cathleen Morawetz, 1995: Clara Franzini-Armstrong, Lily Jan, Judith Kimble, Anne Krueger, Carla Shatz

Tags: ,

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Peggy K at 11:59 PM 3 comments

Monday, May 05, 2008

Blackburn and Steitz win the Albany Medical Center Prize

On May 2, the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research was awarded to Joan Steitz and and Elizabeth Blackburn. It is the first time that the award has gone to a woman since its inception in 2001. Even though the prize is fairly new, it's the largest monetary award - $500,000 - given for biomedical research in the United States.

Elizabeth Blackburn is the Morris Herzstein Professor of Biology and Physiology at the University of California San Francisco. She was given the award for her discovery and characterization of the enzyme telomerase. From the press release:

Before Dr. Blackburn’s research, the “clock” that determines cellular life was a mystery. Shortening of chromosomes, which carry key genetic information, continually occurs naturally over time until the telomeres become too short and the cell dies. She demonstrated that telomerase can “turn back the hands of the clock” by replenishing the chromosomes by “adding DNA back into their ends.”

In more recent experiments with a UCSF psychologist, Dr. Blackburn’s team has shown a direct link between low levels of telomerase and chronic stress that can promote early onset of age-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative disorders. Dr. Blackburn and her team are now exploring the potential role that the enzyme could eventually play in neurodegenerative and other age-related disorders. The goal of some current trials is to see whether telomerase can be inhibited in order to slow and perhaps halt the progression of cancer.

Joan Steitz is the Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale, where she is best known for "discovering and defining the function of small ribonucleoprotteins (snRNPs) in pre-messenger RNA". From the press release:
Dr. Steitz’ uncovering of the previously mysterious splicing process elucidates the science behind the formation of proteins, essential components of all of our biological processes including the intricate metamorphoses that occur as the immune system and brain develop. Understanding just how splicing occurs is important because it may someday enable scientists to prevent a variety of human genetic diseases. In, fact, many scientists believe that Dr. Steitz’ research will ultimately lead to breakthroughs in diagnosing and treating patients with lupus and other serious autoimmune disorders.
They are both clearly well-deserving of the prize.

ETA: Check out GrrlScientist's post for more about Blackburn and Steitz's research.

Tags: , ,

Categories: , ,

Posted by Peggy K at 9:59 PM 0 comments

Friday, April 11, 2008

How to Think About Science: Eveyln Fox Keller

Evelyn Fox Keller is an emeritus professor of the History and the Philosophy of Science at MIT. She originally trained as a theoretical physicist, receiving her PhD from Harvard in 1963. Her interests shifted, though, towards mathematical biology and the young field of molecular biology. In the mid-1970s she began to talk and write about her painful experiences as graduate student and the relationship between gender and science. This article about her in The Guardian has more about her background.

On the CBC Radio show "How to Think about Science" Evelyn Fox Keller talks about her career, how language and gender roles shape how science is done, and "science studies".

Science, according to its first practitioners, was a masculine pursuit. Francis Bacon writing in the early 17th century invited “the sons of knowledge” to pass through “the outer courts of nature” and on into “her inner chambers.” Science was male, nature female. And, according to Evelyn Fox Keller, this was no mere figure of speech – it had a shaping influence through the centuries on how science was imagined and how it was done. Evelyn Fox is emeritus professor of the philosophy and history of science at MIT, and a keen observer of the ways in which models and metaphors condition our understandings. In recent years she has been particular critical of the ways in which simplistic models of the all-powerful gene mislead public understanding of genetics and developmental biology. And her proposal with regard to what she calls “gene talk” is the same one she made in her pioneering Reflections on Gender and Science in the 1980’s: “change the terms of the discussion.” Evelyn Fox Keller shares some of her story and some of her thoughts on how gender, language, model and metaphor have coloured the practice of science.
I find her discussion of the role of language on public perception of what a "gene" is particularly interesting. Listen to the program (requires RealPlayer).

Evelyn Fox Keller's books mentioned on the show:



Tags: , , ,

Categories: , ,

Posted by Peggy K at 10:51 AM 0 comments

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)