31 July 2007

Scientists, Engineers Receive Highest U.S. Science Honors

Medals go to HIV researcher, State Department science adviser

President Bush honors 2006 National Medal of Science Laureate Robert S. Langer in a ceremony at the White House July 27. (© AP Images)

By Cheryl Pellerin
Staff Writer

Washington -- Twenty-seven scientists and engineers and three corporations have received the presidential National Medals of Science and Technology for 2005 and 2006, the United States’ highest honors in science.

Awardees work in fields that include mathematics and computer science, biological and physical sciences, chemistry, engineering and behavioral and social sciences.

Their discoveries have led to treatments for HIV/AIDS and the major cause of pneumonia, refinements of the Big Bang theory of the universe, advances in paleoclimatology and climate variability, forensic DNA fingerprinting and the Human Genome Project, the development of high-density microarrays for genetic analysis, the development of roadside and race track safety technologies, development of the cell phone and much more.

“The men and women we salute have been recognized with countless honors, including the Nobel Prize,” President Bush said July 27 during a ceremony at the White House. “And now they add to their deep and remarkable resumes the highest award a president can confer in their fields.”

Congress established the National Medal of Science in 1959 and the National Medal of Technology in 1980 as presidential awards.

SCIENCE AND DIPLOMACY

Among the eight 2006 Medal of Science recipients is Nina Fedoroff, a geneticist and molecular biologist from Pennsylvania State University who on July 18 became the new science and technology adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Fedoroff received the medal for pioneering work in the molecular modification of plants and for being first to clone and characterize corn (maize) transposons, also called mobile genes.

In the 1940s, Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock (Medicine 1983) discovered that some genes could move, Fedoroff said during a July 31 USINFO interview.

“Until then,” Fedoroff added, “geneticists believed that all genes stayed in their places on chromosomes, and they spent their time constructing maps that were based on the fact that genes didn’t move. Then McClintock came along.”

 

President Bush speaks at a ceremony honoring recipients of the 2005 and 2006 National Medals of Science and Technology July 27 at the White House. (© AP Images)

President Bush speaks at a ceremony honoring recipients of the 2005 and 2006 National Medals of Science and Technology. (© AP Images)

When Fedoroff began working on plant transposal elements, she said, she read McClintock’s genetic work and thought, “‘Wouldn’t it be really spectacular to be able to understand the molecular side of this?’ -- and that’s what I set out to do.”

One of the important things Fedoroff and her colleagues discovered, she said, is that sometimes the transposal elements they studied would “act like they disappeared, and sometimes they would come back -- they could stay off for generations and then come back,” she said. “The underlying mechanism is now something that people are studying very actively, calling it epigenetic modification.”

As science adviser to the secretary of state, Fedoroff said, her first job will be determining where science advice can make the most difference.

“I’d like to be able to serve diplomacy,” she said, “by identifying the right kinds of information and supplying it where it’s needed.”

HIV AND THE IMMUNE SYSTEM

One of eight 2005 Medal of Science recipients is Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. He has also been chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation since 1980, working as an administrator and a scientist.

He received the medal for pioneering understanding of how the human immune system is regulated and for his contributions to knowledge about how the AIDS virus destroys the body's defenses, leaving the body susceptible to deadly infections.

Since the early years of the AIDS pandemic, Fauci has helped “at the scientific level” to find “the mechanisms of pathogenesis of HIV disease,” he said during a July 31 USINFO interview, asking questions such as “how does the virus work, how does it destroy the body’s immune system, what are the pathways the virus uses to subvert the human immune system and what are the mechanisms whereby this virus is able to replicate so rapidly and destroy the body’s defenses?”

The reason that has become very important, Fauci said, “is that it has laid the foundation and framework for a rational approach to therapy of HIV-infected individuals. You can’t address the issue of drug development and/or vaccine development unless you understand what we call these pathogenic mechanisms of HIV.”

Fauci’s work during the 1980s and 1990s sought to explain why the immune system response to HIV is inadequate, whereas in the response to virtually every other infection, even deadly infections, ultimately, the immune system wins out.

HIV is unique, he added, “in that it has these mechanisms of pathogenesis which not only wreak havoc on the body’s immune system but also evade the body’s ability to eliminate the virus.”

The next steps in his research, Fauci said, “overwhelmingly” involve developing a safe and effective vaccine against HIV.

More information about medal recipients is available at the National Science and Technology Medals Foundation Web site.