Skip to main content

Blog Archives

Older posts
Newer posts

Spreading Science Knowledge Far and Wide

A woman gives a presentation to an elementary school class.

Seven Science 2.0 pioneers offer their perspectives on science, information sharing, collaboration, and the role of technology going forward.

Published May 1, 2010

By Adrienne J. Burke

Image courtesy of Studio Romantic via stock.adobe.com.

Surely you’ve noticed: The scientific community is undergoing a research-and-data-sharing sea change. Perhaps slower to take to Web-based dissemination than some professions, science—the endeavor for which the World Wide Web was developed—has gradually been adopting new online methods for distributing knowledge. Some say the changes could accelerate scientific progress.

From open-access journals to research-review blogs, from collaboration by wiki to epidemiology by Blackberry, networked knowledge has made more science more accessible more quickly and to more people around the globe than could have been imagined 20 years ago.

And it’s not just new media businesses that are pioneering the Science 2.0 movement. Traditional scientific journals are part of this social evolution too, innovating ways to engage scientists online and enable global collaboration and conversation. Even the 187-year-old Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences has joined the digital age. The Academy now permits free public access to selected online content and has digitized every volume dating back to 1823.

That wider, freer, faster access to scientific data and research results will benefit the world is, to many, intuitively obvious. “We work on the assumption that the reason we publish is to keep science moving forward,” says Public Library of Science founder Harold Varmus. “If everybody can see the work that we do, and new work is built on what’s come before, science moves faster.”

Varmus is among a cadre of iconoclasts calling for immediate open access to scientific papers. They’re impatient for colleagues to give up their allegiance to the conventional process that they say keeps new research under wraps for too long. And they’re eager for publishers to break out of business models that require a paid subscription to read the most current publications.

To be sure, some changes are easier advocated than adopted. The most esteemed peer-review journals have taken great leaps toward openness in the last decade. Some now help readers network with each other online or enable posting on their Web sites of commentary and conversations about scientific publications. Many make papers openly accessible after a certain time. But how to sustain a business that publishes peer-vetted, high-quality content without requiring payment for access remains a hotly debated question.

As Varmus himself points out, the essential importance of the scientific paper has a lot to do with why it’s not just for-profit publishers, but scientists themselves who are moving toward open access with such caution. “Publication is not an addendum to, but the heart of the career of scientists,” he says. “The way you’ve built a legacy is through your publication—it’s the most important thing you do.” To give up the emotional reward of seeing their research published in a distinguished journal is a lot to ask of scientists raised in this tradition.

Seed Media Group CEO Adam Bly hints at how the up-and-coming generation of scientists—the so-called “digital natives” who’ve never known a world without the Internet—might move science past the paid-access paper. Says Bly, “In a Seed research study, one scientist said to us, ‘The soul of your identity is on the Web, because it is your most direct form of communication out into the wide world. You have a great degree of control over how you present yourself, your ideas, and your findings, and it’s fast, and it’s free.’”

For help considering whether the desire for open access contradicts the value of peer evaluation and envisioning what the future of science publishing could look like, The New York Academy of Sciences spoke with Varmus, Bly, and five other pioneers at the forefront of the Science 2.0 movement. These experts in Web technology, publishing, law, and science have the vision and passion to change the future of the way you work. As Bly says, “Open science is not this maverick idea; it’s becoming reality.”

Harold Varmus: Co-founder and Chairman of the Board, Public Library of Science

This story originally appeared in the Spring 2010 edition of The New York Academy of Sciences Magazine.

Harold Varmus, a Nobel Laureate, President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and member of the Academy’s President’s Council, led the team of biomedical scientists who set out in October 2000 to liberate access to scientific research in their field by petitioning publishers to post peer-reviewed papers in free, public online archives.

Varmus and his cohorts ultimately launched a nonprofit open-access publishing venture, which achieved financial sustainability this year. The Public Library of Science journals—there are now seven of them at www.plos.org—make scientific papers immediately available online, with no charges for access and no restrictions on subsequent redistribution or use, as long as the authors and source are cited, as specified by the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Would you define what you mean by “open access.”

Some people think that if their content is online it’s “open access.” That’s not the case. “Public access” is what the National Institutes of Health now operates under; if your work is supported by the NIH, then you must be sure that it’s available in less than a year on a public database like PubMed Central. That was a big victory for us, but it’s not anywhere near the goal.

True “open access” is different from “public access.” It means that the author holds the copyrights, that the journal places the work immediately and freely in the public domain under a Creative Common license or something equivalent to it, and that the work is in public libraries and available for all kinds of reasonable use, as long as attribution is maintained.

Have scientists been slow to embrace submitting their work to open access journals?

There’s now pretty wide acceptance of Public Library of Science journals, but most of my colleagues are still tormented by the need to publish in Nature, Cell, and Science, which are not open access journals. This is about much more than just publishing; it’s about values in the scientific academic community. Biomedical trainees are completely obsessed with the idea that they can’t get a job unless they publish papers in Nature, Cell, and Science. This is unfortunate, because those journals are going to be the last to go completely open access.

PLoS is now publishing far more research than any of those journals, isn’t it?

Yes. We publish over 600 articles a month. The only way you really can change the culture is to take on those top journals, so we decided we would publish two journals, PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology, to compete with the very best.

We’ve achieved a high level of credibility for PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology. They’re so-called high-impact journals. But to do that means rejecting a lot of articles, which gets expensive because of the costs of reviewing articles that do not get published. We afford those two journals because we make very modest amounts of money from other higher volume journals and we cover the cost of the whole enterprise by balancing things out.

What about the importance of the impact factor in scientific publishing?

The impact factor is a completely flawed metric and it’s a source of a lot of unhappiness in the scientific community. Evaluating someone’s scientific productivity by looking at the number of papers they published in journals with impact factors over a certain level is poisonous to the system. A couple of folks are acting as gatekeepers to the distribution of information, and this is a very bad system. It really slows progress by keeping ideas and experiments out of the public domain until reviewers have been satisfied and authors are allowed to get their paper into the journal that they feel will advance their career.

What are some ways PLoS is taking knowledge-sharing to the next level?

One of the most important developments is not particular to open access journals, and that is the addition of online commentary. Here’s our opportunity to make every article an occasion for conversation and a way to have another kind of evaluation. I can imagine search and promotion committees of the future spending more time looking at the kind of commentary that a paper has elicited than calculating impact-factor scores.

We’ve tried another experiment in the last few months called PLoS Currents. We’ve done this with one subject so far—influenza, a topic of great interest with a need for rapid publication. We invite people to post in PLoS Currents anything that can be looked at by a board of curators in 24 hours. The point is to get an article or an idea or a single result into the public domain quickly so people can build on it.

Look at PLoS Currents: Influenza on our Web site and you’ll see it’s been quite a nice experiment. Some postings look like full-fledged articles, others look much more primitive, but most have anywhere from a few to 10 or 20 commentaries attached to them. This is a way for scientists to get others to comment while they’re still working.

Information can also be aggregated and put together in very useful ways on sites that we’ve been calling Hubs, a project still in development. The idea is to try to wrest deeper ideas out of aggregated material without violation of copyright. We hope to create communities that migrate to these sites every day and then use them as platforms for fostering their field. This is another way to make science more energized.

What would be one technical fix you’d wish for right now to enable more sharing of science?

We have problems about sharing in our community that are not very technical, and it’s important to keep those in mind. Getting people to share their reagents, their mice, their plasmids—there’s a problem. People seem to forget that they were paid by the government or by some charitable agency or an institution to do this work and that they don’t own it. Say you made a new transgenic mouse 10 years ago or even two years ago and somebody else wants it.

You ought to give it to them, and you don’t need cloud computing to do that. Before we make all sharing digital, let’s remember that there are some simple things that reflect community values that we don’t subscribe to with the kind of enthusiasm we should. Of course, we’d also like to see everyone publishing more papers in open-access journals, especially at PLoS!

Adam Bly: Founder & CEO, Seed Media Group

After a three-year stint researching cancer at Canada’s National Research Council while still a teenager, Adam Bly set out to launch a magazine to cover “the 21st century scientific renaissance.” Five years later, his Seed Media Group has expanded beyond its glossy print flagship, Seed, to launch several online products serving science, including: ScienceBlogs.com, a social media site reaching more than 2.5 million readers; ResearchBlogging.org, which aggregates and feeds to relevant journals blog conversations about the peer-reviewed research that they publish; and ScienceWide, a platform that aims to drive advertising dollars to support open-access science publications and other innovative online science tools. Bly’s company’s mantra: “We are inspired by the potential of science to improve the state of the world, and we make media and technology to help realize that potential.” 

What do you mean when you say that science publishing needs to adopt a digital core?

Science has gone digital. Open science is not this maverick idea; it’s becoming reality. About 35 percent of scientists are using things like blogs to consume and produce content. There is an explosion of online tools and platforms available to scientists, ranging from Web 2.0 tools modified or created for the scientific world to Web sites that are doing amazing things with video, lab notebooks, and social networking.

There are thousands of scientific software programs freely available online and tens of millions of science, technology, and math journal articles online. What’s missing is the vision and infrastructure to bring together all of the various changes and new players across this Science 2.0 landscape so that it’s simple, scalable, and sustainable—so that it makes research better.

How will that happen?

To affect this kind of change is a grand challenge and will take the participation of many stakeholders—from government agencies to funding bodies to scientists themselves. The next generation of PIs is already establishing new behaviors. They feel comfortable blogging, using social media tools, and using wikis to advance their research. It will take the big institutions to support open-access journals, for example. And it will take technological innovation in the form of software that is purpose-built for this unique community and its set of challenges.

The culture of science resists change to science itself, and it’s important that it does. Part of that is practical: nobody sets rules for all of science. So it might take 10 or 20 years or more to effect a complete transformation. We’re talking about something as fundamental and important as modernizing the architecture of science.

What are some ways your company is contributing to this transformation?

We’re listening to scientists and introducing software and digital and social media platforms to help spur and support this transformation. Any scientist who blogs anywhere can now go onto ResearchBlogging.org and download free software that we’ve built that allows them to easily affix to a post the digital object identifier (DOI) of the scientific paper they’re blogging about along with some metadata.

We’re aggregating all of the conversations that are happening around that specific paper, and, through ResearchBlogging Connect, feeding the conversations back to scientists and journals in the form of widgets and RSS feeds. Now, when you’re reading the paper online, you see a feed of blog posts associated with that paper coming from across the Web. So in this example, we’re tackling post-publication peer-review and working to connect analog to digital in a way that’s seamless and useful to the scientist.

It sounds like you could have a new way of measuring a paper’s impact.

There are a lot of people trying to bring forth some new ideas about how to create more dynamic indicators. There are people merging scientometrics with data visualization, and there’s amazing work being done at universities around the world to develop new ways of measuring scientific progress. One thing we’re really interested in at Seed is whether blogs and the conversations we’re now organizing can serve in any way as an indicator of the momentum of scientific ideas. Technology can afford us more dynamic intelligence and useful knowledge.

James Boyle: Founding Member, Board of Directors, Creative Commons

James Boyle is a widely published leader of the global discussion about the ways that current copyright, patent, and trademark laws stand in the way of innovation by interfering with access to information that is in the public domain. He was one of the original board members of Creative Commons, which works to facilitate the free availability of art, scholarship, and cultural materials by developing licenses that individuals and institutions can attach to their work.

And he was a co-founder of Science Commons, which aims to expand the Creative Commons mission into the realm of scientific and technical data. In 2000 he joined the faculty at Duke University, where he is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. He is also a board member of the Public Library of Science.

What do you see as the current problem with access to science knowledge?

Science knowledge generation has gone digital, but our method of knowledge processing is still analog. Most scientific literature is behind pay walls. You may be able to find it with Google, but you probably can’t read it. That’s Science 1.0: You don’t have access unless you’re sitting in a great research university where it’s free, and you certainly can’t send a robot to crawl the literature to create a mini index of all the articles, and cross index them and see whether, for example, a particular gene known by multiple names is referenced by them.

Is the prestige attached to publishing with closed journals part of the problem?

Right now, if your article gets into Nature or Science it’s a big help in getting tenure and grants and retaining grad students. That’s important—we should encourage people to publish. But perhaps we could refine the incentives so that you get more of a bump for publishing openly. I would like to see people’s resumes say when their database has been downloaded more than 1,000 times. You want the prestige economy to reward the prosocial behavior, not the anti-social behavior.

So, how can incentives be changed?

When you’ve got centrally funded science, it should be a pretty easy cascade to start. The funders get much more bang for their buck if they do this. You’re actually saving the public money and increasing the yield of every research dollar. 

Once the idea can be explained to people, it makes an enormous amount of sense. I tell scientists, “There are a billion people connected to the Web. At least one of them has a smarter idea about what to do with your data than you do.”

Their first take, though, is “Oh, great. You’re going to force me to annotate my data and put everything out there. You’re going to troll it and publish ahead of me. I’m going to get no credit, I’m not going to get tenure, and I’m going to end up living under a dumpster. And you’re going to win the Nobel Prize.” That mindset is the big obstacle.   

We need funders to say that a condition for the funding is data deposit in an open, accessible format. That’s beginning to happen—the public-access mandate from NIH is beginning to make the literature openly available. But we’re just at the beginning.

Beyond social/cultural issues, what else needs to change?

Nobody ever wants to fund infrastructure because it’s boring, but enabling Science 2.0 is the Eisenhower freeway system of the mind. And then we need to get past the legal restrictions so that we can have technologies that troll for data, make sense of it, and import it mechanically.

How is Science Commons addressing those issues?

We’re sort of the public interest lawyer to the sciences. Say you want to use a database which was generated in Europe. We come up with a data protocol, a legal tool, which says “this gets your data free to the greatest extent possible in every jurisdiction in the world that we have lawyers in” (and we have lawyers pretty much everywhere, because a lot of really smart lawyers have volunteered to produce this high-quality tool).

We’re also attempting to show people what it might look like if you could wire together all this open stuff. We have a project called the Neuro Commons which is putting all the publicly available neurological literature and open databases together in a vast, open network that anyone can download, use, or build upon.

We’ve had high-throughput arrays, robotization, in silico studies, genetic sequencing, and the personal genome. All of these were supposed to catapult us off into a scientific revolution but didn’t. It reminds me of what people were saying about the personal computer in 1985: “This thing’s just a paperweight. What does it do for me?” The answer was, “Nothing until it’s wired together with all of the other ones.” Then suddenly you can’t imagine being without it.

Anurag Acharya: Founding Engineer, Google Scholar

Computer scientist Anurag Acharya and colleague Alex Verstak were onto something big when they took a break from building the Google Web index to focus on improving the rankings of scholarly articles within Google searches. The result of their sabbatical was Google Scholar beta. The specialized section of the larger Google search engine, which was launched in late 2004 and is now managed by a team of four people, has been transformational for enabling people to get their hands on all the world’s scholarly publications from their desktop. Acharya says the goal of Google Scholar is simple: a resource for anyone to find all scholarly literature across all disciplines, languages, and time periods.

Did your interest in creating Google Scholar stem from a need you saw in your own academic experience?

It was an experience I had as an undergraduate back in India. I grew up on the Indian Institute of Technology campus in Kharagpur. My uncle was a faculty member, and doing research was what the cool people did, at least in my head. I thought you did some work, and you wrote it up and you sent it for publication, because that’s what people do. You go to the library, you look up citations, you follow references, and you learn what you can.

If the papers don’t exist in your library, you write letters to people—this is 1985—and some fraction of them send you back their reprints. You send your own paper out for publication, and the reviews from the U.S. come back saying, “This is all very smart stuff, but you’re making this key assumption that is four years out of date.” So you’ve gone through all this effort and ultimately what you have done is not relevant because you didn’t know what was already being done.

With Google Scholar, first and foremost we make it possible for you to find the literature. Whether you can read it is a more complicated problem, but if you don’t know it exists, you have no hope.

Has it been difficult to persuade publishers to permit you to index their paid-subscription content?

Oh, yes. I started talking to publishers in 2001. We’re now indexing all the major publications, publishers, and societies, but it was a slow process. Initially the scholarly publishers didn’t believe that scholars used a lowly thing like a search engine. I’m serious. I had to convince people that researchers do use this. It was a mindset that search engines are used for casual things and not for real research. The attitudes really have changed.

If you could have some problem solved immediately, what would that be?

If I had one silver bullet I would apply it to translation. We index papers in every language that has any significant number of papers. We have a feature that allows you to find related articles, and relatedness can jump across language. All of this is trying to facilitate discovery.

A Google group has been working on a translation feature for many years now. There are groups that are using it to point to open-access journals and outside the English-speaking countries to make it possible for people to read papers that are not originally in English. Translation could open up the space to a population that previously we have not had an opportunity to reach.

Timo Hannay: Publishing Director, Web Publishing, Nature Publishing Group

A doctor of neurophysiology based in London, Timo Hannay manages Nature.com, Naturejobs.com, Natureevents.com, Nature Methods and Nature Protocols. He is organizer of Science Foo Camp, an annual interdisciplinary scientific “unconference” at Google headquarters. And he was a contributor to The Fourth Paradigm: Data Intensive Scientific Discovery, a collection of essays that envision the future of discovery based on data-intensive science. In the “interests” fi eld on his Nature Network profile, Hannay lists just one: “Making the most of the Web in scientific communication.”

You have called the Web “the ultimate global collaborative medium” and science “the ultimate global collaborative pursuit.”

Yes, that’s one of the reasons why I decided to work on the Web in science. Tim Berners-Lee originally considered the Web a scientific communication means. But ironically it hasn’t been scientists and the research community pushing the Web to its limits. It’s my job to try and make the Web more useful as a scientific communication medium. 

The volume of data is important and has profound implications, but an even more profound change will be if it’s all linked together. It’s going to be messy. We’re going to be using tags and microformats and ontologies and links and all sorts of strategies. But one way or another we’re integrating this data more and more. It’s not the volume of data, it’s the interconnectedness of it that’s critical in my mind.

Some would say that one of the obstacles to connecting scientific data is the traditional method of scientific publishing that doesn’t permit open access to research.

The fundamental issue is that the unit of contribution to the scientific knowledge base has become the paper. Journals grew up as a means for scientists to be able to share their discoveries and ideas. The incentive for doing so was that by publishing in journals their contributions would be recognized by citation and other means. So, you have this pact: be open with your ideas and share them through journals and you will get credit. 

Publishing in peer-review journals is no bad thing. I work for a company whose main business is publishing peer-review journals. They’re useful. However, we need to move beyond the view that peer-review publications are the only kinds of significant contributions that scientists make to the research process. A classic example would be genome sequences.

Large teams of scientists put enormous amounts of effort into providing genome sequences. Fundamentally, their contribution is making that data available to other scientists to draw insights from it. They can also provide reagents and materials to other scientists, or they can provide software and code and algorithms.

There are all kinds of ways in which scientists can contribute to the global endeavor. And yet one type of contribution, the peer-reviewed publication, has priority over all the others in the way that it’s measured and in the way that credit is assigned. The incentive structure has not caught up with what we really want scientists to do. We do want them to be able to share their ideas and their data and their reagents and so forth as well as publish traditional peer-review research reports. 

At Nature Publishing Group we try to be open to new ideas and try them out. From making tagging of scientific information possible to things like Nature Network and Nature Precedings which are venues for scientists to be able to share information with one another more informally and more immediately than they could through a scientific journal. Some things worked well and some didn’t, but that’s the nature of trying to understand a new medium and how it can be harnessed to best effect. I think the only way to effect change is by the funders, publishers, the scientists all working together.

John Wilbanks: Executive Director, Science Commons

John Wilbanks was named one of “50 visionaries who are changing your world” by the Utne Reader, and a “Revolutionary Mind of 2008” by Seed Magazine. He writes the Common Knowledge blog on Science Blogs and is known simply as Wilbanks on Twitter. As VP for Science at Creative Commons, he runs Science Commons from an office at MIT. Wilbanks joined Creative Commons from a Fellowship at the World Wide Web Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Previously, he founded and led to acquisition the bioinformatics company Incellico.

How is Science Commons different from Creative Commons?

The primary way that we convey scientific knowledge is to compress it down into text and distribute that through a journal. But with the Internet we can now distribute a lot of the tools, data, stem cells, and so forth that used to simply be described in the paper. Making data useful to people who didn’t generate it is the most important problem, and it requires an enormous investment of time, infrastructure, curation, data standards, standard formats, and giant computers that can store it. If you add the law to that complexity, you have what we would call an NP-hard problem. Unsolvable.

When we got into this, we thought that the way we license software or literature was going to be the solution—that a Creative Commons license would take care of the problem. But data is much more foundational than literature or software and it’s more like the Web than it is like software. In other words, we all take software and run it, but the human genome is the knowledge equivalent of the Internet—it’s the common language of biotech, and if that foundational architecture imposed down-stream restrictions it would really screw things up.

The genome being in the public domain was much better than the genome being licensed. Imagine if every time a distributed annotation server ran across the genome it had to attribute whoever put that piece of genome online?

What we use instead of the law there is citation. You know that if someone published the first paper about that piece of the genome, when you write your paper you should add a citation to it. Citation norms scaled much better than the legal aspect of licensing. So, we stopped working on licensing for data and we started working on public domain pools for data. We worked on a tool called CC0—Creative Commons zero—which is a legal tool that achieves a legal status that is similar to the public domain. The idea is to waive the rights that are associated with data.

Let’s say you and I try to generate something like the genome now. If we had the money, we could sequence both of our genomes in a couple of days. But there are little bits of copyright that stick around data when you put them into a database in the U.S. They attach not to the data itself, but to the look and feel and the structure of the database. It’s unclear to many people where those rights stop and start, so the first thing CC0 does is waive those elements. 

If we want to have that data be interoperable with the public genome, we have to get rid of the database rights and the copyrightable pieces of it. The second thing CC0 does is get rid of those database rights. If we can make things legally interoperable, then the only problems we leave are the monstrously complicated technical and semantic ones. 

So, we wrote the Science Commons Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data. The first two requirements are: waive your intellectual property rights to the extent they exist, and don’t put a contract on your data. The third requirement is to request behavior through norms, not through the law. That’s about using citation, not attribution. In science, citation scales in a way that attribution doesn’t, because attribution is tied to this very old way of thinking about copyrightable object as opposed to massive data structures.

What would be one change you’d put at the top of your wish list?

It would be for the various funding agencies to put meaningful requirements or evaluation systems in place for sharing data and tools, not just papers. Right now, there’s no incentive to go through the effort of curating, annotating, and posting your data. The biggest thing the NIH could do would be to begin looking at a two-pronged mandate, similar to the open-access literature mandate, and provide minimum requirements for sharing data that you generate.

That would create incentives for researchers to get their data online and share their tools and it would create an environment where some of the startups can have success. In the absence of putting some teeth behind those requirements, all we’re going to see is an increase in the number of PDFs deposited, and I don’t think that revolutionizes scholarly communication.

Stewart Wills: Online Editor, Science

On his Twitter profile, Stewart Wills describes himself as the “aging online editor of a scientific journal, trying to stay young in 140 characters or less.” An earlier adopter than many a “digital native,” he’s been Tweeting diligently, usually several times a day, since June 2008 about all things science and media. In 2000, when he completed a PhD in geological sciences at Columbia University, Wills joined Science. His principal goal at present, he says (via his Linked In profile), is, “Keeping the Science site moving forward, to provide the best possible value and utility to users, the scientific community, and the public.”

How is your publication responding to the move of science onto the Web?

At Science we pay a lot of attention to how the digital natives are changing everything. We have a set of users with new expectations, new assumptions, new ways of learning that we in publishing need to figure out how to address. As an editor working with a scientific publication, I have an interest in making our content as available as possible and serving the community as well as possible. Whatever the business models we’re dealing with, we have to find a way to serve the community on this.

Moreso than the general population, scientists are do-it-yourselfers. If there’s a tool available, they figure out how to use it. The Web is one huge, highly flexible tool. Certain groups of scientists are in there using open notebook science and open wetware and various things like that to do their jobs. They are exploring new ways of doing science. For that reason, we increasingly hear the community’s need not just for open access but for open science—for open data.

How are you changing the way Science makes research and data available? 

The data supporting the papers has always been free on our Web site, and Science has had full text on the Web since 1996. Now we’re doing some of the more obvious things to improve the syndication of research results—RSS feeds, Twitter, and Facebook. We’re active on these social channels because that’s where the users are having conversations. It’s a way to capture some of the conversation around our content. And we are experimenting with adding different kinds of content, such as a pilot with the Journal of Visualized Experiments to create video methods to go along with certain papers. 

Would you say that scientists who aren’t on Facebook or following Twitter are at a competitive disadvantage?

That’s an interesting question and I’ll answer it this way: It’s going to depend on the network that you’re following. I heard Cameron Neylon, a senior scientist with the U.K.’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, speak at a conference recently. He filters his content through a tool called FriendFeed. It’s the most sophisticated use of tools like Twitter or Facebook to deal with the information glut: a collection of friends he trusts helps him with discovery by filtering papers that are of interest to him. It’s a certain kind of peer review.

How Math is Like a Ladder to the Moon

A professor writes on a blackboard in a college lecture hall.

For unsolved time-dependent processes like the motion of fluids, I want to try to find a few important parameters and then successively add information to build up a better and better picture—and all of this using the methods of algebraic topology.”

Published May 1, 2010

By Dennis Sullivan, as told to Abigail Jeffries

Image courtesy of Scott P. Moore.

My interest in mathematics began when I was nine or ten years old. I liked to think about ideas and do math puzzles, and I noticed there was some structure of prediction. Later on, I came to know this was called statistics, related to chance events. This ability to predict amazed me. I was a late bloomer academically in the sense that I didn’t have any pressure to study when I was growing up. In college I got back into academics again and made a fresh start. I was able to attend Rice University in Houston, which at the time was like a scaled-down Caltech. I rediscovered my academic self there after being a quasi-juvenile-delinquent, running around working on hotrods!

There’s an interesting theory that, among mathematicians for example, a person may discover they like mathematics and have a strong aptitude. They get so involved in it that their personality development is arrested at that point. They just stop caring about the finer points of their finishing, you might say. I’ve seen this in every one of my six children. They’re like little mathematicians or little scientists, then for some reason that usually washes out. They get interested in other things. For some of us, like me, it didn’t wash out.

After receiving my BA from Rice in 1963, I received my doctorate in 1966 from Princeton, where I wrote my thesis on triangulating homotopy equivalences. This work became part of surgery theory, which describes a way of manipulating mathematical spaces called manifolds.

Analyzing Mathematical Concepts

Almost everywhere you look, when you start to analyze a mathematical concept, it’s as if there’s this tightly woven Oriental rug covered by dried leaves. You sweep away the leaves, and you start finding out about it, and everywhere you look the beautiful tapestry is there to be uncovered. You can sweep anywhere and find it underneath, with all sorts of fantastic structure.

I was a member of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France from 1974 until 1997. IHES was modeled after the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. It was a wonderful place for people like me who like to work on math all the time. I had no duties. I was given an office and a research environment with a library and a secretary. My colleagues were the best in the world, and I enjoyed the steady flow of visitors. I just worked on math. It was paradise.

While at IHES, I did some mentoring of people who had recently received their PhDs or who were on sabbatical and focusing on their research. The atmosphere was wonderfully collegial. Our lunches would start at one o’clock and we’d sometimes still be sitting there until tea at four o’clock, writing ideas on the backs of napkins.

During that time, and due to the six-month academic year in France, I was able to take advantage of an offer for the Einstein Chair at the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1981. So, I split my time between IHES and CUNY until 1997. I would move to each place for about six months. When my fourth child was in first grade, the back-and-forth schedule wasn’t tenable, so I substituted my current position as professor at SUNY Stony Brook for the position at IHES.

Receiving the National Medal of Science

The awards I have received have all meant a great deal, but the National Medal of Science in 2004 was special. At the White House we met George Lucas (which thrilled my 11-year-old son); the developer of the liver transplant which had saved the life of a relative one year before; and the inventor of the first computer games, Simon and Pong. All of us were receiving either science or technical awards from President Bush.

The Wolf Prize in Mathematics this year was for Shing-Tung Yau’s work on curved spaces and for my work in algebraic topology and conformal dynamics. Topology is an approach that allows one to ask scientific questions that are more qualitative in nature, such as whether or not a system would evolve and then come back to its original configuration, or whether there are cycles, and if so how many.

These are questions that can be expressed in words, without formulae, and they often involve integers or whole numbers or counting. By moving from formulaic considerations, which turn out to be very complicated, to a place where you try to define things in such a way that they can be counted, a problem becomes easier to understand.

You can study complicated spaces of many dimensions using algebraic topology. Think of the three-dimensional space we live in as a large hotel full of rooms, little boxes next to each other that fill up the entire space. Algebraic topology breaks down the hotel space we might otherwise think of as being continuous into all these little boxes put together.

Discrete Mathematical Descriptions

You can list these boxes on a computer or in your mind and give them names, and you can record how pairs of boxes relate to each other. If you give me the names of all the boxes and you tell me their relationships, then I can assign a purely algebraic description to each box and start applying algebraic topology to reconstruct many of the properties of the overall space.

We need discrete mathematical descriptions like these that can be inserted into a computer computation in an efficient way. Even though computers are very fast, it’s easy to generate problems that are much too big for them. If you’re trying to apply computers to study the flow of blood around the heart in the human body, this process is happening in space with a lot of little particles moving around. You cannot input an accurate assemblage of points and the way they all interact and ask a computer to compute that; it’s overwhelming.

In my work with conformal dynamics, I consider dynamical systems (processes that evolve in time) in small dimensions to make them more manageable. Some processes are reversible, meaning that they can run backward and forward, but others, such as a fire, are not. These non-reversible processes are more complex, but you can study them in very small dimensions. They can be studied in discrete time to reveal a very interesting structure that’s beautiful and that can also be analyzed. In the world of conformal geometry, you see the amazing fractal patterns of the Mandelbrot set, for example. It’s extremely interesting mathematically, and the incredible intricacy has an explanation via conformal dynamics.

Technology to Prove Math Theorems

I started studying this around 1980. There were primitive computers then that could draw figures, and you could plot this out and see all sorts of fantastic patterns. Then, we started trying to prove things about them. You could observe them, but to prove them as math theorems required technology, new ideas, and research.

That’s what I was working on at IHES. To draw a comparison to music, this structure is as breathtaking as if you had only known rhythmic drums and suddenly I show you Mozart. It was totally unexpected that such an incredibly beautiful structure should be there in such a simple problem.

Math is actually a very robust field. There are a lot of new ideas coming forth, and a lot of progress is being made. Yet in many ways we’re still at the beginning. Sometimes you use a problem as a North Star to guide you.

You don’t actually solve it because it’s often not that tractable yet, but the first steps you take to solve it lead you to other steps. You find other things, other structures. It’s like building a ladder to the moon: you have to build the steps of the ladder, always moving out and up.

The Next 15 Years

I expect many new developments in the next 15 years. Complex data will be attacked with all of the tools available, and we will see ideas from physics gain in influence. New technological developments have already impacted my work. The conformal dynamics used computer computations to find out what to prove. This was not really possible before 1980.

We still need ways to do fluid simulation, and this was pointed out at the White House event by George Lucas’ animators. For unsolved time-dependent processes like the motion of fluids, I want to try to find a few important parameters and then successively add information to build up a better and better picture—and all of this using the methods of algebraic topology.

I want to keep working on this algebraic model of space and its geometry. That’s my goal in a nutshell, and I hope my work will be useful in the sense that people can apply it.

A New Science Partnership with the Univ of Nigeria

A birds-eye view of a city in Nigeria.

The partnership is an effort to boost learning and provide world-class resources to students in Nigeria.

Published April 23, 2010

By Adrienne J. Burke

Aerial view of Marina commercial business district Lagos Island Nigeria. Image courtesy of
Terver via stock.adobe.com.

The University of Nigeria, Nsukka, signed an agreement in February to enroll 300 faculty and 500 postgraduate students as members of the Academy’s Science Alliance program in an effort to boost learning and provide world-class resources. Noting that lecturers in many Nigerian universities lack access to international scholarly publications and resources due to funding constraints, Chima Nwanguma, a professor in the University of Nigeria’s Department of Biochemistry, says the agreement is significant because, “as many staff as possible will get the opportunity of unrestricted access to the online resources and archival materials of the Academy dating back 100 years. In this age, it is important to have international linkages and to be abreast of developments across the world of scholarship.”

The agreement was borne of the University of Nigeria’s interest in having access to the Academy’s content such as eBriefings, Annals volumes online, and conference Webinars for use in the classroom setting. With this agreement now signed, the Nigerian students will begin benefiting right away from the privileges of Academy membership.

Not a member of our inclusive and impactful community? Join today!.

New Insights into Science Teaching as a Profession

An empty and clean science lab at either a high school or college.

Data suggests that science comprehension among American high school students is middle of the pack compared to peer countries. Here are some tips for teachers to improve comprehension.

Published April 9, 2010

By Erica Nofi

Image courtesy of Khunatorn via stock.adobe.com.

The second event presented by the New York Science Education Initiative brought together more than 150 secondary science teachers, research scientists, and other educators to discuss the future of science teaching as a profession and the roles that scientists can play in improving education.

Sheila Tobias, a writer focused on math and science learning, presented the initial results of the Science Teaching as a Profession project, which she co-directs. Tobias and her colleague Anne Baffert conducted their research through their web site and in personal interviews with science teachers and science chairs. Beginning with the question: “Does your work life make you feel like a professional?” the team surveyed hundreds of secondary science teachers about the status of teaching, what it would take to retain teachers in this high-attrition field, and many other issues.

Improvement Needed in Science Comprehension

Although the research was opportunistic—depending on individual teachers to volunteer their opinions through online participation—rather than systematic, it provides valuable insight to the current state of careers in science teaching. The project led to a book of the same title, co-authored with Baffert and published by the National Science Teachers Association.

Tobias argued that the trend toward test-based assessment and teacher accountability has eroded the professionalism and status of teaching as a career, to the detriment of science education. She compared teaching to other professions, such as medicine and law, whose practitioners are highly-trained, self-policing, and place service over personal gain. Tobias outlined these and other identifiers of professionalism, and used teacher interview results to illustrate how returning the qualities of professionalism to teaching would improve teacher job satisfaction and retention, as well as overall educational quality.

Tobias concluded by noting that the U.S. was recently rated by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as 29th out of 57 countries in high school students’ science comprehension. While this statistic is upsetting, Tobias claimed it offers an opportunity to make a serious change in the teaching of science in this country, one that will give our students an advantage in the technology-centric markets of the future. The participation of practicing scientists in this process is vital both to the content and status of science education.

Challenges and Successes in the Science Classroom

Following Tobias’s talk, the audience broke out into small discussion groups, each of which included a scientist and a staff member from The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) as facilitator. The groups discussed their experiences teaching science and the potential of collaborating with scientists to improve science education.

Teachers, discussing their successes and challenges in the classroom, found that topics that relate directly to students and their lives were most engaging. Teachers reported that students responded best when the material was related to:

  • Their bodies
  • The immediate environment
  • Their futures and careers
  • Their idealism and ability to influence the world

The “Wow Factor” is also a tool to increase engagement:

  • Surprising demonstrations, a.k.a. discrepant events
  • Explosions
  • Extremes and awe, such as in Astronomy or Paleontology
  • Real materials, such as dissections, or extremely detailed models

Teachers presented extensive tool chests of engagement techniques, but when it came to challenges, two central topics quickly emerged: scientific thinking and math. Additionally, it was pointed out that sometimes it can be difficult to tell whether a student is struggling with a conceptual misunderstanding or a math difficulty. Teachers also shared that the best way to make math understandable is to provide context, whether by relating the math to the students’ lives, or by teaching the math through the science concepts.

Creativity and Thinking About Science

It was agreed that the key to teaching scientific thinking is the reintroduction of creativity to the classroom, a proposition that can be difficult when students expect test-based teaching methods. Some teachers said that by the time students have reached high school, they have already been trained to think of science as a subject of rote memorization.

Despite this challenge, many teachers have found success by placing students in the role of primary investigators rather than having them follow lab instructions. For example, one teacher had the students present their findings from unguided experiments at a mock conference.

What Scientists Can Bring to Classrooms

Teachers generally agreed that outside visitors can inspire extra interest and attention. Bringing scientists into the classroom can give students a real, relatable connection to the practice of science, as well as the opportunity to see themselves in the role of a scientist. Hearing scientists discuss the process they use in their labs can also help students understand scientific thinking.

In addition to directly relating their experiences in the lab, visiting scientists can also give students the chance to see their classroom teachers as ongoing learners, and scientists as former students. Seeing parallels between their learning process and the learning processes of teachers and scientists can also inspire investment in science learning.

What Teachers Can Learn from Scientists

Given the opportunity to interact directly with scientists, teachers suggested that they would use it both to improve their own understanding of science and to learn techniques to reach students. Many teachers mentioned that learning more cutting-edge science to bring to the classroom would help them engage students. They also wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the topics they are already teaching, and learn new ways of teaching them, including new demos or experiments to do with supplies already on hand. Particular interest was also expressed in discovering ways to integrate more scientific thinking, experiments, or current science into standards.

Scientists Can Also Learn from Teachers and Classrooms

Scientists at the event pointed out that they also have a lot to learn from classroom situations. Many scientists want to learn how to express the concepts in their work more clearly to general audiences, and graduate students in particular need experience, outreach, and teaching on their resumes.

While agreeing that bringing scientists into the classroom was a positive experience for all involved, both scientists and teachers shared some cautionary comments about the process. The outlook of the scientist is geared toward rigor, while a teacher is interested in the excitement of science—the two viewpoints may be difficult to reconcile, but have much to offer one another. Teachers also noted that both students and scientists need to be prepared for classroom interaction: students should prepare questions, while scientists should be briefed on the students’ level of understanding.

How to Connect Scientists with Classrooms

Scientists at the event overwhelmingly indicated that their colleagues are interested in becoming involved with K-12 education and value their experiences in schools. However, both teachers and researchers have difficulty making contact with willing partners—several individuals related bad experiences when looking for laboratories or classrooms with which to partner. Another complaint was that most scientists participate in “high-end” competitions, events, or programs, rather than in schools where improvement is most needed.

Many participants were interested in an online network or listing of schools and laboratories interested in partnerships, visiting speakers, mentors, and internships—the Academy’s ability to build communities may be an answer to this need. Scientists suggested that schools institute semi-formalized “lecture series” to attract graduate student speakers looking for experience. Another possibility is for research institutions to systematically encourage their faculty and staff to participate in school efforts.

How Can Scientists Support Teachers

The most important theme that arose in this final discussion was the need for mutual respect. Science teachers need the respect of the entire community, and if scientists are to help increase the effectiveness of science education, they must respect science teachers and demonstrate that respect. The support of scientists would be influential in the attempt to return professionalism to science teaching.

There are several ways for scientists to help engage the public in science education, beyond speaking in classrooms. Teachers at the event suggested that scientists could help involve parents and impress upon them the value and importance of science education—possibly through speaking to parents groups or giving evening demonstrations for parents. Scientists can also speak with or write to media outlets like newspapers, radio shows, and web sites, and encourage other scientists to participate.

Also read: Supporting Science Education for the Good of Society and Advancing Science Education in New York City

Developing Drugs for the Benefit of Society

A woman smiles for the camera.

Having nurtured her own strong scientific curiosity as a child growing up in New Orleans, Toni Hoover wants to help the next generation find what motivates them.

Published March 1, 2010

By Adam Ludwig

Toni Hoover.

Long before Toni Hoover became a senior vice president at Pfizer, she honed an interest in psychology by keeping an eye on the street life in her hometown of New Orleans.

The odd behavior of some of the local denizens fascinated her as a teenager, even if it was largely indulged as harmless eccentricity or regional flair. Today, she acknowledges that much of what captured her interest was in fact psychopathology.

Hoover took her early passion for understanding the underlying causes of abnormal behavior to Harvard, where she earned a BA, MA, and PhD in psychology. Early work as a clinical scientist in the neurosciences area at Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis in Ann Arbor, Mich., led to a project standardizing clinical assessment outcome measures to be used in clinical trials of treatments for Alzheimer’s patients. She went on to lead central nervous system drug development at Parke-Davis, overseeing the development of several medications, including Pfizer’s Lyrica, and has now worked for Pfizer and its legacy companies for 23 years.

Since 2006, Hoover has been site director of Pfizer’s Groton/ New London Laboratories, the company’s largest research and development facility. Her focus is on creating a vibrant, innovative, and productive environment for discovering and developing new medicines. In addition to making sure that the needs of the R&D colleagues are met, Hoover is responsible for the site’s compliance with state regulations, serving as the public face of Pfizer in dealing with legislative, public policy, and community relations.

An Invaluable Partnership

Three years ago, she was tapped to reassess Pfizer’s relationship with The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy), and set out to identify new ways in which Pfizer R&D could get “more bang for its sponsorship buck.” Encouraged by discussions with Academy leadership, which yielded new strategies for rejuvenating the relationship, Hoover made the case to Pfizer’s worldwide president of R&D to continue major sponsorship of the Academy.

Given the location of Pfizer’s corporate headquarters in New York City and the close proximity of its large R&D site in southeastern Connecticut, she argued that the visibility of Pfizer as a corporate sponsor of the Academy was invaluable, making support of high-profile Academy initiatives a natural fit. Upon approval of Hoover’s proposal, Pfizer renewed its support of the Academy as a Mission Partner.

Subsequently, she was asked to consider joining the Academy’s board. She accepted the invitation, and in 2009 became a member of the Board of Governors. Meanwhile, she has stepped up her own investment in the Academy by directing her personal contribution towards programs focused on advancing women and people of color in the sciences. She says these mirror similar educational outreach efforts by Pfizer in Connecticut to “support, spark, and delight” young people about scientific careers. Hoover takes special delight in witnessing the first green shoots of youthful inquiry, remarking, “You can see the ‘Aha!’ moment as they watch hands-on demos of the wonders of science.”

Encouraging Scientific Curiosity

At the college level, Pfizer offers summer internships aimed at getting undergrads interested in discovering and developing new medicines. Some of Pfizer’s collaborations with university science departments focus specifically on increasing the diversity of the pipeline of new talent, and Hoover believes that the Academy can further such efforts by developing skills among women and ethnic minorities, and by working to facilitate networking among scientists from those groups.

Hoover’s growing personal investment in the Academy capitalizes on the Pfizer Foundation Matching Gift program, which allows her to double her impact. And since Pfizer renewed its sponsorship three years ago, the number of Pfizer scientists who have joined the Academy has increased from 20 in 2005 to more than 366 today. This represents the largest number of scientists from any company and from any single corporate sponsor.

Just as Hoover has watched young people from Pfizer’s student programs go on to become working scientists—sometimes as researchers at her Groton/New London laboratories—she hopes to see the Academy raise its own crop of scholars and scientists. Scientific curiosity came naturally to Hoover as she was growing up in New Orleans, but she knows that it doesn’t grow on trees.

Also read: How Science Can Keep America Globally Competitive

About the Author

Adam Ludwig is a writer in New York City.

The Life of a Nobel Laureate Neuroscientist

A video camera.

New film explores Eric Kandel’s life, from escaping Nazi-occupied Vienna to becoming a Nobel Laureate.

Published October 16, 2009

By Adrienne J. Burke

Imagine Science Films will screen the feature film In Search of Memory this evening in Tribeca. The film, directed by German documentary filmmaker Petra Seeger, blends autobiography and history to recount the life of Academy President’s Council member Eric Kandel, widely considered one of the most important neuroscientists of the 20th century. Based on Kandel’s autobiography of the same name, the story illuminates scientific developments in humankind’s understanding of the brain’s role in recording and preserving memory.

In addition to archival footage and dramatic re-creations of Kandel’s childhood experiences in Nazi-occupied Vienna and his formative years as an emigrant in New York, the film features discussions with Kandel, friends, and family. Footage from Kandel’s public lectures in Vienna and New York, which explore both his professional and personal life, are also included.

Kandel, a professor of physiology and cell biology at Columbia University, was awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his groundbreaking research on the physiology of the brain’s storage of memories.

Also read: A Neuroscientist’s Search for Memory

A Doctor’s Journey: From Studio 54 to the Academy

A woman smiles for the camera.

Academy Life Governor Karen Burke is known for finding what’s exciting in NYC, crossing paths with everyone from Andy Warhol to Ralph Steinman.

Published September 1, 2009

By Adrienne J. Burke

Karen Burke

When Karen Burke reflects on her path to a career as a research scientist and medical doctor, she credits her mentors and supporters—inorganic chemist Michell Sienko at Cornell University who inspired her to pursue science; Harold Scheraga, then chairman of the Cornell Chemistry Department who became her PhD advisor; Ralph Steinman at The Rockefeller University, whose discovery of dendritic cells sparked her interest in dermatology; and her close friend in Manhattan, the artist Andy Warhol, who encouraged her to go to medical school and even brought her dinner during her grueling residency hours at Bellevue Hospital.

Today, Burke sees her long-time support of The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) as a way of returning the favor to the scientific community. She has been on the Academy’s President’s Council since 1998, served actively on the Academy’s Board of Governors for nine years, and will be appointed this year as a Life Governor.

She has passionately supported the Academy’s Committee on Human Rights of Scientists and was an early supporter of the Academy’s Scientists Without Borders program. She gives the gift of Academy membership annually to friends and family, including the science teachers at her sons’ schools. And her generous contribution to the Academy’s Comprehensive Campaign will help enable the Academy to continue promoting science literacy, building scientific communities, and disseminating new science and technology knowledge.

From Architecture to Chemistry to Medicine

Burke, who was raised in Swarthmore, Pa., had an interest in architecture when she won a scholarship to Cornell University. But her chemistry professors there encouraged her aptitude in science, and she graduated with a major in chemistry.

With her PhD advisor Scheraga at Cornell, Burke conducted theoretical quantum mechanical studies of protein folding as well as measurement of conformational parameters of amino acids in synthesized “sandwich” copolymers. After completing her PhD thesis at Cornell plus a nine-month stay at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, she returned to New York for postdoctoral research in cellular immunology at Rockefeller. “Ralph Steinman had just discovered dendritic cells in the liver and spleen.

Similar dendritic cells had been recently discovered in the skin, so I was stimulated to specialize in dermatology to investigate these so-called Langerhans cells,” she says. Burke continued research during her dermatology residency at New York University Medical School by studying clinically, and at cellular and molecular levels, the use of soft tissue implants (particularly various collagens) to treat indented scars and wrinkles and to stimulate wound healing. She also investigated immune reactions after treatment of skin cancer.

She now has a private practice for medical and cosmetic dermatology and dermatologic surgery and is on the faculty of the Department of Dermatology at Mt. Sinai Medical Center where she studies topical and oral antioxidants to reverse photoaging of the skin and to decrease the incidence of skin cancer. Burke has also been appointed to the US Food and Drug Administration General and Plastic Surgery Device Advisory Panel and is founder and president of the Karen E. Burke Research Foundation and of Longévité, Ltd.

“The Most Exciting Science Lectures in New York”

Burke also wrote four books on staying “fit for life” with dietary recommendations based on the science of insulin regulation and hormone interactions and a concentrated, 12-minute isometric stretching routine inspired by ballet and yoga. Her book Great Skin for Life describes a daily skin care regimen based on the science of maintaining and regenerating healthy, youthful skin.

Of Warhol’s influence, Burke says, “He, more than anyone, encouraged me to go to medical school. He said education becomes a part of you, and is something no one can ever take away.” And Warhol’s “Factory” crowd kept hours that let her have some social life outside of her studies. “I could sometimes work late and still go to the end of a ballet or a dinner or to Studio 54. I felt like I was seeing part of the ‘scene’ in New York,” she says.

Starting with the Committee on Human Rights of Scientists, Burke has expanded her involvement with the Academy and become a loyal attendee of professional meetings on emerging scientific topics as well as Science & the City public events. She says she especially enjoyed the “Science of the Five Senses” series last year that featured scientists paired with cultural figures: “These lectures are incredibly interesting and so much fun. I always take guests, and I’ve never had anyone disappointed,” she says. “They are truly among the most exciting science lectures in New York.”

Read more about Dr. Burke.

Green Chemistry? He Invented the Term

A man with his Husky dog pose outside for the camera.

“I hope that my work will highlight the power and potential molecular scientists have to help the world even more dramatically than we thought.“

Published May 1, 2009

By Paul Anastas, as told to Abigail Jeffries

Image courtesy of Jim Harrison/Heinz Awards.

I grew up in the small town of Quincy, Mass., where I lived on a hill overlooking one of the most beautiful coastal wetlands imaginable. When I was ten years old, the bulldozers rolled in. This upset me so much that I tried to fight it in the usual way by circulating petitions around the neighborhood.

Today perhaps two percent of the wetland still exists; the rest is a business park. My father who was a biology teacher said to me at the time that if you really care about something you have to understand it deeply in order to protect it. More than anything else, that set me on track to become a scientist.

After earning a BS in chemistry, I went on to graduate school where I focused on the total synthesis of natural products to make anti-cancer compounds. This research eventually became personally difficult because so many good people I knew were being diagnosed with and dying of cancer.

Roger Garrett, the founding chief of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Industrial Chemistry Branch, had followed my work on structure activity relationships. In 1989 he offered me a position at EPA where, instead of trying to treat or cure cancer by making new molecules, I was able to think about how molecules could be created so that they never cause cancer in the first place.

In 1991 I coined the term “green chemistry” and developed and launched the US EPA Green Chemistry Program. The concept expanded rapidly. Green chemistry wasn’t just about cancer-causing molecules; it was about toxicity from the point of synthesis through all phases of the chemical life cycle.

Meeting Economic and Enivronmental Needs

In 1997 I was awarded the EPA Silver Medal for designing and developing the program, which is currently based in the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxic Substances and is best known for administering the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards. The achievements of the award winners, excluding nominees, account for removing or preventing the generation of enough hazardous substances to fill a train of boxcars 200 miles long. And this has occurred while maintaining or increasing commercial profitability. Above all, the field of green chemistry has shown that economic and environmental needs can be met simultaneously.

After establishing the US EPA Green Chemistry Program, I served during the Clinton and Bush administrations as Assistant Director for the Environment in the White House Office of Science and Technology, Policy Chief of the Industrial Chemistry Branch and as the Director of the US Green Chemistry Program. During those years I focused on writing about and promoting green chemistry principles.

I was astonished when Teresa Heinz delivered the news that I had won the Heinz award for environment in 2006. This moved me tremendously. Senator Heinz was a visionary, and Teresa Heinz is an environmental movement legend. When I received the phone call from her, she asked if I was aware of the Heinz awards, and at that moment I was certain she was going to ask me if I would serve on the judging panel. When she delivered the news I was speechless. I was so proud to be in the company of the other winners.

Science-Informed Decisions

Although science will not be the only element in any government decision, it should be a part of every decision. So far President Obama’s administration has demonstrated an early recognition that science is a fundamental building block of policy and that it needs to be a piece of the wide range of policy decisions a government makes.

Many of our attempts at environmental regulation have been mandates for technological bandages that didn’t always foster innovation. Though some accomplished the desired goals, the approaches were often costly and inefficient. The next generation of actions taken by government in concert with NGOs and industry needs to be far more about innovation and thoughtful design.

Green chemistry uses the same talents, creativity, and expertise as traditional chemistry and engineering but from a new perspective. The research I do in my current position at Yale is focused on achieving increased understanding of the molecular basis of sustainability so that chemists—molecular architects—can learn to design substances to have these critical properties. The green chemistry imperative says that because we now understand the molecular basis of hazard, we have an obligation to design molecules so they don’t cause harm to humans or the environment.

A Path for Changemakers

Unfortunately, human and institutional inertia can be obstacles to living by the imperative. For instance, students are intensely eager to learn about and apply the principles of green chemistry but may not have access to instruction until graduate school. We can do a better job of showing students that science and technology offer a path for those who want to change the world.

There is a real understanding that green chemistry is the way people want to go, but we need to figure out how to facilitate the necessary shift in our molecular infrastructure. We are currently getting tremendous performance from chemicals, but at a great cost. The only way to address the overwhelming challenges we face is to address them at the most fundamental level. This means considering feedstocks and the way they are manufactured, and then biodegradability at the end of the product life cycle. I hope that my work will highlight the power and potential molecular scientists have to help the world even more dramatically than we thought.

About the Author

Abigail Jeffries is a freelance health and science reporter based in Tolland, CT.

Legendary Labs: Secrets for Scientific Excellence

A scientist pipettes a sample from a vile inside a research lab.

From management styles to creating the right culture, learn the secrets of academic researchers who produce impactful science and diligent scientists.

Published December 30, 2008

By Adrienne J. Burke

Image courtesy of Microgen via stock.adobe.com.

Phil Sharp, who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Medicine and trained a scientist who won the same award 13 years later, says he learned from his first mentors how to nurture budding talent. While Sharp was still a grad student in chemistry at the University of Illinois, Victor Bloomfield gave his career a boost by telling other scientists about his work and by sending him to scientific meetings. And his postdoctoral advisor, National Medal of Science recipient Norman Davidson, encouraged Sharp to pursue his own research and engage with other faculty at Caltech.

As he continued his studies under 1962 Nobel Laureate James Watson at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Sharp learned that “if you surround yourself with very exciting people and research projects in an environment where ideas are always percolating and you can add your own perspective, then it’s easy to do cutting-edge research.”

Sharp certainly makes it seem that way. Progeny of the MIT lab, where 30 years ago he discovered the split gene structure of higher organisms, now populate faculty posts at nearly every major university in the country. Sharp Lab alumni include Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators, National Academy of Sciences members, and Andy Fire, who won a Nobel in 2006 at age 47. As a group, so-called Sharpies share such fond memories of their days under his tutelage that they organized 20- and 30-year reunions at the lab. Sharp counts them among the happiest days of his life.

Good Scientific Citizenship

Academic scientists such as Phil Sharp, who are as well known for producing excellent science as they are for developing following generations of top-flight scientists, are a unique breed. Within a system that gives recognition, money, and tenure for scientific achievement, good scientific citizenship generally goes unrewarded. Those who conscientiously nurture their successors’ careers are motivated by pure altruism.

And they are largely self-taught. Unlike in industry, where scientists in supervisory roles are typically immersed in management training, few universities offer even basic leadership instruction to newly minted principal investigators.

John Inglis is president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, which publishes books on scientific management. He, says, “Postdocs who not so long ago did something really great and are given a lot of money and have to set about building a group are immediately faced with all kinds of challenges. Very seldom has anybody talked to them about how to do this leadership thing and how to cope with all the human situations that science throws up when you’re dealing with a creative endeavor.”

It’s no surprise then that the iniquitous university workplace—where senior investigators take credit for students’ work, schedule lab meetings on holidays, or provoke postdocs to hoard supplies and lock up their data by pitting them against one another—is no mere myth.

Carl Cohen, president of Scientific Management Associates in Boston and author of Lab Dynamics: Management Skills for Scientists, says lousy leadership is rampant in science. “Scientific projects get destroyed, interactions go astray, and students flounder, not because the science itself is wrong, but because scientists are not attuned to personal dynamics,” he says.

Searching for the Right Fit

Maryrose Franko, senior program officer for graduate science education at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, advises students against pursuing postdoc appointments based only on the principal investigator’s scientific accomplishments. Franko says many graduate students resolve to put up with whatever misery they must for the chance to work in a prestigious scientist’s lab. But, she warns, that strategy can backfire.

One promising young postdoc Franko knows signed on wittingly to the lab of a less-than-supportive P.I. “I warned her, ‘He’s a shark’,” says Franko. “But she said, ‘I don’t care, he’s the best in the field.'” Now, three years later, the senior investigator has prohibited the postdoc from taking her research to her first faculty appointment. She’s dependent entirely on a referral from him to get anywhere.

Kathy Barker, author of the popular lab management advice book, At the Helm, says that people frequently tell her that they wish their P.I. had taken a course or read a book about how to run a lab. “One in three people I talk to have had bad PhD experiences,” she says.

But does it matter? “The fact is that very great science can come out of groups that are disasters in terms of human relationships,” says Inglis. “A certain amount of money was spent, a certain number of people left science because they were so disillusioned about how the research enterprise works. But does any of that matter if the end result was a significant advance in our understanding of how a cancer cell works?”

Training First, Science Second

David Baltimore, past president of Caltech and Rockefeller University, would say it does matter. “I want to do great science, but that’s not the primary thing. The primary thing is the training, because that’s what’s going to last,” he says. To scientists like him, the advancement of the research ecosystem is more important than any single scientific discovery. And, as Barker points out, providing a future P.I. with an excellent experience can have far-ranging results: “Once you’ve been in a wonderful lab, you want to make your lab like that.”

Just what makes a lab wonderful? Even the most highly acclaimed leaders aren’t sure of the keys to establishing an excellent research culture. Says Sharp, “It’s sort of like cooking. You can follow a recipe, but you only know it works when it works.”

Asked to explain his secret to having trained nearly 100 accomplished scientists, including department chairs at Columbia, Duke, Harvard, and MIT, David Botstein says, “It’s a reasonable question, but I don’t know.” Botstein, who taught at MIT and Stanford before becoming director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton, says he sees it as his job to produce great students. But he has no formula. “I can only tell you what seems to work for me.”

Indeed, conversations with a dozen P.I.s widely recognized as great mentors reveal that few have any scripted approach to mentoring.

A More Guide than a Boss

George Church, director of the Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School, has launched some of the most promising young systems biologists in the country. Princeton Associate Professor Saeed Tavazoie, who zoomed from PhD thesis to tenure in just five years. So did Jay Shendure, an assistant professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington who was named to Technology Review magazine’s TR35 list in 2006 for a remarkable genome sequencing technology he developed in Church’s lab. But like most of his peers, Church candidly reports that he has never studied management or even thought much about it.

Nevertheless, these senior investigators have gleaned and put into practice a certain amount of lab management wisdom over the years. The advice they impart comes down to four simple maxims:

  • Hire well;
  • Be more guide than boss;
  • Do your best to foster an open, congenial, collaborative culture; and,
  • Put teaching and your underlings’ careers first, your research second.

While great lab leaders unanimously disdain micromanagement, hiring is one function they control carefully. “When you try to appear to run a laissez faire lab, you have few leverage points,” says Church. “The big one is whom you select. That affects tone, ambiance, and subject matters, so you need to exert quite a bit of certitude.”

Surprisingly, brilliance isn’t necessarily the first trait they seek in postdocs. “I don’t look for people who are very smart,” says Church. “If you got into grad school at Harvard or MIT, I don’t have to worry if you’re smart. I’m mainly looking for people who are nice.” Church says he is careful to not let his lab revolve around him, and he also shuns candidates who seem most concerned about their own success.

“Immersed” in Science

Phil Sharp looks for postdocs with a track record: “They’ve advanced a problem, can articulate what the problem is, and they have a view of the world that is developed and sometimes different,” he says of ideal hires. In grad students, he seeks those clearly “immersed” in science. “They read, they talk science, they work in the lab with a lot of commitment, and they go to lectures and come back with ideas.”

Bob Weinberg, a Whitehead Institute founding member and cancer research pioneer who has trained more than 100 scientists in his MIT lab, says his top criterion for selecting grad students and postdocs is that they be able to get along well with others. “I ask about that before I ask about scientific mettle,” he says. “How generous are they with their colleagues? How often do they share? I have turned down an applicant not because they weren’t brilliant, but because I’d heard they weren’t the most pleasant to have around.”

In fact, Weinberg makes it a point to survey candidates’ past mentors and labmates before making an offer. “You often have a postdoc around for three, four, five, six years. It’s kooky not to invest time in that detective work,” he says. “I don’t want people in my lab all to be in love, but I would like them to get along and share.”

Janet Thornton, director of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK, goes a step further to have “a group of people who get on well together,” she says. She asks existing staff to screen incoming candidates, and takes their reviews seriously. When the feedback was, ‘if you recruit this person, the whole group will resign,’ she quickly rejected the applicant.

Pride and Ownership

“True grit” is what HHMI investigator Pippa Marrack looks for as “one of the best predictors of future success.” What’s true grit? “It’s about being brave enough to go for the core of the problem, and being persistent and not giving up when something looks like it’s going wrong,” says Marrack, who has run a lab at the National Jewish Medical & Research Center in Denver with her husband John Kappler for nearly 30 years. “It’s being able to persevere when the reviewers say your paper is crap.” Marrack says a one-day interview “can occasionally reveal when someone has done something in their lives that lets you see they have courage.”

Independence is another sought-after characteristic, especially among senior leaders with multiple responsibilities and busy calendars. “As my own life became more complicated running universities, increasingly over the years I have made independence a very important part of the equation,” says Baltimore. “The worst thing I can do is accept people who can’t handle independence.”

In fact, the freedom to pursue independent research is what most of these accomplished scientists say they most valued about their own training. “Dulbecco was a hands-off mentor, so I was given as much freedom to do what I wanted to and that made an impression on me,” says Bob Weinberg. Everybody in his lab has their own project, and knows up front that when they leave they can take it with them. That way, he says, “They can take pride and ownership in what they’re doing.”

Controlled Freedom

David Baltimore recalls that Richard Franklin at Rockefeller University “was a wonderful mentor because he gave me the freedom to do what I wanted to within the context of working on problems in virology.” Baltimore says the experience taught him the “tremendous importance of allowing young people to find their own way.” Over time, he says, “I’ve just developed great respect for what trainees can do if you support them and provide critical intelligence while letting them define as best they can where they want to go.”

Janet Rowley, the 1998 Lasker Award winner, famed for having identified a specific genetic translocation in leukemia, was mentored by 1966 Nobel Laureate Charles Huggins. She says that when she started up her lab at the University of Chicago in 1969 she approached lab management the same way she did child rearing. “You give people a lot of freedom, you’re there to help them if they need it, and you let them go,” she says. Rowley also says she prefers flexibility to rules and regulations: “You don’t know where creativity is going to come from, and as lab director you have to be open to it coming from an unusual direction.”

George Church’s lab is so free of rules that he compares it to an artists’ colony. “I couldn’t be in a cookie cutter mold where the lab was real production-oriented like a factory, or so hung up on dogma and protocol that you couldn’t think outside of the box,” he says. Having been trained in a research environment that rewarded creativity and interdisciplinary effort, Church says he has adopted the same system.

Equality for People and Ideas

Church is also a fan of equality for people and ideas. “I try to treat everybody as a peer. The lab isn’t entirely without hierarchy, but it’s historically been pretty flat.” As a result, it operates like a free-market system. “If I want to get something done, I have to sell my idea down the line. If it doesn’t sell, I realize there’s something wrong with my message or it’s a bad idea,” Church says.

While all of the scientists interviewed for this article talk about the importance of being supportive to their trainees, they also all see value in letting people flounder and learn from their own mistakes. Church says there’s a fine line between maintaining a nurturing environment and one that promotes critical thinking. “You don’t want to be so supportive that you can’t tell someone something is a bad idea, but you don’t want to be so critical that they think all their ideas are flawed or that all good ideas come from one person.”

Joan Steitz, James Watson’s first female graduate student at Harvard, has run a molecular biology lab at Yale since 1970 and been an HHMI investigator since 1986. She says surprising things can happen when a P.I. steps back and lets postdocs work on problems they’ve developed independently.

Shobha Vasudevan, a PhD who joined Steitz’s lab from the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey, came along with what Steitz thought was a rather dull research project on protein binding. But when Vasudevan started finding proteins associated with microRNAs and showed that microRNAs can activate genes depending on the cell cycle, Steitz says the project “went off in the most amazing direction.” Vasudevan’s paper, which Steitz calls “very important,” was scheduled to appear in Science before the end of 2007.

Creating a Congenial Culture

Across the board, successful leaders abhor the idea of promoting competition among scientists inside the lab as a way to stimulate discovery, saying collaborative, open environments are the most productive. “Most of the truly original ideas that have come from people in my lab come from frequent conversations with their peers,” says Weinberg. “I want them to be talking incessantly. I want that to be part of their style—to be talking to people outside of my lab.”

In that vein, Pippa Marrack says her training at the renowned MRC labs in Cambridge taught her the simple importance of eating in the cafeteria to learn about others’ work. “Everybody, all the Nobel Laureates and the janitors, ate in the same cafeteria at large tables there,” she says. Marrack set up her students’ offices to promote conversation. “We keep our postdocs and grad students in two large offices without cubicle walls to encourage them to talk to each other and come up with ideas together. They do sit around talking, and it’s not always about fantasy football,” she jokes.

Weinberg says he has spent years trying to make sure the limits of his students’ universe are not the walls of his lab. “We’ve been having floor meetings since 1970 with six or seven groups where we all share our research findings. I want people in my group to talk openly about their successes and failures so they can benefit from others’ insights. They may have to go much further afield than me to get input. I want them to develop this habit rather than leading hermit-like existences.”

The Road to Experimental Research

Phil Sharp says he chose MIT as the home for his research because it offered that opportunity for interaction with other scientists. “I’ve been at MIT 33 years, and on the fifth floor of the cancer center all that time,” he says. The laboratories of Weinberg as well as David Housman, Michael Yaffe, and David Sabatini are all nearby. “We live in a group,” Sharp says. “We share a noon Wednesday seminar, we have a party every Friday afternoon, and we have science talks together. My lab is immersed in a group of about 100 people, and in that group are some of the best people in the country in every age group. It elevates us all.”

Another reason a congenial culture is important: the road of experimental research is a rocky one. “More often than not, things don’t work,” Weinberg says. “How do you maintain morale when things aren’t working? I’m not saying I’m the personification of morale maintenance,” he says, “but I think I’ve created an environment where people can help each other through the scientific rough times, if not the personal ones.”

While networking is seen as a benefit, thoughtful mentors tend also to keep their own labs small enough that they can contribute to the success of each person in it. In the late 1980s and early ’90s when funding was at its peak, Rowley says she had as many as 16 lab members. “That’s really as much or more than I could carefully manage. When a lab is 40 or 50 postdocs, I question whether a senior investigator can really counsel that large a number of postdocs carefully, creatively, effectively. I look on very, very large labs with a certain amount of skepticism,” she says.

Produce People First, Science Second

David Botstein says that he has always considered his profession as a geneticist to be not simply research, but a hybrid of teaching and research. “My goal with students and postdocs was in part, of course, to do research that would be of general interest, but also to choose problems and methods that would maximize the students’ learning,” he says.

Botstein argues that putting teaching first is a key not just to generating better scientists, but to producing better science. “The time I spend teaching—up to half my time—makes my research better,” he says.

Rowley agrees. Supporting a young scientist’s success reflects well on a senior scientist, she says. “If you keep asking yourself, ‘What am I getting out of this?’ you reduce your effectiveness. You have to really think about what is going to help the other person be more successful.”

Phil Sharp’s method for helping students develop their careers is to get them to take ownership of an idea and then to plan and execute a series of experiments that advance the understanding of science in that area. “It works best if that interest aligns with my interest in the lab. Occasionally it will align to something only distantly related, but I’ve always found it most important to put the person’s development at top.”

Let Them Taste Success

Church steers postdocs in directions that are most likely to let them taste success. “It’s a soft touch,” he says. “It’s amazing how little it takes to steer, but you don’t want any of your postdocs doing something that is so impossible that there won’t be milestones or they won’t get any credit.”

Even before coaching his postdocs on the problems they chose to tackle, Bob Weinberg sees an important role for himself in influencing their thinking. “I want to impart to them a taste for working on problems that are important and will be thought to forge new conceptual paradigms.”

In discussions over lunch at least twice a week, and in a journal club where they analyze recent scientific publications, Weinberg teaches his people to think critically about research questions. “Is this an interesting question?” he challenges. “Have they focused on something important, or is it trivial in terms of its heuristic value? Are the data really that interesting? Or are they just filling holes in a brick wall?” He says these questions train people to think about whether or not a topic is worth the investment of time.

The Hardest Thing in Science

Baltimore considers “framing the right question” to be “the hardest thing in science.” He says questions have to be audacious enough to be interesting and yet experimentally tractable. “Finding that balance of interest and do-ability is something you only develop with experience and with trying things that are too hard or doing things that are not interesting enough,” he says. “I try to help people find that sweet spot. And when we’re successful, they do wonderful things and they develop a lot of self-confidence, and when they leave my lab they’re ready to establish their own labs and be successful.”

Contrary to the supervisor of the hapless postdoc who has no rights to the data she produced, Weinberg makes it a point to ensure that the research his postdocs do in his lab will help launch their careers. He says, “Some labs have rules that when they train grad students or postdocs, the project stays in the lab. When my lab continues in an area of research, I try to stay out of the way of the person who has gone away so they’re not being undermined by my lab.” To do otherwise, he says, would be very unfortunate. “I’m interested in their soaring, not sinking,” he says.

Also read: Grant Rejection Could Be the Best Thing for Your Career and 10 Things To Do at Every Scientific Conference

Expanding the Immunology Frontier in Medicine

A man smiles for the camera inside a science lab.

Academy member Ralph Steinman tells the story of his life journey being raised in a nonscientific household to going to medical school and studying the immune system.

Published September 1, 2008

By Ralph Steinman

Ralph Steinman

I wasn’t raised in a scientific family and I didn’t have a focus on science early on. In high school I took a vocational test and it concluded that I could be anything. I was interested in everything and I had absolutely no focus until I went to university at McGill. That’s when I first took biology. I really became interested in physiology and medicine, though I took almost every other course in the university. I knew I loved research, but I also liked the practice of medicine a lot. As I went through medical school I became more and more focused on biology and medicine.

All along, at every educational institution, I had great teachers. They did what mentors are supposed to: they provided knowledge, support, and criticism. We always need mentors, not just when we’re starting out.

My key mentors were the ones that I worked with in the lab—Orville Denstedt, professor of biochemistry at McGill, and then cell biologists Betty Hay and Jean Paul Revel at Harvard Medical School. For my postdoctoral work, I wanted to come to Rockefeller and work with Zanvil Cohn and James Hirsh. I had no second choice, in part because they were the only people taking cell-biological approaches to the immune system at the time. I learned immunology sitting right in this very room. We just read papers and that’s how I learned. Working with them led me to the discovery of dendritic cells in my third year at the lab.

The Role of the Immune System

I feel that many people don’t recognize that the immune system is involved in so many important conditions. The vast majority of people may have never heard of the word immunology. Even if they’re taking an antibody that’s making them well, they may have no idea this came from immunology.

The major sacrifice you make as a research scientist is that you don’t get to spend enough time with your family. The other thing one gives up is time outside the lab making science understandable to the community. I do a little public speaking, but I definitely would have liked to have had more time to get out and explain what we’re doing. Not only because it’s fun being with people, but it really is important.

I don’t like superlatives, but if I had to try to describe my most important accomplishment, it was to discover a new dendritic cell lineage of white blood cells and to show that it initiates and controls immunity. It was quite a struggle to get there, but those discoveries in 1973 and 1978 convinced us we were on the path to something new and important, and it opened up the field. Dendritic cells help you to understand how this remarkable immune system is involved in many diseases, and what you might do to prevent or treat diseases.

Focused on AIDS and Cancer

AIDS is our lab’s main target, cancer is another, but we also want to learn to silence or tolerize the immune system in transplantation and many other settings like autoimmune diabetes. And we want to discover vaccines for many more diseases. Some people would say the major application is to use dendritic cells in immune therapy for cancer.

There is plenty of promise, but immunology in cancer is very underdeveloped. I estimate that immunology is less than five percent of the effort at the National Cancer Institute and very little of that five percent deals with cancer in patients—it’s people like me doing models outside of the patient. That’s one of the things I’m trying to change, but it’s going very, very slowly. We need people to see this as an omission in the war on cancer that must be overcome once and for all.

When you list the properties of tumor cells, it is fair to say that one is to evade the immune system. But the immune system also knows how to reject cancer cells. We have a cancer death rate in this country of more than a half million every year and we have 22,000 cancer patients in drug trials, but hardly any are immunologic.

It’s a huge gap that we’re not looking after. A number of immunologists who think this way have gotten together and, with help from various sources, come up with a proposal which we call a cancer immunotherapy network—a mechanism whereby scientists will work together to design the best immune-based studies in cancer patients and make them accessible to patients.

Just Tackling a Problem

I often wonder what I’d be doing if I didn’t take my biology course, but certainly if I had to do it over again I would do the same thing. Undoubtedly, I love a lot of things about my work, including being able to work on a special campus like this and in New York City. I love discovery and the way it happens. I love tackling what I believe to be a big problem.

And I love the scientific profession, its internationalism and the many terrific people who are responsible for one major advance after another. I’m getting old, but because everybody in the lab is so young, I feel like one of them, you know, just tackling a problem.

Also read: Dispatches from the Democratization of Science

About the Author

Ralph M. Steinman is the Henry G. Kunkel Professor and a senior Physician in the Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Immunology at The Rockefeller University. He earned his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and has been an Academy member since 2002.

Recent awards include the Gairdner Foundation International Award (2003); the New York City Mayor’s Award for Scientific Excellence (2004); the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (2007); the Albany Medical Center Prize (2009). In his free time, he enjoys ballroom dancing with wife Claudia, spending times with granddaughters Isla and Syla, and architecture.

Older posts
Newer posts