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ASM Members Receive Awards
ASM members Bernard Moss, Carl Woese, and Stanley Falkow have recently been honored with awards for their contributions to science.
Woese Woese, a molecular biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is one of the recipients of the 2000 National Medals of Science and NationalMedals of Technology. Woese's work in proposing the notion that there are three primary evolutionary domains into which all living things may be classified led to a quantitative map, or universal tree of life, by which the diversity of all life can be assessed. Woese used oligonucleotide comparisons of ribosomal RNA strands to deduce phylogenetic relationships among bacteria. The resulting map of relationships revealed the existence of the Archaea as one of three primary lineages, separate from the Bacteria and the Eucarya. In 1992, Woese was named the 12th recipient of microbiology's highest award, the Leeuwenhoek Medal. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
The 2000 National Medals of Science and National Medals of Technology, the nation's highest science and technology honors, were conferred during a ceremony at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., on 1 December 2000.
"These exceptional scientists and engineers have transformed our world and enhanced our daily lives," President Clinton said. "Their imagination and ingenuity will continue to inspire future generations of American scientists to remain at the cutting edge of scientific discovery and technological innovation."
The National Medal of Science, established by Congress in 1959 and administered by the National Science Foundation, honors individuals for contributions to the present state of knowledge across a variety of science frontiers. Including this year's recipients, the Medal of Science has been awarded to 386 distinguished scientists and engineers. More information about the National Medal of Science is available on the Web.
Falkow Stanley Falkow of the Stanford University School of Medicine has been given the 2000 Koch prize, Germany's top science award. The Robert Koch Foundation awards its prize and medal annually to recognize outstanding achievements in the field of basic research on infectious diseases.
Falkow's research on bacterial pathogenesis has been crucial to our understanding of infectious diseases and the relationships between pathogens and hosts. He was an early pioneer in molecular genetics with his studies on R-plasmids. Falkow has been elected to the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. Falkow, a past president of ASM, is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has been the recipient of the Paul Ehrlich-Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, the Becton Dickinson Award in Clinical Microbiology from ASM, and the Altmeier Medal from the Surgical Infectious Diseases Society of America. He was awarded the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Infectious Disease Research in 1997.
Swiss biologist Marco Baggiolini received the Robert Koch gold medal for his work in identifying unknown proteins in blood which help the body fight off bacteria and viruses. Baggiolini, the director of the Theodor Kocher institute at the University of Bern, is considered a pioneer in the microbiology of the immune system and the development of infections.
Moss Moss, a virologist whose work has been crucial to understanding how viruses infect cells and to developing vaccines against viral diseases, received this year's Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Infectious Disease Research. Moss serves as chief of the Laboratory of Viral Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Moss is cited for his many seminal contributions to understanding the molecular virology of poxviruses and the interactions of the viruses with their host organisms. Moss received a silver medallion and a $50,000 cash prize at an awards dinner on 30 November.
Moss discovered several insidious strategies viruses use to undermine the immune system and spread through the body. For example, he found that some viral genes code for proteins, which he dubbed virokines, that protect the virus from the host's immune system. Moss also showed that some viruses cause their host cells to secrete a growth factor that stimulates nearby uninfected cells to multiply, thereby allowing the virus to spread faster. His most widely appreciated accomplishment was demonstrating how to use the vaccinia virus, employed as a vaccine against smallpox, as a tool for research and for making other vaccines. He showed that a modified gene from an unrelated infectious organism could be inserted into the vaccinia virus. When injected into a host, this engineered virus causes an immune response to the infectious organism whose gene it containes. This achievement revolutionized vaccine research and led to a live recombinant wildlife rabies vaccine used widely in Europe and the United States. Several other candidate vaccines based on this method are being explored.
Moss has received numerous other awards and honors and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Microbiology, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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