- Council Policy Committee Welcomes Three New Members
- New Editors in Chief for AEM and JB
- ASM Cosponsors Symposium at the 10th Pan American Congress of Infectious Diseases
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Council Policy Committee Welcomes Three New Members
Three ASM members have been elected to the Council Policy Committee (CPC), succeeding those whose terms have expired. Roy Curtiss and Stanley Maloy are the Division Members at Large, succeeding Herbert Winkler and Virginia Clark; Joan Rose succeeds Roberta Carey as Branch Member at Large.
Curtiss Curtiss, Councilor for Division Z, Animal Health Microbiology and an ASM member since 1960, has held numerous positions within the Society, including previous service as a member of the CPC. Curtiss is considered one of the world's leading genetic biotechnologists and was recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Among his many achievements are recombinant vaccines to prevent Salmonella infection in poultry and swine and significant contributions toward understanding mechanisms of bacterial pathogenesis and elicitation of immune responses. He is the George William and Irene Koechig Freiberg Professor of Biology at Washington University, St. Louis, Mo.
Maloy Maloy is Councilor for Division H, Genetics and Molecular Biology. He has served as chair of ASM Press since 1998 and is a member of the editorial board of Infection and Immunity. His research interests include genetic regulation, membrane structure and function, host specificity of Salmonella, chromosome organization, and genomics. Maloy has also received numerous awards and recognition for teaching excellence. He is a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and the director of the Center for Microbial Sciences, San Diego, Calif.
Rose Rose served as president of the ASM Florida Branch 1997 to 1999. She is a professor in the Department of Marine Science, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. A renowned expert on water quality, Rose frequently advises community, media, and governmental organizations on water quality issues. She has been a member of numerous national committees addressing environmental health and is a past president of the Florida Environmental Health Association.
New Editors in Chief for AEM and JB
Ornston Beginning 1 July 2001, the Publications Board will be welcoming two new editors in chief. L. Nicholas Ornston from Yale University, New Haven, Conn., will be replacing Judy D. Wall as the editor in chief of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, and Philip Matsumura from the University of Illinois, Chicago, will be replacing Graham C. Walker as editor in chief of the Journal of Bacteriology.
Ornston received his A.B. in biochemical sciences from Harvard College in 1961 and his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965. Ornston continued his postdoctoral training in microbiology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1966, in biochemistry at the University of Leicester, England, in 1966-1968 and at the University of Illinois, Urbana 1968-1969. He joined the Department of Biology at Yale University in 1969 where, during his 32 years there, he has moved through the ranks to become a full professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology. Since 1961, Ornston has been the recipient of many professional honors including being selected as a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellow, NIH Postdoctoral Fellow, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the Yale College-Dylan Hison '88 Prize for Distinguished Teaching. Ornston has previously served as editor in chief of the Annual Review of Microbiology and as an editor of the Journal of Bacteriology, is a member of the Department of Energy Basic Energy Sciences Committee, and is currently a Delegate for Biology for the Oxford University Press.
Matsumura Matsumura received his B.S. in biology from the University of Santa Clara, Santa Clara, Calif., in 1969 and his Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y., in 1975. Matsumura continued with postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Diego from 1975-1979. He joined the Department of Microbiology and Immunology faculty at the University of Illinois, Chicago, in 1979 as an assistant professor and has risen to his current position of full professor. Matsumura has been particularly active in graduate and postdoctoral mentoring during his academic career. In addition, he has served on a number of grant review panels, including those for the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association of Illinois, and has served on the editorial review board of the Journal of Bacteriology from 1987-1995. His future research goals include continuing studies on signal transduction in bacterial chemotaxis and determining how complex formation alters the binding specificity of transcriptional regulators.
ASM Cosponsors Symposium at the 10th Pan American Congress of Infectious Diseases
The International Committee of ASM has been collaborating with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the Pan American Association of Infectious Diseases (API), and the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics (APUA) to develop a program to address and reduce problems of antibiotic resistance in Latin America. In this collaboration ASM has participated in joint working meetings and provided speakers for congresses and workshops. To further the goals of this joint effort and to bring the discussion of goals and plans to a wider audience, on 1 May 2001 the ASM International Committee cosponsored with its three collaborative partners a symposium on "Resistance to Antibiotics: Improving the Understanding and Use of Antibiotics in the Americas"at the 10th Pan American Congress of Infectious Diseases in Guadalajara, Mexico. This full-day symposium with an audience of over 80 from Mexico and many other Latin American countries featured 14 speakers, including Stephan A. Lerner, chair of the ASM International Committee. Lerner has been a member of the PAHO-initiated "Task Force on Antimicrobial Resistance"since its founding meeting in January 1999 in Asunción, Paraguay. The symposium was convened by Anibal Sosa, Director for the Latin America Initiative of APUA, and cochaired by Jose Donis of APUA-Mexico, Hugo Pezzarossi, president of API, and Lerner.
Lerner spoke on the role of ASM in the control of antibiotic resistance. This contribution has included member expertise for conferences and workshops (in collaboration with PAHO) on training for susceptibility testing and development of networks and databases, in addition to member expertise for conferences and discussions on antibiotic usage (in collaboration with PAHO, API, APUA), on appropriate standards and guidelines, and on implementation of control strategies. Lerner also addressed specific strategies to address resistance in the hospital and in the community, citing programs of the Michigan Antibiotic Resistance Reduction Coalition (MARR), a coalition of over 50 academic, government, private sector, nonprofit, and civil society organizations.
The four collaborating organizations developed the "Guadalajara Declaration to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance in Latin America," which lays out goals for actions to be taken. The symposium provided Lerner with an opportunity to strengthen the relationships of ASM not only with the other sponsoring organizations but also with the Mexican Society of Infectious Diseases and our new ASM Ambassador in Mexico, Juan Carlos Tinoco.
American Academy of Microbiology
The American Academy of Microbiology is proud to announce that the following scientists have recently been elected to Fellowship for the first quarter of 2001.
Barry Beaty, Ph.D., Colorado State University, Ft. Collins
Joan S. Brugge, Ph.D., Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass.
Thomas R. Fritsche, M.D., Ph.D., University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle
Alexander N. Glazer, Ph.D., University of California, Oakland
Jeffrey I. Gordon, M.D.,Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Mo.
Edna S. Kaneshiro, Ph.D., University of Cincinnati, Ohio
John Kuriyan, Ph.D., Rockefeller University, New York, N.Y.
Sidney R. Kushner, Ph.D., University of Georgia, Athens
Anthony H. Rogers, Ph.D., Adelaide University, South Australia
Yuval Shoham, Ph.D., Technion, Haifa, Israel
Douglas W. Smith, Ph.D., University of California-San Diego, La Jolla
Jaroslav Spizek, Ph.D., Czechslovak Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic
Ralph M. Steinman, M.D., Rockefeller University, New York, N.Y.
Jesse Summers, Ph.D., University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Jack T. Trevors, Ph.D., University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Jonathan R. Warner, Ph.D., Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, N.Y.
Robert D. Wells, Ph.D., Texas A&M University Health Science Center, Houston
Patricia Zambryski, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Award
Nicole Johnston was given the Herb Lampert Student Writing Award by the Canadian Science Writer's Association. The award was given for her article "Gene Therapy: Hype or Hope?," published in The Globe and Mail, 18 April 2000. Johnston was the 1999 ASM/AAAS Mass Media Fellow.
Deceased Member
Pierre Schaeffer, professor of microbiology at the University of Paris and a pioneer in the genetic analysis of bacterial differentiation, died in September 1999 after a long illness. He will be remembered as a rigorous geneticist, an originator of fundamental ideas about bacterial sporulation, and an overly modest scientist who consistently undervalued the significance of his own discoveries and insights. He will also be remembered for his kindness, his devotion to his colleagues, and his humor in the face of life's absurdities.
Schaeffer trained at the Institut Pasteur under the supervision of André Lwoff during the postwar period, when that lab was one of the centers of the bacterial genetics universe. His colleagues included François Jacob, Jacques Monod, and Elie Wollman. In 1958, after postdoctoral research with Rollin Hotchkiss and Francis Ryan in New York, Schaeffer organized his own group at the Institut Pasteur. In collaboration with Robert Edgar, he provided the first evidence that H. influenzae has a strong preference for homologous DNA. Schaeffer then launched what were to become classical studies using genetics and microscopy to unravel the process of spore formation in Bacillus subtilis. Ten years later, Schaeffer left the Institut Pasteur to found the Institut de Microbiologie at the branch of the Université de Paris located in the suburb of Orsay. He initially recruited as colleagues André Berkaloff, Herbert Marcovich, and Jean-Claude Patte.
Schaeffer served as director of the Institut de Microbiologie for 17 years, providing fundamental training in microbiology to a multitude of students. He felt a special calling to train students from the underdeveloped countries of the former French colonial empire. At a time when microbiology was underappreciated in France and elsewhere, Schaeffer stood out for his devotion to his science and for the rigor of his intellectual approach. In the 1960s and 1970s, his labs at the Institut Pasteur and Orsay were a center for training of foreign postdoctoral fellows, such as Rich Losick, Janice Pero, Glenn Chambliss, Eric Eisenstadt, John Coote, Gabriel Milanese, and Linc Sonenshein, and for collaboration with visiting scientists, including Bob Edgar, Ken Bott, Art Aronson, Rollin Hotchkiss, and others. Schaeffer's influence went beyond his own lab at Orsay. Patrick Stragier trained with Patte, but, after his doctoral work, picked up the torch of sporulation and extended Schaeffer's legacy.
His early collaborators included the geneticist Hélene Ionesco, the very talented electron microscopist Antoinette Ryter, and the expert physiologist Jean-Paul Aubert. Together, they revealed two fundamental truths about sporulation. First, the isolation of mutants and the correlation of their stages of blockage with the sequence of morphological changes in wild-type cells established the orderliness and genetic determination of the temporal sequence of morphological changes. This work demonstrated that one could dissect a complex developmental process and identify genes responsible for the transition from one stage to the next. Second, they showed that the probability that a cell would initiate the process of sporulation is inversely related to growth rate (a regulatory phenomenon initially attributed to a form of catabolite repression), giving a mechanistic explanation for the known fact that cells sporulate when deprived of nutrients. With Jacqueline Millet, Janine Guespin-Michel, Brigitte Cami, Céline Karmazyn-Campelli, Jean Brevet, Jean-François Rouyard, Jean-Pierre Bohin, and others, Schaeffer continued to push the genetic approach. He and his colleagues identified and characterized mutations in genes now known to encode the Spo0A transcription factor and its signaling partners KinA, Spo0B, and Spo0F, the global repressor AbrB, the sporulation-specific sigma factors s F and s K, the regulatory phosphatase SpoIIE, the membrane complex SpoIIIA, the morphogenetic protein SpoIIID, and the DNA translocase SpoIIIE. The last phase of his research career was devoted to the intriguing finding, emanating from a collaboration with his old mentor, Rollin Hotchkiss, that protoplast fusion in haploid B. subtilis leads to genetic diploidy and gene silencing. Carmen Sanchez-Rivas and Corinne Lévi-Meyrueis were Schaeffer's principal collaborators in this work, which was subsequently pursued by Luisa Hirschbein.
Although he would deny it, Pierre Schaeffer was a giant; as a scientist, as a teacher, and as an inspiration to several generations of trainees. His demonstration of the power of formal genetic analysis to unravel a complex developmental process stands as one of the pillars of the field of bacterial differentiation.
Abraham L. Sonenshein
Tufts University School of Medicine
Boston, MassASM Branches on the Web
The following ASM Branches have established sites on the World Wide Web:
New Jersey (Theobald Smith Society)
ASM Divisions on the Web
The following ASM Divisions have established sites on the World Wide Web:
Division A, Antimicrobial Chemotherapy
Division B, Microbial Pathogenesis
Division C, Clinical Microbiology
Division D, General Medical Microbiology
Division I, General Microbiology
Division K, Microbial Physiology and Metabolism
Division O, Fermentation and Biotechnology
Division Q, Environmental and General Applied Microbiology
Division R, Systematic & Evolutionary Microbiology
Division W, Microbiology Education
Division X, Molecular, Cellular and General Microbiology of Eukaryotes
Division Z, Animal Health Microbiology
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