Volume 46, Number 3, Winter 1998-99

Our Gang

As part of a massive shakeup of the Boston Globe’s editorial staff, Nils Bruzelius, senior assistant metro editor for health and science, became foreign editor March 1.

Barbara Culliton has joined Celera Genomics as executive editor of Celera Genome News Network, an independent news service created to cover research, policy, ethics, and anything else related to genes and genomic research in humans, microbes, and agriculture worldwide. She can be reached at Genome News Network, 45 West Gude Drive, Rockville, Maryland 20850, e-mail cullitbj@celera.com.

Rick Borchelt has left Oak Ridge National Laboratory/ Lockheed Martin to join the faculty of Vanderbilt University in Nashville as Senior Research Associate for Technology Policy and Communication, an appointment in Vandy’s new Management of Technology Program. He will split his time between Vanderbilt and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, about an hour and a half down the road in Huntsville, AL, where he’ll help lay the groundwork for the embryonic National Center for Space Science and assist with the science communications process at Marshall proper.

After serving time in Wisconsin as editor of Earth, Josh Fischman returns to DC as a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report.

Potter Wickware contributed the chapter “History and Technique of Cloning” to the anthology The Human Cloning Debate, edited by Glenn McGee and published by Berkeley Hills Books, 1998.

John Pope, medical and health reporter for the Times-Picayune, won the Louisiana State Medical Society’s 1998 Award of Excellence in print journalism. Pope, who also won the annual competition in 1990, received the award and $500 for an article describing brain surgery to arrest the continuing tremors associated with Parkinson’s disease.

Odom Fanning received a Merit Award in the 1998 Fifth Annual National Health Information Awards program. The Confidential Advisory Program Health Report, a quarterly newsletter for constituents of The Medical Center at Princeton, NJ, was selected for an issue featuring mind-body medicine and how it can contribute to increased pregnancy rates through relaxation training. Fanning has been writing this newsletter since its inception in 1993.

Rick Borchelt and Lynne Friedmann will provide media training as part of the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, a new initiative to help environmental scientists become effective communicators of scientific information. The program will train a select group of 20 environmental scientists (Leopold Fellows) each year for the next three years. The program is conducted on behalf of the Ecological Society of America and funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, author of Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries has been invited to speak at the American Physical Society’s Centennial Meeting in Atlanta, GA, in March. The APS is the professional organization of physicists. Nobel Prize Women in Science was published in hardcover in 1993, and an expanded, paperback edition was published in December 1998 with a new chapter about the latest woman to win a science Nobel. McGrayne’s talk is being sponsored by the Forum on the History of Physics, the APS Division of Nuclear Physics, and the APS Committee on the Status of Women in Physics. McGrayne has also been invited to speak at the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Nuclear Shell Model, in Heidelberg, Germany. The co-discoverer of the shell model, Maria Goeppert Mayer, is featured in Nobel Prize Women in Science, a collection of bios about 15 important women scientists. For the book, Mc Grayne interviewed all the featured women who were alive at the time and more than 250 of their associates.

Steve Marcus has left the balmy winter weather in Boston to move to Minnesota. He joins the Minneapolis Star Tribune as science/medicine editor. On the plus side, Marcus will work with a team of seven reporters, plus their own copy editor, to maintain and enhance the paper’s already fine science and medicine coverage. On the minus side, it gets real cold in the Twin Cities. Reach him at Star Tribune, 425 Portland Avenue, Minneapolis, MN 55488; phone 612-673-4000; fax 612-673-4359; e-mail smarcus@ startribune.com.

Freelance Patricia Thomas started the New Year with a bang. She is the recipient of the 1998 Leonard Silk Journalism Fellowship. The award carries with it a $30,000 cash prize and is given to only one person a year. The fellowship was established by family and friends of the late New York Times columnist Leonard Silk. Its purpose is to help an established journalist complete a book on an important contemporary issue, and the project should “exemplify the ideas of public instruction, social betterment, and intellectual conviction that marked Leonard Silk’s work.” Thomas’ book, with the working title Big Shot: Inside the Struggle for an AIDS Vaccine, will be published by PublicAffairs, a new nonfiction house that is part of the Perseus Group.