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Each year the Council of the AAAS selects a small number of scientists from its membership (nearly all scientists are members) and honors them for "efforts on behalf of the advancement of science and engineering that are scientifically or socially distinguished." This year, from the Biological Sciences, R. Scott Hawley ('84 Scholar) was elected; from Chemistry, M. Reza Ghadiri ('91) and Ronald T. Raines('90); and from Neurosciences, Gilles J. Laurent ('90), Joseph S. Takahashi ('85), and Marc Tessier-Lavigne ('91). The new Fellows of the Association will be presented at the annual AAAS meeting in Boston on February 16 of 2002.

As candidates tried to download application forms just before the deadline, a computer expert at Johns Hopkins worked diligently for several days on ridding our server of thousands of exe files and cleaning up over a thousand html files that had Nimda commands embedded in them. Mary Tarpey helped by faxing forms to a few desperate candidates, and Andrew Nitchkin did the computer repairs to put us back on line. Thanks Mary and Andrew for making things work!

This news came via Cedric Chernick, former Director of our Program and continuing enthusiast for it, who read it in C&E News. Congratulations Marc! And we need more news correspondents like Cedric!

The goal of the Kirsch Foundation is to eliminate all diseases. The present awards are for work towards a cure for Parkinson's disease (given to Allison) and to develop stem cell therapies (to Geraldine). The awards are for $150,000 to the investigator and $30,000 to the institution for the first year, with the possibility of additional funding in the subsequent two years. These awards were two of four given this year. One of last year's recipients was Ben Barres, 1994 Searle Scholar, who will continue to receive funding from the Kirsch Foundation.

Daphne K. Preuss, 1997 Scholar, will receive the third annual ABSC-Promega Award for Early Career Life Sciences. The award will be presented at the ASCB annual meeting in December. Daphne is being recognized "for her work in chromosome structure and pollen function. Her work seeks to identify components that mediate inheritance from the gene products that control fertilization to those that regulate DNA transmission. Preuss was also a key contributor to the sequenceing of the Arabidopsis genome."

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS - Fifteen individuals doing research in the chemical and biological sciences will each have an additional $240,000 to support their research programs during the next three years. The fifteen have been named as the 2001 Searle Scholars. With the names announced today, 348 Searle Scholars have shared over $61,360,000 in grants made since the program began in 1981. This year, 173 applications were considered from recently appointed assistant professors, nominated by 93 universities and research institutions. The final selection of Scholars was based on recommendations made by a Scientific Advisory Board of eleven scientists distinguished for their research and leadership in fields of interest to the Searle Scholars Program.

In selecting the Scholars, the Board looked for individuals who have already demonstrated innovative research with the potential for making significant contributions to biological research over an extended period of time.

The funds that support the awards come from trusts established under the wills of John G. and Frances C. Searle. Mr. Searle was President of G.D. Searle & Co., of Skokie, Illinois, a research-based pharmaceutical company. Mr. and Mrs. Searle expressed the wish that some of the proceeds of their estates be used for the support of research in medicine, chemistry, and biological science.

In 1980, members of the Searle family acting as Consultants to the Trustees of the Trusts established under the wills of Mr. & Mrs. John G. Searle, recommended the development of a program of support for young biomedical scientists. This idea evolved into the Searle Scholars Program, which is funded through grants from the family trusts to The Chicago Community Trust and administered by Kinship Foundation in Northbrook, Illinois.

2001 Class of the Searle Scholars Program

Steven E. Brenner, University of California, Berkeley

Kenneth C. Catania, Vanderbilt University

Michael J. Caterina, The Johns Hopkins University

Joseph L. DeRisi, University of California, San Francisco

Catherine L. Drennan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Guowei Fang, Stanford University

Elizabeth A. Finch, Emory University

Su Guo, University of California, San Francisco

Taekjip Ha, University of Illinois

Tonya L. Kuhl, University of California, Davis

J. Troy Littleton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Guangbin Luo, Case Western University

Zachary F. Mainen, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

W. Matthew Michael, Harvard University

Noam Sobel, University of California, Berkeley