Nobel Laureates Participate in Intel ISEF 2000 in Detroit
9 May 2000
Nobel Laureates Participate in Intel ISEF 2000 in Detroit
DETROIT--May 9, 2000--High school students participating in this year's International Science and Engineering Fair 2000, May 7-12 in Detroit, will have a chance to meet with a global panel of scientific "superstars."Five Nobel Laureates, two Charles Stark Draper Prize winners, and one Enrico Fermi Award recipient will be visiting the 51st annual science fair at the Cobo Convention Center and participating in a question-and-answer panel discussion with the student finalists on Tuesday, May 9, 12-2 p.m.
"It will be a lively panel discussion," said Tzeitel Hirni, Science Service marketing manager. "The biggest thing that the Nobel Laureates and other award-winning scientists want to do during the visit to ISEF is meet with the students themselves. They don't want to be VIPs. They want to talk with the students."
The Science Service, which is based in Washington, D.C., has been coordinating the annual International Science and Engineering Fair since the first ISEF in 1950. The Science Service is a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the understanding and appreciation of science among people of all ages through publications and educational programs.
The International Science and Engineering Fair is held in a different city each year. Detroit's plans to hold the first ISEF of the 21st century were laid back in 1987. The event will draw thousands of students, judges, volunteers, chaperones and translators to Detroit's downtown and is estimated to generate $8 million for the Southeastern Michigan economy.
ISEF 2000's panel of award-winning scientists include:
-- Dr. Robert Curl, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1996. Dr. Curl
was born in Alice, Texas, August 23, 1933. His father was a
Methodist minister and the family moved often, living in a
succession of mostly small towns in south Texas: Alice,
Brady, San Antonio, Kingsville, Del Rio, Brownsville,
McAllen, Austin and then San Antonio again. He went to Rice
Institute (now called the Rice Quantum Institute) in
Houston, Texas, and graduated with a B.A. in 1954. Curl went
on to receive his Ph.D. in 1957 from the University of
California, Berkeley, and then had a post-doctoral position
at the Mallinkrodt Laboratory at Harvard University,
Cambridge, Mass. He returned to the Rice Institute as an
assistant professor in 1958 and has remained there ever
since. Curl and fellow professor of Natural Sciences Rick
Smalley won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery
of Buckminsterfullerene (C60). Smalley and Curl's
discoveries helped to open an entirely new field of research
-- nanoscale science and technology. Rice undertook a major
initiative in nanoscale science and technology, which
centers on the science and engineering of functional
structures having dimensions between 1 and 100 nanometers.
This initiative included hiring of a dozen new faculty
members and construction of a new 83,000 square-foot
laboratory facility.
-- Dr. Walter Gilbert, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1980. Walter
Gilbert was born March 21, 1932, in Boston, Mass. In 1939,
his family moved to Washington, D.C., where he attended
public school, including Sidwell Friends High School. He
went on to attend Harvard where he majored in chemistry and
physics. As a graduate student, he worked in the theory of
elementary particles, the quantum theory of fields. He spent
his first graduate year at Harvard, then went to the
University of Cambridge for two years where he received his
doctorate degree in 1957. Gilbert went on to help develop
the methods to work out the structure of DNA. Gilbert
discovered a rapid method to decode the base sequences in
DNA and then apply this knowledge to induce bacteria to
produce medically useful substances, such as insulin and
interferon. In 1988, the physicist-turned-biologist called
for the scientific community to engage in the "human genome
project," a massive effort to chart, by the year 2000, the
entire sequence of DNA that makes up our genetic material.
Gilbert is a Carl M. Loeb University Professor.
-- Dr. Dudley R. Herschbach, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1986.
Dudley R. Herschbach was born June 18, 1932, near San Jose,
Calif. He grew up in a rural area of fruit orchards, where
he milked cows, fed pigs and chickens, and picked prunes,
apricots, and walnuts. Herschbach didn't expect to receive a
university education, but was offered a football scholarship
to Stanford University in 1950. He soon gave up his football
scholarship for an academic career. He received his B.S. in
mathematics in 1954 and an M.S. in chemistry in 1955. He
continued his graduate study at Harvard and received an M.
S. in physics in 1956 and a Ph.D. in chemical physics in
1958. He developed techniques enabling scientists to see
collisions taking place between pairs of molecules and
detect the products of such collisions, which led to his
Nobel Prize. Herschbach actively promotes the public
appreciation and understanding of science, hosting a PBS
special on the Nobel Prize.
-- Dr. Russell A. Hulse, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1993. Russell
A. Hulse was born Nov. 28, 1950, in New York City. He
attended the Bronx High School of Science in the early 1960s
and subsequently was admitted to Cooper Union, a
tuition-free college in lower Manhattan. From 1966 -70,
Hulse lived with his parents and commuted daily to Cooper
Union on the subway. He learned about computers at Cooper,
which had an IBM 1620, but there were no courses on
programming it, so Hulse taught himself FORTRAN and began
using it. After receiving his bachelor's degree in physics
from Cooper Union in 1970, Hulse started his graduate work
at The University of Massachusetts in Amherst. After five
years, he received his doctorate in physics and then started
working on a second degree in radio astronomy. He later
received a post-doctoral appointment at the National Radio
Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va. In 1993 Hulse,
then a Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory
physicist, and Joseph Taylor Jr., a professor of physics at
Princeton University, were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize
for Physics in recognition of their discovery of the first
binary pulsar -- a twin star system that provides a rare
natural laboratory in which to test Albert Einstein's
prediction that moving objects emit gravitational waves, as
well as other aspects of his general theory of relativity.
-- Dr. Leon M. Lederman, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1988. Leon M.
Lederman was born July 15, 1922, in New York. He started his
schooling in 1927 at PS 92, at the corner of Broadway and
95th Street. By 1951, he had received his Ph.D. at Columbia
University. At that time, the Columbia Physics Department
was constructing a 385 MeV Synchrocyclotron at its Nevis
Laboratory with the aid of the Office of Naval Research.
After receiving his Ph.D., Lederman stayed at Nevis for 28
year. In 1958, he was promoted to professor. In 1961,
Lederman became director of Nevis Labs and held this
position until 1978. In 1979, he became director of the
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Batavia, Ill.), where
he supervised the construction and utilization of the first
superconducting synchrotron, now the highest energy
accelerator in the world. Lederman is the recipient of
fellowships from the Ford, Guggenheim, Ernest Kepton Adams
and National Science foundations. He is a founding member of
the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (to the Department of
Energy) and the International Committee on Future
Accelerators. He has received the National Medal of Science
in 1965 and the Wolf Prize for Physics in 1982 plus other
awards in addition to his Nobel Prize.
-- Dr. John B. MacChesney, Charles Stark Draper Prize, 1999.
John MacChesney was born in New Jersey in 1929. He earned a
B.A. in Chemistry from Bowdoin College in 1951. He served in
the U.S. Army during the Korean War and subsequently studied
at City College of New York and New York University while
working in New York City. He matriculated at the
Pennsylvania State University and graduated in 1959 with a
Ph.D. in geochemistry. He joined Bell Laboratories, where he
has continued his employment until this time, even though it
has gone through a transformation from AT&T to Lucent
Technologies, and now holds the rank of fellow. It was in
1974 that MacChesney and his colleagues at Bell Laboratories
provided a detailed description of a commercially viable
process, called Modified Chemical Vapor Deposition (MCVD),
for mass-producing high-quality optical fiber. MacChesney
remains engaged in the development of glass and its
processing to economically produce the next generation of
optical devices. He was elected a member of the National
Academy of Engineering in 1985.
-- Dr. Robert D. Maurer, Charles Stark Draper Prize, 1999.
Robert Maurer was born in 1924 and is a native of
Arkadelphia, Ark. He received a B.S. in Physics in 1948 from
the University of Arkansas and Ph.D., also in physics, from
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951. His
education at the university was interrupted by service with
the 99th Infantry Division in Europe. Following a
post-graduate year at MIT, Maurer joined the physics
department of Corning's research and development laboratory,
progressing from research physicist in 1952 through senior
research fellow in 1978. In 1970, he and his colleagues
designed and produced the first optical fiber with optical
losses that were low enough to make it useful for
telecommunications. Maurer retired from Corning in 1989. He
was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering
in 1979.
-- H. Rodney Withers, Enrico Fermi Award, 1996. H. Rodney
Withers was born in 1932 in Queensland, Australia. He
received his medical degrees from the University of
Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and from the Royal
Australian College of Radiologists in Sydney, Australia. He
received his Ph.D. degree from the University of London in
1965 and his D.Sc. from the University of London in 1982. He
is both a physician and a research scientist whose career
has been devoted to radiation biology and how it directly
relates to radiation therapy for cancer. Withers has held a
broad range of posts including positions at the Gray
Laboratory in Middlesex, England; the National Cancer
Institute; the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer
Center in Houston; the Prince of Wales Hospital at the
University of New South Wales, Sydney; and the University of
California, Los Angeles. He is currently a professor and
chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology at the UCLA,
where he also holds an American Cancer Society Clinical
Research professorship. Withers has received may honors for
his work, including the Enrico Fermi Award of the President
of the United States and the Department of Energy in 1996.