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Douglas Brutlag received
his B.S. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology
and his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford University in 1972,
where he has remained as professor. He is the co-founder of IntelliGenetics,
Inc. and IntelliCorp, and is currently the Chief Scientific Officer
of DoubleTwist, Inc. Brutlag has been the Director of the Bioinformatics
Resource at Stanford and he was cofounder of the International
Society for Computational Biology. Brutlag states that his primary research objective
is to understand the flow of genetic information from the genome
to the phenotype of an organism. This includes understanding the
sequence-structure dependencies and the structure-function dependencies
of macromolecules. These goals represent the bioinformatic and
functional-genomic approach to predicting structure and function
from sequence. Specifically, we develop computer representations
that can discover structural and functional properties of DNA,
RNA and protein from sequences and from first principles. We spend
much of our time learning the first principles of molecular and
structural biology from known examples. We are also interested
in predicting the interactions between ligands and proteins and
between two interacting proteins. Given the structure, function
and interactions of the proteins in a cell, we will eventually
be able to simulate the metabolism of the organism. We attack
these critical problems using a variety of different representations
of sequences, structures and functions. Multiple representations
of sequences include simple consensus sequence patterns, parametric
representations, probabilistic techniques, graph theoretic approaches
as well as computer simulations. Much of our work consists of
developing a new representation of a structure or a function of
a macromolecule, applying the methods of machine learning to this
representation, and then evaluating the accuracy of the method.
We have developed novel representations of sequence correlations
that have predicted amino acid side chain interactions that stabilize
protein strands and helices. We have developed novel algorithms
for aligning sequences that give insight into the secondary structure
of proteins. We have developed novel methods for discovering both
sequence and structural motifs in proteins that help establish
semantics of protein structure and function.
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Joshua Lederberg was born in Montclair,
New Jersey on May 23, 1925, the son of a rabbi. Lederberg's interest
in a scientific career began quite early. His family moved to New
York City when Lederberg was a child, and Lederberg was able to
attend Stuyvesant High School, which concentrated in the sciences.
In New York Lederberg was also able to take advantage of facilities
such as the American Institute, which made laboratory space and
equipment available to talented high school science students. Upon
graduating from high school at 16, Lederberg took advantage of a
local scholarship to attend Columbia University. After his experiments with Edward L. Tatum that demonstrated
sexual recombination in bacteria, Lederberg decided to leave medical
school to pursue a Ph.D., which he received from Yale in 1948. He
then joined the Genetics Department at the University of Wisconsin,
which at the time was part of the University's School of Agriculture.
He eventually helped form and served as chair of the Department
of Medical Genetics.
Lederberg received the Nobel Prize in 1958. Shortly
afterward he joined the new Department of Genetics at Stanford University's
School of Medicine, where he remained until 1978, when he left Stanford
to become President of Rockefeller University.
Computer science
and molecular biology caught Lederberg's scientific imagination
during the mid-1960s at Stanford. In collaboration with computer
scientists Edward A. Feigenbaum and Bruce Buchanan and chemist Carl
Djerassi, Lederberg developed DENDRAL (DENDRitic ALgorithm), one
of the first "expert" or "knowledge-based" systems. DENDRAL was
designed to further two goals. The first was to aid scientists by
determining the molecular structure of a chemical compound of known
composition. The second was to investigate the combination of acquired
knowledge and experience and inductive reasoning that a human would
use to solve similar problems. Lederberg was involved in other early
computer science, artificial intelligence, and cooperative communications
projects, like SUMEX-AIM (Stanford University Medical EXperimental-Artificial
Intelligence in Medicine). In a very early realization of the Internet,
remote users could connect to a mainframe at Stanford to collaborate
on problems that applied the methods and theories of artificial
intelligence-the use of computers in complex decision making-to
questions of medical science and medical diagnosis.
He became a professor
emeritus in 1990, and he continues to research, lecture, and serve
on a number of advisory panels.
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Stephen Hilgartner
is Associate Professor in the Department of Science and Technology
Studies at Cornell University. He has his Ph.D. in sociology from
Columbia University. His research interests span the fields of biology,
ethics, and values; social studies of biology, biotechnology, and
medicine; science as property; ethnography of science; risk. Hilgartner
has written extensively on genomic research, including: "The Dominant
View of Popularization," Social Studies of Science (1990);
co-author with S. Brandt-Rauf of "Controlling Data and Resources:
Toward Empirical Studies of Access Practices," Knowledge
(1994); author of "The Sokal Affair in Context," Science, Technology
& Human Values (1997); and "Data Access Policy in Genome Research,"
in A. Thackray (ed.) Private Science (1998).His recent book,
Experts on Stage: Science Advice as Public Drama (Stanford, 2000)
explores the processes through which scientific expertise is established
as a tool for decision making. He is currently completing a book
on the Human Genome Project.
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Evelyn Fox
Keller received
her B.A. from Brandeis University in Physics in 1957, and her Ph.D.
Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Harvard Universityin 1963. worked
for a number of years at the interface of physics and biology. Her
research focuses on the history and philosophy of modern biology
and on gender and science. Keller taught at Northeastern University,
S.U.N.Y. at Purchase, and New York University, before moving to
the University of California, Berkeley, where she was Professor
in the Departments of Rhetoric, History, and Women’s Studies
(1988-1992). Since 1992 she has been Professor of History and Philosophy
of Science in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at
MIT. Her current research is on the history and philosophy of developmental
biology. Evelyn Fox Keller has been the recipient of numerous awards,
including the MacArthur Fellowship. She is the author of several
books, including: A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work
of Barbara McClintock; Reflections on Gender and Science;
Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender
and Science; Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth Century
Biology and, most recently The Century of the Gene.
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Daniel J.
Kevles is the J. O. and Juliette Koepfli Professor of the Humanities
at the California Institute of Technology. After obtaining
his Ph.D from Princeton, Daniel Kevles joined Caltech in 1964 where
he has studied and written on the interplay of science and society
past and present, the history of science in America, the history
of modern physics, the history of modern biology, the history of
environmentalism, as well as scientific fraud and misconduct.
Kevles's historical articles and essays have appeared in dozens
of diverse publications ranging from The New Yorker and Los
Angeles Times Magazine to Physics Today, Biotechnology,
Isis, and The Journal of American History. His books
include: The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community
in Modern America (Alfred A. Knopf, 1978); In the Name of
Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Alfred
A. Knopf, 1985); The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues
in the Human Genome Project, edited with Leroy Hood (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1992); and, most recently, The
Baltimore Case (W. W. Norton, 1998), a Los Angeles Times
bestseller and winner of the History of Science Society's 1999 Watson
Davis and Helen Miles Davis Book Prize.
Kevles also is the founder and current faculty chair of the Science,
Ethics, and Public Policy Program for undergraduate and graduate
students at Caltech.
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Hans-Jörg
Rheinberger was born in Grabs, Switzerland. He took undergraduate
degrees in philosophy and biochemisry at the University of Tübingen
and the Free University of Berlin. After obtaining his Ph.D. in
molecular genetics at the Free University of Berlin, Rheinberger
was a research scientist at the Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular
Genetics in Berlin beginning in 1982. From 1985-1990 he was a group
leader at the Max-Planck-Institute working on protein synthesis.
Rheinberger
has had a dual career as a historian of science. He has held positions
in the history of science at the University of Innsbruck, University
of Lübeck, University of Salzburg, and University of Göttingen.
Since 1997 Rheinberger has been the co-founding director of the
Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
The author or
co-author of numerous scientific articles Rheiberger has published
widely in the history of science. His book, Toward a History
of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube
(Stanford,1997) explores the primacy of the material arrangements
of the laboratory in the dynamics of modern molecular biology.
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