A cool, well-organized mind may be essential for parsing data, but sighting—and clearing—a new scientific frontier depends on a kind of stubborn, dreamy get-up-and-go. Cynthia Kenyon, for example, defied convention by believing that a tiny worm could hold clues to human aging. • Napoleone Ferrara persisted—when others doubted—in believing that blocking a tumor’s blood supply could help slow cancerous growth. • And more than a decade ago Stephen Fodor believed it possible to scan the entire human genome using a silicon chip the size of a postage stamp. All five Discover Award winners for 2004 have weathered doubts about their vision, and each has countered those doubts with steady progress and impressive innovation. And they enjoyed themselves along the way. • Stephen Fodor says: “I think the big fun to me was always just doing experiments. It’s amazing the results you can get if you just do the experiments. That’s what a lot of science is. There are a lot of really, really good ideas in science. There’s no lack of good ideas. But there is a lack in the number of people who will actually do the experiments required to test those ideas.” Meet five winners who had the ideas—and tested their ideas.
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JUDGES
BASIC SCIENCE
Thomas R. Cech, president, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, Maryland
Daniel Koshland, professor of molecular biology, University of California at Berkeley
Kary B. Mullis, founder, Altermune, LLC, Newport Beach, California
Bruce Stillman, director, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York
Carlyle B. Storm, director emeritus, Gordon Research Conferences, Kingston, Rhode Island
GENETICS
Aravinda Chakravarti, director, McKusick-Nathan Institute of Genetic Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
Mary-Claire King, professor of medicine and genome sciences, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle
Stephen J. O’Brien, chief, Laboratory of Genomic Diversity, National Cancer Institute, Frederick, Maryland
Margaret Pericak-Vance, director, Duke Center for Human Genetics, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina
MEDICINE
Stephen T. Warren, professor of human genetics, Emory University, Atlanta
Catherine DeAngelis, editor, Journal of the American Medical Association, Chicago
Brian J. Druker, director, Leukemia Center, Oregon Health Sciences University, Portland, Oregon
Juan Carlos López, editor in chief, Nature Medicine, New York City
Charles Vacanti, professor of anesthesia, Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, Massachusetts
NEUROSCIENCE
Nancy Andreasen, professor of psychiatry, University of Iowa College of Medicine, Iowa City
Michael Gazzaniga, director of the program in cognitive neuroscience, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
Joseph LeDoux, professor of neural science and psychology, New York University, New York City
Larry R. Squire, professor of psychiatry, neurosciences, and psychology, University of California at San Diego School of Medicine
Gary Westbrook, senior scientist, Vollum Institute, Oregon Health Sciences University, Portland, Oregon
PUBLIC HEALTH
Rita Colwell, professor of public health, University of Maryland at College Park and Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, and chairman, Canon US Life Sciences Inc.
Donna Shalala, president, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida
Alfred Sommers, dean, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore
Harrison C. Spencer, president and CEO, Association of Schools of Public Health, Washington, D.C.
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