Eugene Garfield – 1925-2017 – a life of impact

February 27, 2017March 9, 2017 AR News Company, News, Research Communication general

By Richard Gallagher, President and Editor-In-Chief of Annual Reviews.

It is with great sadness that I write to share the news that Dr. Eugene Garfield, one of the longest serving members of the Annual Reviews Board of Directors, passed away yesterday (26th February 2017) at the age of 91. Throughout his tenure Gene provided invaluable and enthusiastic support to us.

That Gene’s life created an impact is undisputed.

He first mentioned the idea of an impact factor in science in 1955 and an article in JAMA tells the story of how he and Irving H. Sher created it. In research that he conducted in the late 1950s, he developed the concept of citation analysis, which provided researchers with a powerful network to identify, connect and retrieve information, decades before the internet.

Although he was an information scientist at heart, Gene’s entrepreneurial flair is revealed in a catalogue of highly successful business ventures. The products that he developed from this research, including Current Contents and the Science Citation Index, are still in use today. Gene founded a very successful business, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), to produce these products and they were for many years part of Thomson Reuters until their IP and Science business was bought out in 2016 (now Clarivate Analytics).

His influence extended well beyond scientific information. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin acknowledged Gene in their academic work on PageRank, the algorithm that powers their company’s search engine, leading Gene to be described as “the grandfather of Google.”

My relationship with Gene and his wife Meher goes back prior to my arrival at Annual Reviews in May 2015. I was privileged to work with him between 2002 and 2010 as Editor and Publisher at The Scientist, a professional magazine for life scientists that Gene founded in 1986. He had boldly envisaged it as a daily newspaper for scientists distributed at campuses across the country, and we brought his vision to reality with The Scientist Daily, launched a decade ago. Ellis Rubinsten, an early employee of The Scientist who became Editor of Science, says that Gene’s encouragement of great science journalism ended up transforming both Science and Nature’s research coverage.

Gene was also a pioneering employer. The ISI office had a state-of-the-art childcare facility attached, maximizing convenience for the staff. And he trained and supported many of the female leaders in the publishing industry today. The awards that he inspired also give an indication of his interests, including The Eugene Garfield Residency in Science Librarianship and the ALISE Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Competition. He also supported and was a Board Member of Research!America.

News of a memorial service will be forthcoming and we will share it here. All of us at Annual Reviews offer our sincere condolences to his family. We are grateful for his life. He will be greatly missed.

Image credit: Chemical Heritage Foundation to Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA.

Ken Arrow and the Annual Review of Economics

February 23, 2017May 6, 2019 AR News Journal News economics

From Sam Gubins, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, Annual Reviews

It is achingly sad to report the passing of Kenneth Arrow. As described by Michael Weinstein in Monday’s New York Times, Ken Arrow was a brilliant economist, the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics. He was also the founding Co-Editor of the Annual Review of Economics.

Update: due published in August 2019 – The Economics of Kenneth J. Arrow: A Selective Review.

At a lunch at the Stanford Faculty Club in April, 2007, I invited Ken to launch an Annual Review in economics. Although Annual Reviews had been publishing journals in the social sciences for several decades, none were in economics. While this publishing house is well known in many disciplines, it was largely unknown among economists. For this reason I was concerned that Ken would be unconvinced of the need for extended reviews written by leading economists, and additionally, that leading economists would not easily be persuaded to write them. Ken quickly dispelled both concerns. He said that he was a regular reader of articles in many Annual Reviews series and understood how valuable they were in synthesizing developments in fields. He had been introduced to them by the sociologist Robert K. Merton and the psychologist Gardner Lindzey. In addition to the social science journals, Ken read articles in several Annual Reviews, including Public Health, Neuroscience, Environment, Ecology, and others. So to my request that he take on the task of serving as inaugural editor, he agreed enthusiastically, inviting Timothy Bresnahan to serve as a Co-Editor.

Most of those he invited to join him on the inaugural editorial committee were unfamiliar with Annual Reviews, yet all agreed to serve. And most of those invited to write reviews accepted and delivered a manuscript. Ken was so beloved and revered that the community was eager to join any endeavor of which he was a part.

His colleagues persuaded Ken to write an essay for Volume 1, Some Developments in Economic Theory Since 1940: An Eyewitness Account, which is a personal reflection on his relationship to the development of economic theory over 70 years.

Tim Bresnahan captured the essence of Ken when he wrote, “he was a great man, a great colleague, and a great economist.” We were privileged to have known him.

Photo credit: Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

“Queen of Carbon Science” Mildred Dresselhaus Dies

February 22, 2017February 22, 2017 Liz Allen Authors conmatphys

Screen Shot 2017-02-22 at 17.20.21.png Mildred S. Dresselhaus, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physicist known as the “Queen of Carbon Science,” died at the age of 86 years in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Monday, February 20, 2017. She was the first woman at MIT to attain the rank of full, tenured professor, and the first woman to receive the National Medal of Science in Engineering.

Dr. Dresselhaus spent her career studying the properties of carbon and was instrumental in developing carbon nanotubes, which have shown promise in the creation of better electricity conduction and stronger materials. She also contributed to the development of thermoelectric materials, which can transform temperature difference into electricity.

Read her autobiographical article in the 2011 Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics.

Friday at AAAS 2017: A Science Salad

February 22, 2017March 9, 2017 Suzanne K. Moses News general

schedule-board Today was a little bit of everything as I continued to get a feel for this years conference. I started off by checking in on some of the results from Obama’s 2013 BRAIN initiative to research new methods of treating and preventing brain disorders. This was the first all female panel I have seen at AAAS! It was really heartening to watch these engineers and researchers describe their projects. My favorite being the wearable PET scan! No more having to lay perfectly still in a big tube and pretend you’re on a roller coaster. Now there’s a chance of getting valuable diagnostic data from people who cannot hold still or safely lay down. It’s quite amazing.

From there I headed to a lively discussion about the ethics of gene editing. I found one speaker’s comparison of IVF treatment and gene therapy very compelling. I next found myself listening to Daniel Nocera talk about the chemistry behind his artificial leaves that can turn sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into fuel. I had to pull on all of my old high school chemistry lessons but I followed the discussion enough to be very impressed with the idea.

I especially enjoy the astronomy panels at every AAAS meeting, and usually come away counting down the months until a favored project launches. This year I was introduced to a coming exploration of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Europa has an ocean over a rocky sea bed that is covered by a thick sheet of ice. Those rocks and water make it a good candidate for having some sort of life. NASA is planning for 20 days of battery life on the surface while carrying 42 kg of scientific instruments. The mission is currently planned for 2024–25.

With my head full of space dreams, I found a seat at Naomi Oreskes’s Plenary lecture titled “The Scientist as Sentinel” and listened to her history of scientists as political activists. I was thinking about the good timing of that lecture as I followed a group of young scientists out into the hallway and heard them making plans for the protest on Sunday.

Suzanne K. Moses is Annual Reviews’ Senior Electronic Content Coordinator. For 15+ years, she has played a central role in the publication of Annual Reviews’ online articles. Not a single page is posted online without first being proofed and quality checked by Suzanne.

Annual Review of Animal Biosciences, Volume 5

February 17, 2017 Suzanne K. Moses Journal News animal

See the full table of contents for the Annual Review of Animal Biosciences, Volume 5.

The autobiography in Volume 5 of the Annual Review of Animal Bioscience, “My Scientific Journey: From an Agrarian Start to an Academic Setting” by Janice M. Bahr, explores her research in reproductive physiology with an emphasis on her relationships with her mentors and students. After completing her PhD, she planned to take a postdoctoral position or attend medical school; however, she learned that the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign was hiring. “Having been raised on a farm and milked enough cows to have a degree in it, I did know a lot about domestic animals.”

The job did come with challenges:

Little was I aware of the challenges of being the first woman hired in the Department of Animal Sciences of 40 men. I was the only female permanent faculty member for about 20 years. Even though I progressed through the academic ranks at an unprecedented speed, becoming an assistant professor in 1974, an associate professor in 1979, and a full professor in 1983, I was paid less as a full professor than the male associate professors in Animal Sciences. I described this experience as swimming upstream in a stream that had no water. Fortunately, Dr. Reginald Gomes, a distinguished reproductive biologist who became head of Animal Sciences in 1985, realized I was significantly underpaid based on my scholarly accomplishments. Women professors receiving a lower salary compared with their male counterparts were not unusual.

Even after many years of reading autobiographies from female scientists, stories like that still surprise me.

I grew up next to a dairy farm in Southwestern Virginia. Upon moving to Northern California, I found the sight of cows grazing with an ocean view rather befuddling. Reading Dr. W. Barendse’s article “Climate Adaptation of Tropical Cattle” gave me a similar feeling. There are a lot of variables in how “tropical” is defined, and the cattle that live within these regions face a host of challenges that I had never considered:

The issues associated with cattle in the tropics have been known for some time, and few new issues have arisen. For example, Bonsma identified (a) heat, including radiation, temperature, and humidity; (b) feed, including feed quality and the ability to use the feed available; (c) resistance, including to parasites, especially ticks, and to photosensitivity, especially eye cancer and keratosis; and (d) the ability to avoid noxious plants, not only as a feed source but also the physical aspects of thorns and other plant defenses.

I was also intrigued by Dr. Gerald Shurson’s article “The Role of Biofuels Coproducts in Feeding the World Sustainably.” I especially appreciated the section on the debate over food versus fuel, which opened up an interesting perspective on how biofuels could be competition for feedstock:

Grains, sugar, and oilseeds are the primary feedstocks used to produce biofuels, but they are also valuable commodities in food production. Thus, increased competition for these resources between biofuels, food, and food animal industries has served as the foundation for the food-versus-fuel debate. Although increases in biofuels production are expected to continue in some countries, production limits will likely be imposed for future expansion. Incentives for using alternative feedstocks (e.g., cellulosic materials) to produce biofuels are being implemented to maintain or reduce competition for traditional grains and oilseeds in biofuels and coproduct production.

Comments are open if you’d like to share what you found most interesting in this volume.

First day of AAAS 2017 – Policy, Climate, and Social Media

February 17, 2017February 17, 2017 Suzanne K. Moses News

Suzanne is attending the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston, MA, and we hope you enjoy her dispatches from the meeting.

aaas

Part of the joy of attending the meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the multiple tracks: everyone is going to choose sessions for their own reasons and everyone’s experience will be different. My first day started with the “Wicked Problem” of Climate Change. Wicked problems (if you’re not from Boston) are complex with no clear paths to solutions. They are often dependent on rapidly changing conditions and can’t be tackled in a linear way. The session ended up focusing a lot on how to work with people and the importance of seeing climate change discussions from different angles. For example, there were discussions about religious ecology, the neuroscience of denial, and not getting distracted by politics.

I liked the logic of working not globally or locally, but regionally. Instead of working within state lines, look at the ecosystem. For example, think about coastal wetlands instead of Florida. One of the speakers mentioned that farmers in the Midwest are adapting to changing climate conditions. They think about how to increase yield in the different climate, but they won’t say the words “climate change.” So scientists need to find ways of communicating that don’t invoke politically charged terms. There was a fantastic question from the audience from a high school teacher who pointed out that because the problem is multigenerational, we need to look very carefully at educating middle and high school students to continue the research.

The theme of this year’s conference is “Serving Society Through Science Policy” and there are many policy sessions on the schedule. The concerns about the new US administration’s approach to science and data is certainly fueling a lot of discussion in the hallways of the conference center. There are flyers and information about the March for Science, and panels about how to get involved in crafting government science policy.

The hallway conversations about the other big panel of the day, Social Media and Online Engagement, was much lighter than the talk fallowing the policy panel. It’s been interesting to watch this topic evolve in the six years I’ve been attending this meeting. At first, it was scientists seriously discussing whether it was appropriate for them to have an online presence. There were also presentations about Second Life and massive open online courses (MOOCs). Now we’re talking about using Twitter to network and create communities. There are stories of universities encouraging social media posting and tenure committees who see time spent building those communities as valid and important scholarly work. As one of the presenters said, “It’s not a distraction from my career, it is essential to my career.”

My day ended with the address from Barbara Schaal, AAAS President. This began with a recognition of the Junior Academy of Sciences winners, which made me think fondly of my own experiences in the Virginia chapter. Next, there were some awards presented and it was noted that many of the planned presenters, attendees, and one of the award winners were unable to attend due to the immigration ban. This set the tone for the rest of the evening with the President’s address focusing on the importance of science to society and the necessity to defend basic research.

That was my impression of day one. Tomorrow, things start in earnest with deep dives into specific topics of interest. I haven’t set my schedule in stone, but I look forward to discovering new topics and questions.

If you are also attending the AAAS Meeting, let us know what sessions and panels you attended and what you found interesting.

Reengineered website – site video guides

Video February 15, 2017February 17, 2017 AR News Redesign

The new Annual Reviews website was recently reengineered with the unique needs of researchers, librarians and agents, and authors in mind. Recognizing that change usually requires some readjustment, our IT project coordinator Andrea Burtness has developed a series of short videos to quickly walk end-users through our enhancements. Each video has closed captioning available in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Japanese, Simple Chinese, and Korean.

Feel free to ask questions by responding to this post and we will address them in a timely manner.

Annual Review of Physiology, Volume 79

February 14, 2017 Suzanne K. Moses Journal News physiol

View the full table of contents for the Annual Review of Physiology, Volume 79.

The first article to catch my attention inthis volume, “A Critical and Comparative Review of Fluorescent Tools for Live-Cell Imaging” by Elizabeth A. Specht et al., conjured for me images of white-coated researchers anxiously holding fluorescent light tubes over microscopes. This amusing vision was, of course, very fleeting, and the last remnants were swept away when I started reading the article and realized biological researchers use the phrase “fluorescent tool” in reference to the fluorescent markers, dyes, and sensors in biological samples. These tools are much more complicated and diverse than I realized and I was very interested in learning about how they work:

This review provides a broad overview of well-established fluorescent tools, with an eye toward recent developments and emerging technologies, and it refers the reader to more comprehensive and detailed reviews on individual techniques and applications. We begin with a discussion of general classes of fluorophores and their advantages and disadvantages for various applications. We then discuss methods for labeling a molecule of interest with a fluorescent moiety—including fluorescent protein fusions, incorporation of fluorescent moieties through nonnatural amino acid substitution, chemical labeling, and antibody labeling—emphasizing applications in live cells. We briefly review applications for monitoring proteins, which are already well established, and then focus on the extension of these techniques to high-throughput proteomics and screening.

Next on my personal reading list is the article by Johannes Overgaard & Heath A. Macmillan titled “The Integrative Physiology of Insect Chill Tolerance.” This article reminded me of when my little brother found a beetle frozen in a pool of ice when we were children. After marveling at it for days he decided to melt the ice so he could examine the beetle more closely and use it as part of an ongoing school science project. We were both quite shocked when the defrosted beetle turned out to be very much alive and not in favor of being used for science projects. (By “shocked” I mean we jumped and screamed when it started moving.)

This article looks at how insects survive ice and cold and the adaptations that make it possible:

The cold tolerance of insects has historically been classified by their ability to tolerate ice formation in the extracellular fluid (freeze-tolerant species) or to avoid freezing by lowering the freezing point of their extracellular fluid [freeze-avoiding species that survive low temperatures above their supercooling point (SCP)]. Studies of freeze tolerance and avoidance have revealed a range of fascinating physiological adaptations that involve accumulation of cryoprotectants, removal of ice nucleators, synthesis of antifreeze proteins, or use of severe dehydration, all of which allow insects to either tolerate or avoid freezing. Nevertheless, the classification of insect species as freeze avoiding and freeze tolerant has received some criticism because it fails to take into account that insect species from warm regions experience loss of homeostasis, cold-induced injury, and death at temperatures above those causing extracellular freezing.

ph79-tongue Finally, I discovered the article by Charlotte M. Mistretta & Archana Kumari, “Tongue and Taste Organ Biology and Function: Homeostasis Maintained by Hedgehog Signaling.” I’ve given some thought to how taste works but because it seems such a basic part of life I forget how complex it actually is. This article certainly reminded me and also included bonus discussion of the hedgehog pathway, one of my favorite names in all of science. As the authors write in the abstract:

The tongue is an elaborate complex of heterogeneous tissues with taste organs of diverse embryonic origins. The lingual taste organs are papillae, composed of an epithelium that includes specialized taste buds, the basal lamina, and a lamina propria core with matrix molecules, fibroblasts, nerves, and vessels. Because taste organs are dynamic in cell biology and sensory function, homeostasis requires tight regulation in specific compartments or niches.

If you found an article in this volume that interests you, please let me know in the comments!

Research partners: Happy Valentine’s Day from Annual Reviews

February 14, 2017February 22, 2017 Suzanne K. Moses Authors biochem, biophys, immunol, physiol

I have a soft spot for the Annual Review autobiographies. I open each volume’s table of contents and eagerly search for them. I’m always interested in how our authors discovered their passion for their field and the interplay between their lives and their science. Among these articles there are a few that are written by husband and wife teams—and they are an extraordinary glimpse into shared lives.

herzenbergs

I first encountered Leonard and Leonore Herzenberg in their article “Genetics, FACS, Immunology, and Redox: A Tale of Two Lives Intertwined,” published in the Annual Review of Immunology in 2004. I was quite taken with the way they handed the narrative back and forth, as well as the humor with which they told their story. I was delighted to find them writing for us again in 2014 for the Annual Review of Physiology, and even more delighted to find they had done a video interview! These two articles remain among my favorites, and I was sad to learn that Dr. Leonard Herzenberg had passed away soon after the video was made.

Here is a snippet from Dr. Leonore Herzenberg about their time in Paris at the Pasteur Institute from the 2004 volume of the Annual Review of Immunology:

…because Len loved hands-on experimentation, I took over much of the data recording, computation, and display (plotting) that was needed. The work was tedious (slide rules were the closest thing to computers at the time). However, it gave me the opportunity to do a preliminary analysis of the data and try novel approaches to analyzing LacZ induction kinetics. Len left this to me. He was more interested in developing methods and experiment designs that would enable clear conclusions without a lot of mathematical interference. This division of labor, which reflects Len’s innate preference for concreteness and my innate love for theory, remains with us even today.

bb-richardsons Drs. Jane and David Richardson wrote “Doing Molecular Biophysics: Finding, Naming, and Picturing Signal Within Complexity” for the Annual Review of Biophysics in 2013. While the article focuses mainly on their research, it is full of stories about their shared experiences, such as this one:

We spent a large fraction of our lives from the early 1970s to the early 1990s in Fred Brooks’ computer graphics lab at the University of North Carolina (UNC). There we accomplished much of our own research in protein structure, acted as guinea pigs for in-depth testing of their software and hardware, and played happily with the science fiction–level gadgets that explored far-out new possibilities such as virtual reality displays, volume rendering, force feedback, fitting models into electron density, or tugging on atoms to move local structure with (more or less) physical realism. Some things worked splendidly and soon became widespread; some failed by being surprisingly unhelpful, making you sick, or whacking you in the chest (their gadgets never just fell apart)…

iy7-kleins

In 1989, George and Eva Klein wrote “How One Thing Has Led to Another” for the Annual Review of Immunology. Their story begins with a whirlwind romance and an intrigue-filled move into Sweden just as the Iron Curtain was falling on Dr. Klein’s Hungarian homeland. From the epilogue of their article:

As each of us is moving towards the approaching darkness, the sun is never setting over the vast oceans of science. It has been a rare privilege to live and work through the times when the genetic material turned from protein to DNA, when adaptive changes in cell populations-including antibody production-were unmasked as Darwinian variations and selection, when GOD became the rearrangement of immunoglobulin genes, violating the dogma that all somatic cells have the same DNA….It was a great time, and it still is, but it is only the stumbling, stuttering, premature foreshadowing of what lies ahead. We have barely scratched the surface.

bi-tabor The story of Celia White Tabor and Herbert Tabor’s work in biochemical research was chronicled along with their personal history in the article “It All Started on a Streetcar in Boston” for the Annual Review of Biochemistry in 1999. Among the scientific discussion are small stories about their lives and friendships, making this an interesting read.

We first met on a Boston streetcar in 1940, being introduced by a mutual friend. Celia was returning from research work at the Massachusetts General Hospital as part of her senior thesis at Radcliffe College, and Herb was returning from a concert by the Boston Symphony. We were married in 1946 after Celia had finished her medical training. We started working together in 1952, and we are still actively collaborating in our studies on various aspects of the biosynthesis and function of polyamines.

Annual Review of Pathology: Mechanisms of Disease, Volume 12

February 3, 2017February 3, 2017 Suzanne K. Moses Journal News pathmechdis

View the full table of contents for the Annual Review of Pathology: Mechanisms of Disease, Volume 12.

pm12-jaffe Elaine S. Jaffe starts this volume off with her autobiographical article “The Microscope as a Tool for Disease Discovery—A Personal Voyage.” Her research involves the classification of hematological malignancies, and this article reveals her passion for all the things that can be discovered through the microscope as well as some surprising information about pathologists:

Looking at a microscopic slide of diseased tissue provides a wealth of information regarding the pathogenesis and pathophysiology of disease. Pathologists are very visual in their approach, and many pursue art or photography as hobbies. Most are adept at recognizing faces or images as well as discerning the varied microscopic patterns.

Sometimes political events highlight portions of our articles that I might not otherwise have noticed. Finding that our articles resonate with current events isn’t unusual, but it may strike you as surprising for an article in the Annual Review of Pathology: Mechanisms of Disease. Perhaps it is less surprising to find such resonances in an autobiography. Dr. Jaffe’s description of her parents and family, who immigrated to the United States from what is now Ukraine, is particularly timely:

My father was born in Steblov, and my mother in Ryzhanovka. My father’s father, who was a cantor, came to the United States in 1914 with his two oldest children, and he expected the rest of the family to follow once he was settled. Cousins who already lived in New York facilitated their arrival… My parents were typical of many immigrant families in their drive to succeed in their new homeland. Our house was always the center for extended family events and gatherings. Political events and intense debate dominated conversations.

Another article of interest is Walsh et al.’s “Humanized Mouse Models of Clinical Disease.” Anyone who has read much medical science realizes that we use animal models for several reasons, as the authors describe:

Animal models are used as surrogates of human biology due to the logistical and ethical restrictions of working with cell and tissue samples from human donors and the biological limitations of culture systems. Small animals such as mice and rats are widely used mammalian model systems due to their small size, ease of maintenance and handling, short reproductive cycle, sharing of genomic and physiological properties with humans, and ability to be readily manipulated genetically.

Of course, these models aren’t perfect, but they are getting closer as humanized mice are altered to more perfectly mimic human systems. I was surprised by how many issues these alterations are letting us research—for instance, to research infectious diseases immunodeficient mice can be grafted with human immune cells so researchers can study the human immune response. I have to note that we are in fact living in the future predicted by the science fiction authors I read as a child.

If you found an article in this volume that particularly interests you, please let me know in the comments!

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Month: February 2017