Francis Collins and J. Craig Venter, former adversaries in the race for sequencing the human genome, are two of the six life scientist who will receive the National Medal of Science this year.

Image: Wikipedia

Also among the awardees is Joanna Fowler, a neurochemist at Brookhaven National Laboratories, who also received this year's National Academy of Sciences Award in Chemical Sciences for developing chemical probes for biomedical imaging studies. She studies how brain circuits are disrupted during drug addiction using positron emission tomography (PET) scans.

Another winner, Elaine Fuchs, is a developmental cell biologist at The Rockefeller University and a Howard Hugh Medical Institute investigator. Her work focuses on multipotent stem cells of the skin. In 2006, she received the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Award for Scientific Excellence.

Biochemist JoAnne Stubbe from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whom The Scientist recently profiled, is being honored for her work on enzymes involved in DNA replication and repair.

Neuroscientist Michael Posner, professor emeritus at the University of Oregon, is being recognized for his studies involving genetic mutations and attention in the brain.

Three other scientists -- mathematician Rudolf Kalman of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, astrophysicist James Gunn of Princeton University, and physicist Berni Alder of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory -- will also receive the award.

The awards will be presented at a ceremony at the White House on October 7th.


Related stories:

Collins seen as boon to NIH
[9th July 2009]

Craig Venter's DNA
[4th September 2007]

miRNA controls skin cell growth
[2nd March 2008]