As we went to press, the kudos were flying

Each spring the National Academy of Sciences elects new members, bestowing one of the highest honors a U.S. scientist or engineer can receive. As this issue of the magazine was in production, we learned that three Yale scientists had been tapped for membership: medical school faculty members Linda M. Bartoshuk, Ph.D., and Arthur L. Horwich, M.D., HS ’78, FW ’84, and alumnus John D. Baxter, M.D. ’66, HS ’68, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

Bartoshuk, a professor of surgery in the section of otolaryngology and of psychology, is an experimental psychologist and one of the world’s leading experts on the science of taste. Horwich, professor of genetics and pediatrics and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, has solved key problems in the study of protein folding, work that has clear implications for Alzheimer’s disease.

Baxter is director of UCSF’s Metabolic Research Unit. In 1979, he and Howard M. Goodman, Ph.D., were the first to clone the gene for human growth hormone, which became the second genetically engineered product to receive government approval. His current work focuses on how receptors in the nucleus of a cell affect human health and disease. His term as president of The Endocrine Society ended in June.

Other Yale alumni elected this spring were George A. Akerlof, B.A. ’62; James H. Dieterich, Ph.D. ’68; John B. Fenn, Ph.D. ’40 (winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry); and Paul A. Wender, Ph.D. ’73. Sixty-nine Yale professors are among the society’s 1,850 active members.

On another front, judges in the CASE Circle of Excellence competition have selected Yale Medicine to receive a silver medal in the Special Interest Magazines category at the case International Assembly in July in Washington. Yale Medicine was awarded a silver medal last year as well by CASE, the 23,500-member Council for Advancement and Support of Education, and received the highest honor in the 2001 magazine competition sponsored by the Association of American Medical Colleges.

—The Editors