Profile: Being Bob Langer

Profile of Bob B. Buchanan.

On a clear June day in 1975, Bob Buchanan and two Oslo colleagues pulled up water samples from a lake in Norway, examining the microorganisms growing at various depths. “When we got to 6 meters,” Buchanan recalls, “there was a band of Chlorobium growing,” referring to a genus of green bacteria (now called Chlorobaculum) that belongs to a unique class of organisms called photolithotrophs. These ...

Langer-Giedion syndrome.

Bob Steneck

Bob Steneck is professor of marine biology, oceanography and marine policy in University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences. He is a marine ecologist whose ‘laboratories’ include coral reefs in the Caribbean and Indopacific oceans and kelp forests of the North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans. He has published over 150 scientific papers on topics including lobsters, sea urchins, fish, corals...

Bob Carlyon

r wine was imported to the port of Lattara in southern France as early as 400 BC (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci USA (2013) 110, 10147–10152). The discovery of a wine press at the same site shows that the resident Celts moved on swiftly from importing Etruscan wine to importing the technology and making their own. More recent instances of agriculture shaping society include slavery in the Americas, wher...

Remembrances of Bob Paige

I first met Bob in 1969. He had just come to New York to join the systems staff at the Courant Institute. We had a CDC6600 back then, but our computing services were in the dark ages. Bob was hired to debug a home-grown time sharing system that didn’t work. He turned out to be a perfect hire; Bob thoughtfully discarded the code and built the system afresh. Our acquaintance was casual for years....