The Editor’s Medal 2006

Acceptance of the 2006 Kober medal.

The 2006 Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal. Masatoshi Nei.

The Genetics Society of America annually honors members who have made outstanding contributions to genetics. The Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal recognizes a lifetime contribution to the science of genetics. The Genetics Society of America Medal recognizes particularly outstanding contributions to the science of genetics within the past 15 years. The George W. Beadle Medal recognizes distinguished ser...

Victor Ambros The 2006 Genetics Society of America Medal

In 1990, Victor Ambros faced a conundrum. The search for the heterochronic gene lin-4 had led him to a 700-bp DNA fragment. This fragment could rescue a lin-4mutant but contained no apparent open reading frame (ORF). The few small ORFs that could be detected were either not conserved in other nematodes or not essential for rescue. Two years and several RNAse protection experiments later, Victor...

The Richard Webster Medal

There have recently been moves afoot among evolutionary biologists to stop speaking of ‘Darwin’s theory of evolution’ and, instead, to call it ‘Darwin’s law of evolution’. This is to stymie creationists who like to say ‘evolution is only a theory’. Now I am all in favour of stymieing creationists, but I think that this idea is misguided. The underlying assumption is that the use of the word ‘La...

The Myth and the Medal

The weekend before the start of the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians, I contributed an op-ed to the New York Times about the history of the Fields Medal. The article treated two topics that are familiar to many mathematicians, if not necessarily to the general public. I suggested that a previously unrecognized connection between these two stories, discovered in the course of my res...