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November 18, 2003

Discover Dialogues

Discover Magazine does a series of interviews and profiles of scientists, many of them women. Here are some I found:

And a list of The 50 Most Important Women in Science.

Posted by Caterina Fake at 07:21 PM in People | Permalink

Comments

Cool - thanks!

Posted by: Anne at Nov 19, 2003 9:02:05 AM

Here's a profile of Bonnie Bassler and her reserach in Wired:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.04/quorum.html

Trim and hyperkinetic at 40, Bonnie Bassler is often mistaken for a graduate student at conferences. Five mornings a week at dawn, she walks a mile to the local YMCA to lead a popular aerobics class. When a representative from the MacArthur Foundation phoned last fall, the caller played coy at first, asking Bassler if she knew anyone who might be worthy of one of the foundation's fellowships, popularly known as genius grants. "I'm sorry," Bassler apologized, "I don't hang out with that caliber of people."

The point of the call, of course, was that Bassler - an associate professor of molecular biology at Princeton - is now officially a genius herself. More than a decade ago, she began studying a phenomenon that even fellow biologists considered to be of questionable significance: bacterial communication. Now she finds herself at the forefront of a major shift in mainstream science.

[...]

The work required an intensity perfectly suited to Bassler, who obsesses about everything - her weight, her guilt that she hasn't put in enough hours at the lab, and especially her bacteria, which she speaks of with unabashed awe. "Did you know that 'vibrio' means vibrate? Unlike E. coli, which are fat and sleepy, these guys zip around under the microscope," she gushes. "Each bacterium in a species is perfect for the niche in which it resides, and if one survives, the whole species survives. They're better than us. They're the ultimate, stripped-down version of life."

Posted by: Kird at Nov 19, 2003 11:58:14 AM