Professors earn nationally recognized awards

This fall, biology professors Howard Gest and Michael Lynch will join an eclectic group of newly elected Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members in the Academy of Arts in Sciences. Among the elite the two will be joining are Sen. Edward Kennedy, actress Anjelica Huston, violinist Itzhak Perlman and Nobel Prize-winning chemist George Olah. \nHoward Gest\nHoward Gest, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Microbiology, said he committed himself to a career in science during his high school years, a time when most people are paralyzed with indecision. After reading Sinclair Lewis' "Arrowsmith," Gest, a world-class conversationalist, was determined to become a bacteriologist. These seeds of scientific curiosity germinated into a long, successful career in microbiology. \nIn 1942, the U.S. government solicited Gest's expertise to further the war effort, interrupting his graduate studies at Vanderbilt. The following year, Gest began work on the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago and later at Oak Ridge, Tenn., in the Clinton Laboratories. His involvement with the clandestine effort to produce the atomic bomb, as a researcher in inorganic nuclear chemistry, has left an indelible mark on him. Though Gest is extremely proud of the success of the project and the implications it had for future energy production, he regrets that the bomb was used against Japanese civilians. \n"It was one of the dramatic, great events from a scientific standpoint (the capacity to get energy from the atom)," Gest said. "In the end, it is obvious that we are going to have use nuclear energy to support our society, I think there is no question of that ... (However) many of us were unhappy when the second bomb was dropped three days later on Nagasaki. \n"The Japanese hardly had a chance to get over this crushing thing that happened three days earlier."\nGest, who retired from teaching in 1987, has published a memoir detailing the project and a little-known petition signed by the scientists, including Gest, immediately following the trial detonation of the bomb in Alamogordo, N.M. The petition was authored by Leo Szilard, the prominent Hungarian-born physicist, who spearheaded the Manhattan Project in response to the Germans, who were feverishly testing potential weapons of mass destruction as their prospects of winning the war dwindled. The petition urged former U.S. President Harry S Truman to consider the moral implications of dropping such a grimly, efficient weapon and to first offer the Japanese peace terms and advance warning of the devastation that would ensue if the terms were rejected. \nThe petition never reached Truman and was subsequently classified until 1958. But it did serve to document the dissent of Gest and his colleagues. \nAfter the resolution of the Second World War, Gest embarked on what would become a long and distinguished career researching photosynthetic bacteria. In 1984, Gest and his student Jeffrey Favinger discovered the bacteria, Heliobacterium chlorum, as the result of a botched experiment. This bacterium, which is extraordinarily sensitive to oxygen, is believed to be a link between the anaerobic bacteria that flourished in the Earth's early atmosphere and the more highly advanced plants that require oxygen for survival. \nMichael Lynch\nMichael Lynch, who arrived in Bloomington last summer, was one of the six inductees to be recognized for research in evolutionary biology and ecology. Lynch was a bit surprised to be inducted into the Academy, which boasts of such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Albert Einstein. \n"There's a lot of people deserving of these awards," he said. "It's really a privilege to have (been inducted to the Academy). I suppose it does make a statement about what my peers think about the work I'm doing."\nIn a modest gesture, Lynch, who taught molecular evolution this past year, deflected some of the accolades.\n"I regard (the honor) as being more important for the department (of biology) than for myself," he said. \nAfter graduating from St. Bonaventure with a degree in biology, Lynch moved to the University of Minnesota, where he studied limnology, the study of lake biology. Upon completing his graduate work, he accepted a job at the University of Illinois. It was there, according to Lynch, that he developed an interest in evolution.\nSince then Lynch has been almost exclusively involved in the research of evolutionary biology. His work includes the study of gene duplication and mutation and genetic conservation. Lynch hopes his research will be able to translate into practical developments in medicine and the way we manage endangered species. \n"We've done a lot of work on the evolution of duplicate genes and how often duplicate genes arise. It turns out that a lot of human genetic disorders are actually associated with duplicate genes," Lynch said. "Also, the work I've done in genetic conservation has a lot of implications for how we manage endangered species. \nFor example, we worry about population sizes falling being below a certain point ... We've developed a lot of theory that provides a quantitative link between population size and the probability of extinction."\nAccording to Lynch, the field will continue to develop at an exponential rate as genome sequencing continues to expand.\n"It's an incredible privilege to be an evolutionary biologist right now ... Over the next 10 years we will have the genome sequences of many dozens of species," he said. "We really have an opportunity to understand how evolution occurs at the gene level."\nIn a recent press release, professor Jeffrey Palmer, chair of the IU Department of Biology lauded the two newly elected fellows.\n"I'm extremely proud," Palmer said. "This gives our department a total of five faculty who have been elected to the American Academy in just the past four years." \nThe Academy of Arts and Sciences will formally induct the new Fellows and Foreign honorary members during an Oct. 5 ceremony in Cambridge, Mass.