Seven Receive Franklin Medals

The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia handed out its awards for 2004 to seven individuals for their achievements in physics, among other scientific fields. The awards ceremony was held this past April.

The institute honored Seymour Benzer with its Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science, which was accompanied by a purse of $250 000, for his “pioneering discoveries that both founded and greatly advanced the field of neurogenetics, thereby transforming our understanding of the brain.” Benzer began his career as a solid-state physicist but later switched to biology. He currently is James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, Emeritus, at Caltech.

Raymond V. Damadian garnered the Bower Award for Business Leadership for his “development of magnetic resonance imaging used in clinical applications, which has transformed the diagnosis and treatment of disease.” He is chairman and president of the FONAR Corp, which develops and manufactures MRI scanners, in Melville, New York.

This year’s Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry went to Harry Gray, Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry at Caltech. He was recognized for his “pioneering contributions in the field of electron transfer in metalloproteins.”

The winner of the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science is Richard M. Karp, University Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. The institute acknowledged his “contributions to the understanding of computational complexity” and said that his work “helps programmers find workable solution procedures, avoiding approaches that would fail to find a solution in a reasonable amount of time.” The citation adds, “Scientific, commercial or industrial situations where his work applies include establishing least-cost schedules for industrial production, transportation routing, circuit layout, communication network design, and predicting the spatial structure of a protein from its amino acid sequencing.”

Robert E. Newnham, Alcoa Professor Emeritus of Solid State Science at the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering. He was cited for his “invention of multiphase piezoelectric transducers and their spatial architecture, which revolutionized the field of acoustic imaging.”

The institute presented its Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering to Roger Bacon, who retired in 1991 from his position as a senior research associate with BP Amoco Corp and then consulted for BP Amoco (now BP Corp) on government contracts until 1999. He was honored for his “fundamental research on the production of graphite whiskers and the determination of their microstructure and properties, for his pioneering development efforts in the production of the world’s first continuously processed carbon fibers and the world’s first high modulus, high strength carbon fibers using rayon precursors, and for his contributions to the development of carbon fibers from alternative starting materials.”

Robert B. Meyer is this year’s recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics. A professor of physics at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, Meyer was cited for his “creative synthesis of theory and experiment demonstrating that tilted, layered liquid crystal phases of chiral molecules are ferroelectric, thus launching both fundamental scientific advancement in the field of soft condensed matter physics and the development of liquid crystal displays that meet the demands of current technology.”