Analyses of the natural variation in stable isotopes of components of ecological systems have provided new insights into how these systems function across paleoecological to modern timescales and across a wide range of spatial scales. Isotope abundances of the molecules in biological materials and geochemical profiles are viewed as recorders that can be used to reconstruct ecological processes ...

This essay summarizes the author's 10 years of experience at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation mentoring secondary school science teachers during 8-wk Summer Research Institutes. The summary is presented as a learning model, which we call the research dynamic. This model consists of three interlocked components: specified ignorance, peer interactions, and gateway experiments. Specified i...

I n February 1944, I was shuttling between service as a hospital corpsman at a US Naval Hospital and the completion of my pre-medical studies at Columbia College in New York. I was just short of 19, and in uniform in the Navy V-12 officers’ training program. At Columbia, as an undergraduate I had already worked for two years in the laboratory of Francis J. Ryan, among the first of the league of...

On this occasion of sharing the high honor of a Nobel Award with Edward L. Tatum for our" . . . discovery that genes act by regulating chemical events", and with Joshua Lederberg for his related" . . . discoveries concerning the organization of the genetic material of bacteria", it seems appropriate that I sketch briefly the background events that led to the work on Neurospora that Tatum and I ...