Sydney Brenner, Robert Horvitz, and John Sulston will be presented next month with the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for their work in programmed cell death and genetic mutations. Meantime, proteomics scientists John Fenn, Koichi Tanaka, and Kurt Wuethrich split the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Fighting a resource crunch, Caliper Technologies laid off 25 people, or approximately 10 percent of its staff.
Timothy Shannon, former head of global medical development at Bayer, joined CuraGen as chief medical officer.
San Diego’s biochip company Aviva Biosciences appointed Norrie Russell as CEO and president. Russell, former head of Lynx Therapeutics, replaced Peter Wilding, who became chairman of the board for Aviva.
Ann Arbor, Mich.’s Rubicon Genomics appointed Fred Beyerlein as president and CEO, replacing Thomas Collet. Beyerlein came to Rubicon in June 2001 as a senior vice president.
Gene-based drug development firm Althea Technologies hired Joseph Monforte, formerly of the Joint Genome Institute, as CSO and Syngenta’s David Vandertie as CFO.
TIGR president Claire Fraser won the EO Lawrence Award for, among other things, her “contributions to genome analysis technology.” The award was established in 1959 and grants winners a prize of $25,000.
This month, the Takeda Foundation will give its annual Takeda Awards in Tokyo. Pat Brown of Stanford and Stephen Fodor of Affymetrix will split the award — and approximately $833,000 — for their DNA microarray innovations.
Dan Janies, who was instrumental in building the supercomputing cluster used for evolutionary and comparative genomics at New York City’s Museum of Natural History, will move to Ohio State University in January 2003. Janies will be an assistant professor of biomedical informatics there.
Fremont, Calif.’s GenoSpectra appointed Gary McMaster to its CSO post. McMaster was most recently director of target discovery and systems biology research at Eli Lilly.
Structural Genomix welcomed aboard Vicki Nienaber as associate director for process technology and Leah Fung as associate director for chemistry. Nienaber, known for x-ray crystallography, comes from Abbott Laboratories. Fung has worked at Structural Bioinformatics and Signal Pharmaceuticals.