At a ceremony at New York's famous Pierre Hotel last month, Bernard Roizman, professor of Virology at the University of Chicago, received a personal check for $50,000 from the pharmaceutical company, Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), as winner of the company's Distinguished Achievement Award in Infectious Disease Research. David Ho, scientific director and CEO of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, New York, and Gordon Archer, professor of medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, both received research funds of $500,000 over five years.
The evening marked the last in a series of six annual award nights in different disciplines for 1998: Distinguished Achievement Awards for cancer (Michael Sporn), cardiovascular (Philip Majerus), neuroscience (Richard Axel), nutrition (George Beaton) and orthopedic research (William Cole) were also made last year, along with two additional research prizes in each category. Ho told Nature Medicine that the BMS research funds are unique because they are given truly with "no strings attached."
Roizman is known for his work on herpes simplex virus (HSV). He mapped the HSV genome, developed recombinant DNA techniques that reveal the role of specific genes in the viral life cycle and laid the groundwork for current efforts to develop a vaccine against the virus.
Bernard Roizman
Roizman accepted his award graciously, and used the occasion to voice his belief that although scientific training has improved since his graduate school days, it may have "gone too far." He declared that the system is creating "a cadre of professionals with few outstanding scientists in their midst," a process that is "becoming more and more evident as new faculty members with excellent records of publications...flounder for several years as they become fully independent." He called for an overhaul of graduate education to make it a true research education "rather than a source of dedicated cheap labor."
