Did you hear the one about the politician who turned into an environmental activist? How about the poet who turned into an inventor? Or the patients who turned into research fund-raisers? There's a story behind every one of the individuals and organizations on Scientific American's list of 50 leaders in science and technology. Some of them you've heard of - such as politician-activist Al Gore, or billionaire philanthropists Paul Allen, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Others are less well-known - but no less deserving.
This year's edition of the Scientific American 50 is already circulating here and there around the Internet, and the full list is due to hit the magazine's Web site on Monday.
"The Scientific American 50 is looking not just at what's happening from the technological standpoint, but also at the business and policy trends and how they bear on the technology," John Rennie, the magazine's editor-in-chief, told me today.
Former Vice President Gore is cited as the policy leader of the year for his consciousness-raising efforts on the climate change issue, including his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." The insurance company Swiss Re gets similar climate-conscious kudos as business leader of the year, for its campaign to achieve carbon neutrality.
"Sound business practices in the 21st century are increasingly going to mean that you've got to have strategies that address climate change," Rennie observed. "It's great to have them sending out that sort of message. More and more businesses will be accepting the reality of climate change and doing something about it."
Gates and Buffett, meanwhile, are being recognized for their multibillion-dollar contributions to global health, and Allen is in the spotlight for his support of the Allen Brain Atlas. But billionaires aren't the only ones getting into the act of funding reearch. "There are a number of really interesting entrepreneurial approaches," Rennie said.
For example, take Scott Johnson, a 50-year-old former businessman who is battling against multiple sclerosis. As part of that battle, he established the Myelin Repair Foundation and enlisted researchers "to take a real business approach to how we develop some real treatments for multiple sclerosis," Rennie said.
Similarly, pharmaceutical executive Kathy Giusti created the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation after learning that she had the disease. "She has been terrifically successful and aggressive in raising money to support that research," Rennie said. "She's raised $16 million for it."
Another member of the Scientific American 50 is Nobel laureate Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, who used her own money as well as a $100,000 grant to set up a foundation aimed at helping women scientists "get the kind of child care and household help they need to free them up so they can spend more time in the laboratory," Rennie said.
Then there's Elizabeth Goldring, a visually challenged artist and poet who developed a "seeing machine" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The device projects images directly onto the retina using light-emitting diodes - and clinical trials already have produced encouraging results.
Another MIT scientist, Angela Belcher, is recognized as the research leader of the year for her work on what could be called bionanotech - a strategy that uses customized microbes to assemble machines and components on the nanometer scale. Scientific American says "her greatest success" involved programming a genetically engineered virus to assemble a three-dimensional grid of quantum dots.
Other fields highlighted in the SA50 hit parade include hybrid and biofuel automobiles, plasmonics and tissue engineering, Alzheimer's treatments and, of course, stem cell research. Last year's SA50 ran into a buzzsaw of controversy over stem cell claims - but this year, Scientific American highlighted approaches that used stem cell magic to reprogram regular cells.
There's even some recognition for the researchers working on robo-racers and invisibility cloaks.
Rennie said it was too early to predict how this week's elections might affect the scientific landscape, but he did say that climate change studies and stem cell research may well grab more of the spotlight by the time 2007's edition of the SA50 comes out.
"I would imagine that a lot of us would be hopeful about trying to push forward for some changes in the embryonic stem cell restrictions that have been in place," he said.
Meanwhile, on the subject of climate change, "there's been a head-in-the-sand tendency toward the formation of policy that's been coming out of Washington for these past few years," Rennie observed.
Will the scientific and political picture become clearer over the next year? Rennie said he's in a wait-and-see mood: "hopeful ... but not overly optimistic." What about you? Feel free to leave your comments below.