Scientists

In an old photograph, Albert Clark Reed looks like just another balding man in a coat and tie, a 45-year-old husband and father from the 1950s. He has a thin mustache and a pleasant half-smile that looks as if he were being coached by some portrait photographer. His wife, Florence, called him a "cool, levelheaded scientist and test pilot." He graduated from Caltech in 1929 and returned for more studies in 1932.

For two decades, Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind battled cosmologist Stephen Hawking over the behavior of black holes. Hawking said that when black holes eat their fill, they disappear, taking with them everything they consumed over their billions of years of existence. Susskind found this idea so disturbing that he publicly declared war -- a conflict he describes in his new book, "The Black Hole War."

Firebombs that struck the home and car of two UC Santa Cruz scientists this weekend were part of an increasingly aggressive campaign by animal rights activists against animal researchers at University of California campuses, officials said Monday. Santa Cruz police officials said the blasts, which occurred three minutes apart, caused one of the scientists, his wife and two young children to flee their home through a second-story window.

Two firebomb attacks last week on UC Santa Cruz scientists who conduct animal research have angered and worried academics throughout the UC system, who said their work has broad public support and that they will not be intimidated by bombers who crossed the line by targeting families. "It is outrageous when people's families are targeted," said UCLA Chancellor Gene Block. "This is incredibly serious because it could have led to loss of life. It's chilling."

In an extraordinary display of the mounting concern over climate change, an international group of physicists and an alliance of scientists and evangelical Christians each issued calls to action Wednesday aimed at preventing a doomsday that includes global environmental catastrophe.

William French Anderson, among the world's most acclaimed scientists, was sentenced Friday to 14 years in prison for sexually abusing the daughter of a researcher at his lab at USC. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael E. Pastor said he considered the contributions the 70-year-old researcher, a pioneer in gene therapy, had made to science, as well as the many letters he received from the defendant's colleagues -- including a Nobel laureate -- vouching for Anderson's character.

Retired IBM Corp. computer scientist Frances E. Allen, whose work helped crack Cold War-era code and predict the weather, today will be named the first woman to receive her profession's highest honor. The Assn. for Computing Machinery has granted the A.M. Turing Award for technical merit to no more than a few people each year since 1966.

It was the weapon of the century, a rocket that could deliver a nuclear warhead 6,000 miles away in 30 minutes and destroy a city, undeterred by any defensive system. It fundamentally altered war planning and the worldview of two generations, who learned to live with Cold War brinkmanship and the petrifying symmetry of "mutually assured destruction."

A medical society has delayed making a decision on whether to discipline a South Korean scientist with Los Angeles business ties who is accused of plagiarizing a research paper. The American Society of Reproductive Medicine's publications committee met Friday in Santa Fe, N.M., to discuss whether Kwang-Yul Cha and other researchers at one of his South Korean facilities copied a research paper that had previously been published in a Korean medical journal.

President Bush presented the Congressional Gold Medal to agriculture scientist Norman Borlaug, whose work on high-yield, disease-resistant varieties of wheat is credited with starting the "Green Revolution" and alleviating starvation in India and Pakistan in the 1960s.