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Tuesday, March 8, 2005

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Bradbury Science Museum celebrates Women's History Month with talks, exhibit

The Laboratory's Bradbury Science Museum is celebrating Women's History Month with a talk this afternoon by a Manhattan Project chemist and a new traveling exhibit. Other activities in March are planned as well.

Isabella Karle will speak about her early work as a chemist during the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government's crash program to build an atomic bomb during World War II. Karle, a senior scientist specializing in crystallography at the Naval Research Laboratory, speaks at 4:30 this afternoon.

Karle has worked at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., for the past 59 years, and, since 1959, as the head of NRL's X-ray Diffraction Section for the Structure of Matter. She has determined the structures of numerous biologically and medicinally important compounds, including peptides, antibiotics, toxins and anti-malarials.

Coinciding with Karle's talk, the museum is hosting a reception this evening to open a new exhibit. The museum and the Lab's Physics (P) Division are co-hosting " Jewish Women Scientists Around the World," a national exhibit showcasing the lives and work of several Jewish women scientists, including two Nobel Prize winners, whose contributions have been made in fields ranging from astronomy to zoology. The women scientists were from the United States, Europe, Israel, South Africa and Turkey.

The exhibit's costs were donated by the Los Alamos Women in Science group and the Hadassah chapters of Los Alamos, Santa Fe and Albuquerque. The exhibit remains up through March 27. The reception is from 5 to 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

Two other talks are planned this month at the museum. At 7 p.m., Thursday, Jeanne Fair of Atmospheric, Climate and Environmental Dynamics (EES-2), will explain the use of bluebird nesting boxes, which can be seen while hiking in some areas around Los Alamos and how they are used for monitoring environmental health.

Fair works on ecological risk assessment, epidemiology and disease modeling and West Nile virus in birds. "Birds as Sentinels of Environmental Health" is the title of Fair's presentation. She has been collecting data since 1997 and will discuss the effects of the fire, drought and other potential environmental concerns.

A third Women's History Month talk at the museum is scheduled for noon, March 15, by Stephani Sandoval of the New Mexico State University Cooperative Extension Service. Sandoval, a forest health specialist, will talk about change in forest since fire suppression, forest conditions of today and the common insects seen. She will cover the bark beetle and where it stands today as well as some other insects affecting the forest and their role in the ecosystem. The Los Alamos Women in Science are co-sponsoring the talk.

The Bradbury Science Museum is located at 15th Street and Central Avenue in downtown Los Alamos. Museum hours apart from special events are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday.

The Bradbury Science Museum is part of Los Alamos' Public Affairs Office.

For more information, contact Berger at 5-0896.

--Steve Sandoval

Noted chemist to give lecture today

One of the nation's foremost chemists, a veteran of Manhattan Project wartime efforts at the University of Chicago, will discuss the crystal structures of peptides at a lecture today.

Isabella Karle of the Naval Research Laboratory, who helped determine the three-dimensional structures of molecules by developing new x-ray crystallographic methods, will talk about "The Alpha, Beta, Gammas of Peptide Conformation, as Well as Dees and Ells and Hydrids." Karle's lecture, part of the current series sponsored by the Laboratory's Glenn T. Seaborg Institute for Transactinium Science, is scheduled for 10:30 this morning in Room 102 at the Health Research Laboratory Auditorium at Technical Area 43.

Karle said she will discuss her research into the many peptides produced by nature and by chemists with alpha, beta, gamma and delta amino acids, as well as peptides with unusual side chains and with a mixture of D- and L- residues in their sequences.

"My objective has been to determine the crystal structures (of peptides) by X-rays to establish how the chemical variations in amino acid residues have affected the conformation and the folding of peptides and their probable bioactivity," Karle said in her abstract.

Her husband, Jerome Karle, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985, helped develop a mathematical theory for direct methods to determine molecular structure. In 1963, Isabella Karle published her "Symbolic Addition Procedure," which used x-ray analysis to determine essentially equal-atom crystal and molecular structures. This revolutionized in a practical experimental way the types and complexity of structures that could be solved, and led to the publication of thousands of molecular structures.

Karle has published more than 300 scientific papers and holds four honorary doctorates. She is the first woman awarded the Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science. Among her many awards are the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences' Aminoff Prize, the Franklin Institute's Bower Award, the American Chemical Society's Garvin Medal, American Institute of Chemists' Chemical Pioneer Award, the Federal Woman's Award, the Robert Dexter Conrad Award, the Secretary of the Navy Distinguished Achievement in Science Award and the National Medal of Science, along with many other awards.

Karle served as president of the American Crystallographers Association in 1976 and again in 1987. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, American Chemical Society, American Physical Society and other distinguished organizations. She received her master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Michigan. After graduation, she and her husband worked on the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago. She then returned to the University of Michigan and was the first woman on the chemistry faculty.

More information about Isabella Karle is available at http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/JCEWWW/Features/eChemists/Bios/Karle.html or at http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/karle.html online.

The Seaborg lecture series presents work on key topics of interest to Laboratory students and staff. The talks are open to all employees and take place at 10:30 a.m. on the last Thursday of each month. The lecture series seeks to create a forum to promote the exchange of ideas, to nucleate and exploit emerging science opportunities and to create a focal point for collaboration in actinide science across the Laboratory.

Knowledge of actinide science continues to be essential to the United States and central to the mission of the Laboratory and the NNSA, including national defense, energy, environmental restoration and radioactive waste management.

More information about the lecture series and the Seaborg Institute is available from Al Migliori at 7-2515 or from Susan Ramsay at 5-7214, or at http://pearl1.lanl.gov/seaborg/seaborgmission.htm online.

--Jim Danneskiold

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