Other Awards and Honors
2007 Impact on Scientific Community
Dick Smith named to Scientific American 50 list of outstanding leaders
Dick Smith, a Battelle Fellow in the Fundamental and Computational Science Directorate, has been named one of 50 outstanding leaders in the 2007 Scientific American 50—an annual list of 50 key contributors in science and technology. Dick shared the honor for creating a new approach to neurological diagnostics with Desmond Smith of UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine.
Dick's research may help identify the earliest detectable stages of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other neurological diseases. Dick's findings indicate that many neurodegenerative diseases leave a biochemical calling card, or biomarker, that may be used to predict early stages of brain impairment. The understandings from this research may result in the discovery of drug targets for new therapeutic approaches. Many biomedical researchers also believe that detecting disease states before symptoms occur is key to reversing many as-yet-incurable diseases.
Dick's work led to the mapping of proteins in brain tissues. This mapping has allowed scientists to examine the location and abundance of large numbers of proteins within healthy brain tissue, which can be compared to protein portraits found within diseased brain tissues. These differences may help identify neurological diseases at a very early stage and proteins that might be targeted for drug intervention. It's hoped that such diseases might be curbed if caught and treated early enough.
"Dick Smith and his team have pushed the frontiers of proteomics instrumentation far beyond what was imagined just a few years ago," according to Doug Ray, PNNL's deputy director for science and technology. "By integrating new ideas into the tools available to conduct research, they have made comprehensive proteomic mapping possible."
This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health and PNNL's Biomolecular Systems Initiative.
Past Scientific American 50 winners include stem cell researcher Douglas Melton, Nobel prize-winning neurobiologist Roderick MacKinnon, former World Health Organization Secretary General Gro Harlem Brundtland, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Apple CEO Steve Jobs. (announced 12/10/2007)