Genius, Hard Work, Pay Off

Foundation Announces Recipients Of This Year's 'Genius Grants'

(AP)  Here is the foundation's complete list of 25 genius grant recipients. Each will receive $500,000 over the next five years:

David Carroll, 64, naturalist, Warner, N.H. For more than 40 years the author of "Swampwalker's Journal" and "Self-Portrait with Turtles" has chronicled the lives of freshwater turtles and other wildlife around New England.

Regina Carter, 40, jazz violinist, New York. Although classically trained, Carter draws from Motown, Afro-Cuban, swing, folk and world music. She used a violin owned by Nicolo Paganini to record her 2001 album "Paganini: After a Dream."

Kenneth Catania, 40, neuroscientist, Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. Catania's study of insect-eating mammals, particularly the star-nosed mole, sheds light on how a mammal's sensory cortex responds to changing conditions.

Lisa Curran, 45, tropical biologist, Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Curran's research on the forests of Indonesian Borneo helps develop strategies to combat deforestation.

Kevin Eggan, 32, developmental biologist, Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. Eggan's work on embryonic stem cell lines could lead to treatments for diseases such as Parkinson's and insulin-dependent diabetes.

James Fruchterman, 47, electrical engineer-turned-entrepreneur, Palo Alto, Calif. Fruchterman's nonprofit company is a launching pad for socially-oriented uses of technology. The Benetech Initiative's Bookshare.org, a web-based downloadable library, provides thousands of titles for people with visual or learning disabilities.

Atul Gawande, 40, surgeon and author, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Gawande, also a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine and author of the "Notes of a Surgeon" column for the New England Journal of Medicine, examines ways to prevent human error in surgery. One of his innovations is a bar code on instruments and sponges to prevent surgeons from accidentally leaving them in patients.

Linda Griffith, 46, bioengineer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. Griffith's latest experiments in tissue engineering, or creating living tissues and organs from cells, involve fabricating scaffolds on which cultured cells can grow.

Victoria Hale, 45, pharmaceutical entrepreneur, San Francisco. Hale's nonprofit Institute for OneWorld Health tries to treat parasite-borne diseases that typically strike in the world's poorest areas and are ignored by pharmaceutical companies because they are unprofitable.

Adrian LeBlanc, 43, nonfiction writer, New York. LeBlanc, a former fiction editor at Seventeen magazine, spent 10 years involved in the lives of residents in an impoverished Bronx neighborhood researching her first book "Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx."

David Macaulay, 59, author and illustrator, Norwich, Vt. The England native and former high school art teacher's book "The Way Things Work" is considered a leading work in the field of illustrated educational books.

Josiah McElheny, 40, sculptor, New York. The master glassblower's 2005 work "An End to Modernity" consists of a 12-foot-wide by 10-foot-high chandelier modeled on the 1960s Lobmeyr design for the chandeliers at Lincoln Center.

D. Holmes Morton, 55, pediatrician, Strasburg, Pa. Morton's treatment of Amish and Mennonite children afflicted with genetic diseases makes his Clinic for Special Children in rural Pennsylvania an international resource for inherited disorders found in isolated groups.

John Rich, 47, physician, Drexel University in Philadelphia. Rich, who created the Young Men's Health Clinic at the Boston Medical Center, is a leading scholar in the health care needs of urban black men.

Jennifer Richeson, 34, social psychologist, Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Richeson investigates how race and gender affect the way people think, feel and behave.

Sarah Ruhl, 32, playwright, New York. Ruhl's "The Clean House," a 2004 play about a successful doctor whose Brazilian maid hates to clean, was a finalist for a 2005 Pulitzer Prize.

George Saunders, 47, short story writer, Syracuse University in Syracuse, N.Y. Saunders, whose fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's and Esquire, has an undergraduate degree from the Colorado School of Mines and worked as a technical writer and geophysical engineer before joining the Syracuse faculty.

Anna Schuleit, 31, artist, New York. German-born Schuleit uses flowers, grasses and music to bring historic institutions back to life. For 2003's "Bloom" she blanketed the hallways of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center's original building with begonias, lilies and tulips.

Shahzia Sikander, 37, painter, New York. Born in Pakistan and trained at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Sikander's works merge the traditional South Asian art of miniature painting with contemporary forms, styles and vibrant hues.

Terence Tao, 31, mathematician, Los Angeles. The Australian-born former child prodigy is the first mathematics professor in the history of the University of California Los Angeles to win the Fields Medal, mathematics' highest honor.

Claire Tomlin, 37, aviation engineer, Stanford University in Stanford, Calif. The England native uses mathematical theories to address practical problems in air traffic control and collision avoidance.

Luis von Ahn, 28, computer scientist, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Von Ahn, who was born in Guatemala, helped develop CAPTCHA, a test used on many commercial Web sites to determine whether the user is human.

Edith Widder, 55, deep-sea explorer, Fort Pierce, Fla. Widder helped design a remotely operated camera system known as Eye in the Sea, which detects and measures bioluminescence on the ocean floor and has produced rare footage of sharks, jellyfish and squid.

Matias Zaldarriaga, 35, cosmologist, Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. The Argentina native is the co-creator of computer software known as CMBFAST, a standard tool for astronomers to estimate the total density of mass and energy in the universe.

John Zorn, 53, musician and composer, New York. Zorn, a saxophonist, is at the center of the "downtown" experimental music scene in lower Manhattan.

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Add a Comment

by shelly_m September 21, 2006 5:31 AM EDT

re: kathyshiffe's assertion: no one in this stem cell debate (including Dr. Eggan) has EVER suggested, let alone advocated, the UNRESTRICTED use of human embryos or embryonic stem cell lines in scientific experimentation. Such misrepresentations only become less convincing by appeals to "theologians and philosophers".

Reply to this comment

by oxyopia_ September 20, 2006 5:57 AM EDT

To: kathyschiffe. I find your attempt at religious/politicization of these awards repellent and anti-intellectual. In fact, as the article states, "These awards are about more than money. They carry an affirmation not only of individual creativity but also are a mark of respect for a whole field of endeavor," said Jonathan F. Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation. "These are activities that society doesn't always give proper due or comment to."

Reply to this comment

by gladys_over September 20, 2006 12:10 AM EDT

I'm glad they honored a glassblower this year. Usually it's just the turtle scientists they shell out for.

Reply to this comment

by kathyschiffe September 19, 2006 2:30 PM EDT

I always appreciate the wide range of creativity in these awards. One recipient this year, though, is problematic: Kevin Eggan has been recognized for his research into embryonic stem cell lines. The morality of unrestricted use of human embryos in scientific experimentation has been hotly debated by theologians and philosophers; and the implicit endorsement of Eggan's study by the MacArthur Foundation shows a lack of regard for public sentiment.

Reply to this comment

by kathyschiffe September 19, 2006 2:25 PM EDT

I always appreciate the wide range of creativity recognized by these awards. One of this year's recipients, however, is problematic: Kevin Eggan has received the award for his research utilizing embryonic stem cell lines. The morality of destroying human embryos in research is a slippery slope and has been hotly debated by theologians and philosophers; and the MacArthur Foundation's implicit endorsement puts them outside the mainstream of ethical thought.

Reply to this comment

by agnim September 19, 2006 2:06 PM EDT

Thursday, he who has gets.
It takes money to make money. LOL

Reply to this comment

by thursday24 September 19, 2006 1:37 PM EDT

I am a Junior in college and have recently applied for financial aid AND WAS DENIED!! I am 24 years old and live alone! I work full time and do not receive help from anyone. I am thrilled that we have people like this to enrich our country but $500,000 a piece?! These people are already successfull - what about those of us who are trying to get an education and cant get help for our $5,000 a semester tuition? Just my opinion.

Reply to this comment

by gmond September 19, 2006 12:07 PM EDT

Where's mine?

Reply to this comment

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[shelly_m]

re: kathyshiffe's assertion: no one in this stem cell debate (including Dr. Eggan) has EVER suggested, let alone advocated, the UNRESTRICTED use of human embryos or embryonic stem cell lines in scientific experimentation. Such misrepresentations only become less convincing by appeals to "theologians and philosophers".

[oxyopia_]

To: kathyschiffe. I find your attempt at religious/politicization of these awards repellent and anti-intellectual. In fact, as the article states, "These awards are about more than money. They carry an affirmation not only of individual creativity but also are a mark of respect for a whole field of endeavor," said Jonathan F. Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation. "These are activities that society doesn't always give proper due or comment to."

[gladys_over]

I'm glad they honored a glassblower this year. Usually it's just the turtle scientists they shell out for.

[kathyschiffe]

I always appreciate the wide range of creativity in these awards. One recipient this year, though, is problematic: Kevin Eggan has been recognized for his research into embryonic stem cell lines. The morality of unrestricted use of human embryos in scientific experimentation has been hotly debated by theologians and philosophers; and the implicit endorsement of Eggan's study by the MacArthur Foundation shows a lack of regard for public sentiment.

[kathyschiffe]

I always appreciate the wide range of creativity recognized by these awards. One of this year's recipients, however, is problematic: Kevin Eggan has received the award for his research utilizing embryonic stem cell lines. The morality of destroying human embryos in research is a slippery slope and has been hotly debated by theologians and philosophers; and the MacArthur Foundation's implicit endorsement puts them outside the mainstream of ethical thought.

[agnim]

Thursday, he who has gets.
It takes money to make money. LOL

[thursday24]

I am a Junior in college and have recently applied for financial aid AND WAS DENIED!! I am 24 years old and live alone! I work full time and do not receive help from anyone. I am thrilled that we have people like this to enrich our country but $500,000 a piece?! These people are already successfull - what about those of us who are trying to get an education and cant get help for our $5,000 a semester tuition? Just my opinion.

[gmond]

Where's mine?