Science journalists from Germany and Japan along with colleagues from across the United States will be introduced to President Charles M. Vest and others of the MIT community tomorrow (September 19) at a reception from 4-6pm in Rm E51-095. The event is sponsored by the MIT News Office and Technology Review.
The journalists, who cover environment, medicine and basic research, are visiting MIT for nine months as Knight Science Journalism Fellows. They will plan studies in areas such as the history of science, water quality and quantity, global climate change, epidemiology, neuroscience, sustainable growth, signal transduction, resource depletion and molecular biology. Fellows will visit labs, audit courses and take part in twice-weekly seminars with faculty members.
The program began this year with a visit on September 11 to gene-sequencing and X-ray crystallography labs at the Whitehead Institute, and a talk about the genetics of the sense of smell. Two days later, the Fellows met with Professor Phillip Sharp, Nobel laureate and head of the Department of Biology.
This year's group is the 14th selected for the fellowship program, which was established in 1982 by the Program in Science, Technology, and Society in the School of Humanities and Social Science and which has been sponsored by the Knight Foundation of Miami since 1987. To date, the program has named a total of 145 Fellows from 26 states and 14 foreign countries. Nearly half worked for newspapers at the time of their selection. A slightly smaller group came from magazine staffs or freelance backgrounds, and about one-tenth came from radio or television work.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on September 18, 1996.
