Thursday, September 20, 2007

Human evolution prize - Congrats to Spencer Wells

Kyung M. Song in the Seattle Times reports that Spencer Wells has won a relatively unknown but quite lucrative prize ($100,000) for his work on the human Genographic Project (see this article in the New York Times by Amy Harmon for more information on this project)

I love the lead in to the story
"Nearly half of all Americans reject the theory of evolution, with many believing instead that humans were created by a higher power. But for more than a decade, a little-known nonprofit based in Bellevue has promoted scientific research into the evolution of the human genome — and dispensed money to spread the knowledge."
Apparently the "Foundation For the Future" is big on human evolution having awarded their Kistler Prize (named after the Foundations founder Walter Kistler) to the likes of Richard Dawkins, E O. Wilson, etc. Congratulations to Spencer, who I still owe for giving me some excellent advice (when I was an undergraduate and he was a graduate student) about people to work for in graduate school (which I ignored, but it was still excellent advice).

Enough about Spencer --- The Times reports that
the foundation wields its $25 million endowment to support an array of scientific endeavors, awarding prizes for books, documentaries and teaching.
Hey - what about for blogs?

2 comments:

  1. Thanks Jon - and glad you didn't follow my advice on grad school...keep up the good work. Spencer

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'll second that congrats. Reading some of Wells' (&others) work several years back certainly spurred me to expand some of my research from pure climate physics to the broader, yet much more interesting, topics at the interface of climate & evolution.

    ReplyDelete

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