Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Welcome to this week's Chutes & Ladders, our roundup of hirings, firings and retirings throughout the industry. Please submit the good news--or the bad--from your shop, and we will feature it here at the end of each week.

At Yale, a colleague said, he showed "there was a way to compete hard and well in financial markets, but to have our lives be about something that mattered more."

Edgewise Therapeutics, Inc., (NASDAQ: EWTX), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing orally bioavailable, small molecule therapies for rare muscle disorders, today announced the appointment of Joanne M. Donovan, M.D., Ph.D., to the position of Chief Medical Officer

Susan Hockfield, Ph.D., MIT President Emerita, Joins Repertoire Immune Medicines Board of Directors - read this article along with other careers information, tips and advice on BioSpace

By the early 1920s, an unlikely pair--a powerful national newspaper publisher and a California-based zoologist--decided that they'd had enough. Enough of half-baked reporting on research results, enough of stories that left readers confused about even the basic principles of science. They wanted something better. They wanted reporting that encouraged a "scientific habit of mind," a citizenry aware of the role of research in everyday life. However unlikely, the alliance between Edward Willis Scripps, founder of one of America's largest newspaper chains, and Harvard-trained zoologist William Emerson Ritter, ran deep. The two men shared a belief in science as the new century's most powerful transformative agent--and also a belief that scientists were doing a poor job of communicating this. By April 1921, they'd decided on a solution, a venture called Science Service, which would be dedicated to providing smart and positive science stories to the public. The organization they formed a century ago would grow into Society for Science, publisher of Science News . True science journalism--independent inquiry into the scientific enterprise and the illumination of research with all its wonderfully complex human interactions--would come much later. But with the founding of Science Service, a new profession did take its first steps, albeit somewhat stumbling ones. Although scientific societies and organizations supported the new service, researchers themselves remained wary of the often flamboyant journalism of the early 20th century. In 1934, a dozen American science writers formed a National Association of Science Writers, in part to build better relationships with their wary sources, promoting it as a way to identify elite, science-savvy writers from the other journalistic riff-raff. Boyce Rensberger, a former director of the Knight Science Journalism Program, once described this alliance between scientists and journalists as the beginning of the "Gee Whiz" period of science journalism, one that he believed led directly to embarrassing fan-boy coverage of the development of nuclear weapons and the post-World War II arms race. As Rensberger and others also note, the profession reluctantly let that model go. Science writers were sometimes downright hostile when faced with the environmental downsides of technological development that appeared during the 1960s: air pollution, water pollution, Rachel Carson-driven warnings that unchecked use of pesticides was unsafe, and more. The best science stories, one leading journalist argued, resulted from cooperation with "enlightened industries." Still, journalistic doubts concerning relentlessly cheery science coverage deepened, and emphasis on telling the whole complicated story also deepened as the profession continued to expand, marked by formation of groups like the European Union of Science Journalists' Associations in 1971, and more. It's in this moment of doubt that science journalism began to come into its independent own. The last two decades of the 20th century saw a new emphasis on professional training, a growing number of female science journalists (although other forms of diversity have been slow to follow), and newly sharp-edged investigative reporting that looked at everything from the politics of HIV research to space shuttle failures to risky chemical contaminants. As Liza Gross, author of The Science Writers' Investigative Reporting Handbook , points out, critics who called science journalists just a bunch of "perky cheerleaders" for researchers were gradually being proved wrong. The rise of this century's digital era of communication has served to accelerate change, both in the way writers tell stories, employing tools from podcasting to data visualization, and in their visibility. Science journalists now readily cover contentious areas of science--from climate change to vaccines to the long-standing culture wars around evolution--with clarity and, in turn, deal with furious pushback from skeptics on social media and other platforms. The original, science-boosting mission of Science Service hasn't been lost. Today, countless "science communicators"--from press officers to scientists themselves--work to foster a positive portrait of science. And there's still a place for journalistic stories about the wonders of science. But the past century has proved that this is not the most important contribution of science reporters. Rather, it is to portray research accurately in both its rights and its wrongs and stand unflinchingly for the integrity of the story. Scripps and Ritter were smart men, and there's a strong argument to be made that they would approve this endpoint.

Dewpoint Therapeutics , the biomolecular condensates company, today announced the appointment of Isaac Klein, M.D., Ph.D., as Chief Scientific Officer, effective May 3, 2021 .

/PRNewswire/ -- Dewpoint Therapeutics, the biomolecular condensates company, today announced the appointment of Isaac Klein, M.D., Ph.D., as Chief Scientific...

Farming would seem to be one occupation that Black Americans could find refuge from discrimination. For decades, the might of the United States Department...

Onvansertib and the androgen receptor (AR) signaling inhibitor abiraterone synergize in an AR-independent manner in in-vitro and in-vivo metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) models

/PRNewswire/ -- Cardiff Oncology, Inc. (Nasdaq: CRDF), a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing onvansertib to treat cancers with the greatest medical...

/PRNewswire/ -- New research from a multi-national, cross-disciplinary team of scientists from Medical Detection Dogs (MDD) in the UK, the Prostate Cancer...

You can take thousands of MIT courses online for free through edX or MIT OpenCourseWare. Here are 13 standout ones, from Python to public policy.

/PRNewswire/ -- NASA has selected 18 astronauts from its corps to form the Artemis Team and help pave the way for the next astronaut missions on and around the...

Scientific American is the essential guide to the most awe-inspiring advances in science and technology, explaining how they change our understanding of the world and shape our lives.

US experts have been studying 'striosomes' - clusters of cells in the basal ganglia, a brain area linked to habit formation, movement control, emotion and addiction.

NIIT Ltd had divested its shareholding in NIIT Technologies last year. The revenue remained flat at Rs 201.8 crore in the April-June 2020 quarter from the year-ago period

BAE Systems recently delivered software to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of a contract under the agency's Competency-Aware Machine Learning (CAML) program. The delivery of the MindfuLTM software is the first milestone in the program to improve the transparency of machine learning systems. Transitioning artificial intelligence-based systems from decision-making tools into true partners requires users to trust in their machine counterpart. While machine learning...

The online learning program combines lab simulations and mentoring experiences focused on biotechnology and neurological diseases, such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis Four hundred students from Massachusetts and North Carolina are enrolling in this no-fee program that also provides students with computers and other technology resources The initiative builds upon Biogen's Community Lab, which has enrolled more than 55,000 students to date, and the Lemelso

The US government report looked at nearly 200 facial recognition algorithms from a range of companies.

The drawings, around 4 inches in length, were discovered in the rocky area of San Juan, near the town of Albuquerque in the province of Badajoz in western Spain.