In 1998 Rita Colwell became the first woman to head America’s National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, since its creation in 1950. Before that, Colwell was president of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, where she remains professor of microbiology and biotechnology.
She’s indulging her passion for biotech with The Gene Masters by Ingrid Wickelgren (Henry Holt, 2002), a good review, she reckons, of the race to sequence the human genome.
Tom Siegfried and K. C. Cole are her all-time favourite science writers: “They transform complexity into simple descriptions for all readers.” She’s into Siegfried’s Strange Matters: Undiscovered ideas at…
