In 1998 Rita Colwell became the first woman to head America鈥檚 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鈥檚 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: 鈥淭hey transform complexity into simple descriptions for all readers.鈥� She鈥檚 into Siegfried鈥檚 Strange Matters: Undiscovered ideas at the frontiers of space and time (Joseph Henry, 2002) and Cole鈥檚 Mind over Matter (Harcourt).
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Closer to home, American: Beyond our grandest notions by Chris Matthews (Free Press, 2002), is proving a 鈥渜uick and amusing read about American myths and fantasies by a very clever and interesting TV personality who runs up against these notions every day鈥�.