News release, October, 30, 1998, effective immediately.
For media inquiries, contact Caroline Booth Lara, Communications Specialist, (580) 224-6379.
  email: cblara@noble.org

Noble Scientist Wins International Award

A scientist based in an Ardmore research facility was recently one of six researchers around the globe named to receive the 1998 Biodiversity Leadership Awards.

Marilyn J. Roossinck, an associate staff scientist in the Plant Biology Division at the Noble Foundation, will receive $180,000, to be paid over a three-year period to assist in continuing her research.

"Outside of the private sector, funding for exploratory projects like a biodiversity inventory of viruses is very limited, and granting agencies prefer to fund projects that have a guarantee of success," Roossinck said of the award, and the work in her laboratory the money will help fund. "But it is this type of pioneering work that will ultimately yield the greatest reward."

Dr. Richard A. Dixon, director of the Noble Foundation Plant Biology Division, described the award as "highly significant recognition of the international status of Dr. Roossinck's work on biodiversity and evolution."

In the award announcement, Roossinck was described as probing "an enormous but under-studied area of biodiversity — the relationships between viruses and their hosts. Viruses are omnipresent in the plant and animal worlds and have profound effects on their fellow residents of the globe, both negative and positive."

"Not only can they make humans feel sick when they ‘come down with a virus' or a food plant wither before harvest, they play major roles in the evolution of their hosts. By one estimate, 1 percent of the human genome is of viral origin. Except for medical research, science has paid relatively little attention to viruses. Roossinck, through ongoing work in Costa Rica, studies the evolution of ecosystems from the viewpoint of the virus-host interactions. Her long-term goal is to create a biodiversity inventory of viruses within defined ecosystems."

Other award winners are F. P. D. "Woody" Cotterill, a young Zimbabwe scientist instrumental in founding and expanding the work of the Biodiversity Foundation for Africa; Timothy J. Killeen, a Missouri botanist and conservation biologist who has spent the past 15 years studying and conserving lowland tropical ecosystems in Bolivia; Karen Lips, a zoologist at Southern Illinois University (Carbondale), who studies the apparent sudden and global decline in the amphibian population; and Susan Middleton and David Liittschwager, photographers based in San Francisco, whose work has brought biodiversity to thousands at a one-to-one level.

Award presenters said Roossinck, like the other five Biodiversity Award winners, is "working on a tight deadline, the finality of extinction."

The awards were created in recognition of an "alarming worldwide decline in both plant and animal biological diversity." The New York-based Bay Foundation and Josephine Bay Paul and C. Michael Paul Foundation collaborated with 10 leading research institutions to create the Biodiversity Leadership Awards, to recognize and encourage excellence in solving the complex and interrelated problems of plant and animal diversity.

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Photo of Dr. Marilyn Roossinck

 Sidebar article: What is Biodiversity?

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(FYI — The Noble Foundation is a privately funded, nonprofit organization headquartered in Ardmore, Okla. The Foundation conducts agricultural and plant biology research; provides grants to numerous other charitable and educational organizations; and assists farmers and ranchers through educational and consultative programs.)