Science and technology take center stage this election year

Gary Ruvkun - The 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science is awarded to Victor Ambros, Gary Ruvkun and David Baulcombe for their discovery of small RNAs that turn genes off, a process called gene silencing. By providing an all-new understanding of how genes are regulated, they opened the door to the control genes for improvements in agriculture and human health.

Long thought to be merely DNA’s messenger in the cell’s effort to produce life’s necessary proteins, RNA molecules have gotten a promotion over the last decade. Gary Ruvkun was one of the first to discover that certain short strands of RNA had a different job – they turned off genes. By showing RNA to be a functional unit unto itself, he helped initiate a paradigm shift in genetic understanding. Ruvkun’s work, along with that of Victor Ambros and David Baulcombe, has set off an onslaught of research to study the breadth of important tasks RNA performs inside the cell. For this he shares the 2008 Franklin Medal in Life Science.

Deborah S. Jin

Deborah Jin receives the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics for pioneering a field of study -- probing the unusual characteristics of ultra-cold fermionic atoms, which are atoms that cannot simultaneously exhibit the same quantum attributes the way other atoms can -- and creating the first gas of fermionic atoms, coaxing the particles to act as a single unit despite their normal repellence from each other.

Manipulating the world of unseeable particles and unimaginably cold temperatures, Deborah Jin has helped forge a path into a new field of physics. She created the first fermionic gas -- a heretofore unseen form of matter -- by taking normally antisocial particles called fermions and luring them into a single cohesive unit. The 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics is presented to Deborah Jin for her innovative studies of fermionic atoms -- research which has spawned groups all over the world who study everything from the odd properties of atoms near absolute zero to whether we can achieve efficient superconductivity in which electricity (made of electrons which are a kind of fermion) whizzes across wires without ever losing energy.

Judea Pearl

Judea Pearl receives the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science for his creation of algorithms to help compute and reason given only uncertain evidence. He has greatly advanced the world of artificial intelligence by allowing computers to uncover associations and causal connections within millions of data points

The ability to form conclusions based on numerous observations may be second nature to a human brain but it is a mind-bogglingly complex skill to program into a computer. With his seminal work creating models on learning strategies, how to reason and how to determine cause and effect, Judea Pearl's work has laid the foundation for just this kind of artificial intelligence. His research has changed the face of computer science, and for it he is awarded the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science.

Wallace Broecker