Nicholas Cozzarelli
Nicholas Cozzarelli has died. His excellent work falling under the heading of nucleic acids enzymology is well known, and led to his election to the National Academy of Sciences. His leadership of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has also been widely admired. An obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle has the quote from Solomon Snyder:
He was the finest journal editor with whom I have ever dealt, and it is generally accepted that he was the best editor of the PNAS since its inception in 1915,” said Dr. Solomon Snyder, the journal’s senior editor and a neuroscientist at the Johns Hopkins University medical school.Nick revolutionized what had become a stodgy, though highly prestigious, journal by opening it up to the general scientific public,” Snyder said. Professor Cozzarellli’s “caring, ebullient personality” and “warm one-to-one” approach inspired the 143 members of the editorial board to devote vast amounts of their time to the journal, Snyder said.
PNAS has tributes to his life and work, including an editorial from Bruce Alberts and links to newspaper obituaries.
We offer our condolences to his family.
Comments
Nick and I were classmates at Princeton and later were in graduate school at Harvard together. It is the genius of the American system that the son of an immigrant shoemaker got as far as he did. Could such a thing happen in Europe? I am very tired of the endless America Bashing found nearly weekly in the pages of Nature.
Lewis Robinson M. D.
Posted by: Lewis Robinson M. D. | April 29, 2006 01:10 PM
Professor Cozzarelli was on my Ph. D. committee at Berkeley in the 1980s. Even though I was a Biophyscist rather than a molecular biologist, I wanted him on my committee because his lectures in the graduate molecular biology course were amongst the most inspiring I ever heard. Apparently one student suggested that he should take a tranquilizer because he presented so much information so quickly, but he communicated very effectively even to a non-molecular biologist like myself. All the things that the obituaries have said about his enthusiasm for intellectual give and take and his smile were absolutely true. I'm really sad to hear of his passing.
I encountered Professor Cozzarelli once after I left Berkeley at a biomolecular structure conference in Berlin. He certainly had a lot close friends and colleagues in Europe as well as in the U. S.
Posted by: fareed aboul-ela | May 3, 2006 06:02 PM