Lerman's, Winick's Advocacy Honored

Two activists who have long fought for the rights of scientists-especially scientists in the Middle East-have been named recipients of the 2005 Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award by the New York Academy of Sciences.

The winners are Zafra Lerman, Distinguished Professor of Science and Public Policy and head of the Institute for Science Education & Science Communication at Columbia College, Chicago, and Herman Winick, assistant director and professor emeritus of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory at Stanford University.

For more than a decade, Lerman, in her role as chair of the Subcommittee on Scientific Freedom & Human Rights of the ACS Committee on International Activities, has stimulated human rights awareness in communities of chemists. She is considered by many to be ACS's leading voice on behalf of the human rights of scientists throughout the world. Lerman has traveled to the former Soviet Union, Russia, Cuba, China, and the Middle East, bringing encouragement to repressed scientists.

In 2003, she worked with the Israel Academy of Science, particularly to allow nine Palestinian scientists to attend a conference that she organized in Malta where scientists from 10 nations in the Middle East met to tackle problems of research and education in the politically and economically troubled region. The second Malta Conference will be next month.

Winick has worked on behalf of the human rights of scientists for more than 25 years. He was one of the original supporters and founders of the Sakharov-Orlov-Sharansky (SOS) group, which opposed the Soviet Union's imprisonment of Andrei Sakharov, Yuri Orlov, and Natan Sharansky in the 1980s.

In the 1990s, he supported the human rights activities of the American Physical Society on behalf of repressed scientists around the world, first as a member, and then as the chair of the APS Committee on International Freedom of Scientists. In the mid-1990s, he conceived the idea of creating a new synchrotron research facility in the Middle East, known as the SESAME project, which would be located in Jordan and actively solicit participants from other regional nations such as Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, Israel, Syria, and others; it is now operating.