James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public

A Briton, Philip Ball is consultant editor for Nature and a freelance science writer.

Before becoming a consultant editor for Nature, he was one of that magazine's physical sciences editors for more than 10 years. His journalism career followed a degree in chemistry from the University of Oxford in 1983 and a doctorate in physics from the University of Bristol in 1988.

Ball is also the author of what a colleague terms a remarkable, and still-expanding, set of popular science books, each of which explores some aspect of chemistry, both modern and historical.

One of his recent books, "Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color," published in 2002, was the 2003 winner of the Sally Hacker Prize awarded by the Society for the History of Technology as the best popular book in that area. Time magazine gave it a thumbs-up as well, calling the book "an intriguing synthesis of art and science."

It covers the unseen role that chemistry has played in the evolution of visual art, charting how the artist's use of color in painting has always been determined by the prevailing state of chemical technology and, in turn, how chemistry itself has benefited from the social demand for new and better colors, not just in painting but also in dyeing, ceramics, and glassmaking.

Color chemistry, the book argues, provides a window on art that allows a fresh perspective on the way that Western painting has developed, from the somber shades of classical Greece to the autumnal hues of Rembrandt and on to the bright exuberance of the Impressionists and the garish modernism of the pop artists.

Among Ball's other titles are the following:

"Designing the Molecular World," which explores today's chemical science, from buckyballs and ultrafast spectroscopy to colloid science and atmospheric chemistry.

"Life's Matrix: A Biography of Water," an in-depth study of the multifarious roles that the humble H₂O molecule plays in our lives and our world.

"The Ingredients: A Guided Tour of the Elements," published in 2002, which is "the best book on the elements out there, full of philosophical insight as well as good stories," one colleague says.

"Critical Mass," which looks at how ideas from condensed-matter physics are helping us understand human society and which won the Aventis Prize for Science Books in 2005.

"The Devil's Doctor," a biography of the 16th-century alchemist Paracelsus, which looks at his contributions to chemistry and medicine. It will be published in spring 2006.

Ball has written many articles and commentaries for Nature and writes weekly on chemistry and other sciences for Nature Science Update. He has a monthly column on materials science in Nature Materials and writes weekly for Nature's Nanozone website for nanoscience and nanotechnology. He is also science writer in residence in the chemistry department at University College London.

As a colleague points out: "Science popularization is its own genre. It takes special skills: fundamental knowledge, the courage to simplify in the service of understanding, and a knack for getting people interested. It's not easy; the public is queasy about chemistry, and its realm is neither that of the very small nor the very big." The colleague notes that "Philip Ball in person is quiet and unassuming," but he is in fact "full of passion for molecules," and his words ring with excitement.

Details of the award address will be announced at a later date.-Patricia Short