A Paradox and Alan Rein: Distinguished Retrovirologist Retires from the HIV DRP

In 1972, soon after then-President Richard Nixon’s newly established Frederick Cancer Research Center (FCRC) hired its first employees, 24-year-old Kunio Nagashima put on a suit and tie and boarded a Boeing 747 at Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport. An electron microscopist from Kyoto University, Nagashima had a one-way ticket in his hand, bound for the United States and ready to take a new job—sight unseen.

Women Scientists Advisors (WSA) was established in 1993 and comprises elected representatives from each NIH Institute or Center who volunteer their time to support other female scientists on issues ranging from pay equity to work/family balance and leadership opportunities.

There are times where opportunities are not present in our environment, so sometimes it’s necessary to make them. Like the famous paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson said, “one must take initiative in life to achieve what he or she wants.” That is exactly what Laura Prestia, Ph.D., and her colleagues, Robert Sons, Ph.D., and Alan Alfano, Ph.D., did in 2016 when they started the Technology Transfer Ambassadors Program (TTAP).

Test your home for radon. I could think of at least 10 reasons why I didn’t want to. It was something else to add to the endless to-do list. The test kit would be expensive. If the test showed high levels, addressing the radon problem would be more expensive. In short, it was going to be a pain. But as it happens, it wasn’t.

When the pandemic shutdown began in March 2020, offices across NCI at Frederick and the Frederick National Laboratory quickly became ghost towns, as employees packed up and decamped to their newly set-up home offices. But for those engaged in scientific research—including efforts to combat COVID-19 itself—the need to safely work on-site became more critical than ever.