Overcoming obstacles that caused the cancellation of the Student Science Jeopardy! Tournament last summer, Scientific Library staff used a virtual platform to hold the 14th annual tournament earlier this month.

At first, Meredith Yeager, Ph.D., thought there was a mistake in the data. She was examining the association between exposure to ionizing radiation after the 1986 Chernobyl power plant disaster and the frequency of exposed Ukrainians later passing radiation-driven genetic mutations to their children. Previous studies suggested that the children’s DNA should have contained multiple such mutations. It didn’t.

The Spring Research Festival came to Fort Detrick this year without its signature massive tent, the home of a sprawling equipment expo with dozens of booths. It came without audiences in auditoriums or gatherings around scientific posters. The community didn’t circulate between buildings for events. On the surface, it may have seemed that the festival didn’t come at all. But after being cancelled last year due to the pandemic, the annual two-day event did indeed return in a virtual format.

A potato, puffin, pineapple, orange, and lemon stood behind small electronic scoreboards. White text, read aloud by the Scientific Library’s Alan Doss, materialized on a blue field above their heads. “Every action has an equal and opposite…”

George Vande Woude, Ph.D., former director of the Advanced Bioscience Laboratories–Basic Research Program at what is now NCI at Frederick, passed away in April. He was known for being a prudent leader and an outstanding scientist (he and his laboratory discovered the MET oncogene in 1984), as well as for his vibrant personality and seemingly limitless energy.