Time honors man Peter M. Vitousek of Honolulu, Stanford University ecologist who studies Hawaii ecosystems, has been named by Time magazine as one of "America's Best" in science and medicine.
with isle roots
The news magazine names Peter
Vitousek 1 of "America's Best"
in science and medicineBy Helen Altonn
haltonn@starbulletin.comHe is one of 18 researchers selected "at the top of their game" in that category in this week's issue of Time.
A distinguished panel of scientific advisers helped Time's editors boil down a list of 100 candidates in science and medicine to 18.
Coming home to Hawaii is both pleasure and work for Vitousek, since he has family here and the entire state is his lab.
He arrived Tuesday, spent the night on Molokai and went to the Big Island yesterday to speak at a conference.
Retired Family Court Senior Judge Betty Vitousek said that despite her son's national honors as a scientist, "he is just about the nicest man you can imagine." She said her son's wife, Pamela Matson, "is a brilliant scientist, too."
Matson is a prestigious MacArthur fellow and a professor who runs Stanford's Earth Systems Program.
Peter Vitousek and his group are doing field studies on differences of volcanic sites, from young lava to old rain forests, from sea level to tree line, from very wet forests to deserts and on natural tropical forests and cleared lands.
He conducts extensive studies of nutrient cycling in tropical and temperate forests, and has demonstrated that exotic species can alter ecosystems in the areas they invade.
Oregon State University marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco described Vitousek as a "real visionary" in a Time article by Jeffrey Kluger.
"It's unusual to have someone who is simultaneously interested in the big picture and in taking a very detailed look at the processes themselves," she said.
Vitousek went to Amherst College in Massachusetts to study politics but switched to science after reading a book on biological invasions of pristine places, he told Time.
He said he always planned to work in Hawaii, where many species of birds and native plants have vanished and survivors are threatened because of biological invasions.
His research group determines the regulation of cycling of nitrogen, phosphorus and other nutrients through chemical analysis of soil, water and gas samples from field sites.
The scientists are focusing on the problem of global nitrogen, found in fossil fuel and fertilizer, because an excessive amount can upset the planet's biological balance, causing explosive growth in some species and stifling others.
"That's a huge alteration in how the world works," Vitousek told Time. "Our capacity to change the Earth means we must manage this."
Vitousek was elected to the elite National Academy of Sciences in 1992 for his contributions to the development of ecosystem ecology and his findings on invasive species and the influence of soil and vegetation after volcanic eruptions.
Time's cover features James Thomson, 43, a University of Wisconsin developmental biologist who is cultivating five new stem cell lines.
He was the first to collect embryonic stem cells and keep them from reproducing indefinitely.