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News from ICTP 87 - Monitor
Wu Minglian, China's Ambassador to Italy, visited the ICTP on 2 November to express his thanks for the assistance that the Centre has rendered to Chinese scientists over the years. Ana Maria Deustua, Ambassador of Peru to Italy, paid a brief visit to the ICTP on 4 December while in Trieste to attend the opening of the new Honorary Consulate of Peru. Mostafa Moin, Iran's Minister of Science, arrived at the Centre on 8 December to participate in the TWAS 10th General Meeting and meet with ICTP Director Miguel Virasoro. The Minister discussed potential opportunities for wider cooperation between the Centre and the government of Tehran.
Six high school students from the Czech Republic visited the ICTP to learn more about Centre facilities and activities. They stopped at ICTP on their way to touring other important science facilities in Italy. The students, who hailed from Prague, were winners of the 10th Young Physicists tournament, launched by Moscow University in 1979. The competition now includes 18 teams from 16 countries on 4 tournaments.
Deisa Buranello retired last October after more than 30 years of service to the Centre. Deisa, who was born in Muggia, just outside of Trieste, emigrated to Australia when she was 11. She returned to Italy with her family in 1964 and came to the ICTP in April 1965, six months after the Centre's creation. Her initial job at ICTP was to provide secretarial help for the Centre's first high energy seminar. In the mid 1980s, she was appointed Head of the Scientific Programme Office, where she remained for the balance of her career, supervising a staff of about 10 people. Centre colleagues and friends alike wish Deisa a pleasant retirement for a job well done.
The Centre's Art Gallery, located on Lower Level 1 of the Adriatico Guesthouse, celebrated its first anniversary with an exhibition entitled "Caressed Engravings." The show, which took place from 12 December 1998 to 15 January 1999, contained the work of some 20 contemporary graphic artists from Italy, Croatia and Chile. This was the fifth exhibition of the Centre's Art Gallery. The 1999 season will begin this spring.
Over the past six months, the ICTP has lost three of its oldest and most internationally acclaimed friends. Like the rest of the global scientific community, we are saddened by their deaths.
Sidney Walter Fox, professor emeritus at the University of South Alabama, was an active participant at the ICTP's Trieste Conferences on Chemical Evolution, where he lectured on three different occasions in the 1990s. A pioneer researcher in the origins of life, his main field of interest was proteins, which he considered forerunners of living cells. He was a key consultant to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on projects related to the search for biological molecules in meteorites, as well as on the Moon and Mars. Fox was 86.
Boris B. Kadomtsev, Director of the Institute of Nuclear Fusion at the Russian Research Centre Kurchatov Institute and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was on the ICTP Scientific Council in the early 1970s. Kadomtsev was a world-class theoretical plasma physicist, who enjoyed a long association with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). He was 70.
Frederick Reines, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for his discovery of the ghost particle neutrino, had visited ICTP during the Trieste Conference on Particle Physics in 1984 and the 25th Anniversary Conference on Frontiers in Physics, High Technology and Mathematics in 1989. He was professor emeritus at the University of California at Irvine. His death occurred just a few weeks after scientists at the Super-Kamiokande laboratory in Japan had announced they had uncovered evidence of neutrino mass. Reines was 80.
