The Protein Society Announces Its 2012 Award Recipients

"The Protein Society, the leading international society devoted to furthering research and development in protein science, announces the winners of its 2012 awards. The awards will be conferred at the 26th Annual Symposium of The Protein Society (August 5-8, 2012, San Diego, CA, USA). The Carl Brändén Award, sponsored by Rigaku Corporation, is given to an outstanding protein scientist who has also made exceptional contributions in the areas of education and/or service to the science. The 2012 award will be presented to Dr. Helen Berman (Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey) for her accomplishments toward enabling a freely available and uniform worldwide archive of 3D structural information for biomedical research and education. Dr. Berman’s passion for making structural data accessible and understandable by a broad community has driven the development of the Protein Data Bank into a vital and accessible international resource for biology. Berman in the early 1970’s was a champion of the open access of scientific information; albeit obvious today, the concept at that time of open access was truly visionary...."