- Jeremy Levin, D.Phil., stepped down in October as CEO of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries after just 17 months on the job, after the company disclosed later-withdrawn layoff plans (see JOBWATCH on page 1), reportedly following disagreements with the company’s board of directors led by Phillip Frost, M.D.
- J. Craig Venter unveiled a digital biological converter capable of creating a copy of an organism from a distant location—“a biological fax machine,” as The New York Times put it.”
- In an exclusive GEN interview, onetime Fortune 400 member and “king of biotech” David Blech blamed a desire to recreate his past and his bipolar disorder for actions resulting in his going to prison on federal charges of “manipulative and fraudulent trading activity.”
- Novo Nordisk ended its association with marketing spokeswoman Paula Deen after the celebrity chef admitted to using a racial slur during a deposition in a since-dismissed workplace discrimination case.
- James E. Rothman, Ph.D., of Yale University; Randy W. Schekman, Ph.D., of the University of California, Berkeley; and Thomas C. Südhof, M.D., of Stanford University co-won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries on how key molecules are transported within and outside the cell through vesicles.
- Martin Karplus, Ph.D., of Harvard University and France’s Université de Strasbourg; Michael Levitt, Ph.D., of Stanford University School of Medicine; and Arieh Warshel, Ph.D., of the University of Southern California won the chemistry Nobel Prize for laying the groundwork behind today’s computer models for understanding and predicting chemical processes.
And a past double-Nobel laureate, Frederick Sanger, acclaimed as “father of the genomic era” for research that laid essential groundwork for the sequencing of amino acids and later DNA, passed away November 19 at age 95.