Last weekend our good friends Jayne and Neil celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary. They invited two hundred or so of their family friends and close colleagues to party at the Hayden Planetarium in the New York Natural History Museum. It was a great fun, hors d’oeuvres and gin and tonics along the “cosmic path”, dancing under the planets, and of course the space show in the planetarium itself with wonderful visualization of the big bang, dark matter, and our ever expanding universe – always an inspiring and humbling thing to be reminded of. Most of the people there were scientists, friends gathered from Jayne and Neil’s thirty-year path in research. Jayne has been my colleague for 20 of these and is one of the most fun and quietly generous people I know. We are both English expat scientists. As such, besides being friends, we share a common belief in the importance of education, which is generally not at all valued on this side of the Atlantic, we’ve co-organized student/faculty retreats, interacted in various mentoring capacities and gone to the same parties at the British Embassy. Jayne has recently moved to Hunter College, part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system. In her day job she is a parasitologist. She loves her research and is working on a really important problem in a unique and creative way. She studies sleeping sickness, a disease involving infection by parasitic trypanosomes spread by bites from Tsetse flies, one of the worlds deadliest animals. 
Cattle are also prone to sleeping sickness and can be a reservoir that facilitates human infection. Intriguingly, baboons are resistant. So she plans to take advantage of this fact by collaborating with scientists at the Scottish institute that created Dolly the sheep and other experts in genetic engineering, to generate a transgenic cow with the relevant gene from baboons conferring resistance. Thus she will rejuvenate the depleted meat and dairy industry in Africa and remove the biggest reservoir of infection. For this she received a Bill and Melinda Gates award and I cannot think of anyone more deserving of this honor.
For more about Jayne’s work see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q-81a1Y4x0
http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v17/n1/full/nm0111-14.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q-81a1Y4x0
http://raper.bioweb.hunter.cuny.edu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=105&Itemid=87
Gates Foundation
http://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Most-Lethal-Animal-Mosquito-Week
For more about the Hayden planetarium see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_Planetarium
