Adobe Systems and IBM were among the companies whose staff
were given America's topscience and technology awardsin Washington last
night.
US president Barack Obama gave medals to IBM CEO Sam Palmisano
for the IBM
Blue Gene supercomputer, while Adobe's John Warnock and Charles
Geschke won for their work on desktop publishing, which now
includes video and the web.
Craig Venter, who led the mission to unravel the human genome,
took a medal for his work in spreading understanding of genomics,
as did Francis Collins for his work on genomics, including the
Human Genome Project.
Obama noted that war produced many scientific and technological
advances. "Much of World War II was fought far from the
battlefield, by Alan Turing in Bletchley Park, and Oppenheimer in
Los Alamos, and by countless others who developed radar and
aircraft and antibiotics," he said.
But weapons development also led to improvements in
understanding nature and man, he said, referring to how the V-2
rockets led to the missions of Mercury and Gemini and Apollo, and
the Hubble space telescope.