President Suzanne Pfeffer reports on an ASBMB career symposium held at the University of California at San Francisco.

Last month, President Obama released his budget request for fiscal 2013, a plan to fund the federal government from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30, 2013. Budgets in presidential election years are difficult, and the president has identified some priority areas for federal investment while working to cut overall spending levels to decrease future debt and deficits.

The National Institutes of Health last month released a new biography of Ruth Lillian Kirschstein, the late deputy director of the agency and the longtime director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

J. Martin Bollinger Jr. of Pennsylvania State University, C. Ronald Kahn of the Joslin Diabetes Center, Daniel J. Donoghue of University of California, San Diego, Matthias Mann of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, and Feng Shao and Hong Zhang, both of the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing, are included.

Xiaodong Wang, a former Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator now at the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing, was lauded as "one of the most highly original, bold and creative scientists."

Barry Honig, professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, was honored for his contributions through computational methods.

The work of Peter Espenshade, associate professor of cell biology at Johns Hopkins University, was called "brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed."

Charles Brenner and Dagmar Ringe were tasked with developing premedical curriculum recommendations in response to the revised Medical College Admission Test.