RSVP : The Science of Mixing Business With a Good Time

There was no refugee from the Comedy Club handling emcee duties, no vocalist belting out his guts. There wasn’t even a dance floor for anyone so inspired.

There was a quickie video highlighting a prominent gene expression lab, and there was no question that brevity was the order of the evening. Speeches were over and everyone was on the way home by 9:20 p.m.

Leaving their lab coats at home, some of the state’s foremost scientists as well as business leaders had donned tuxedos to honor their own at a dinner at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Wednesday.

And if you hadn’t heard of polymerase chain reaction (PCR), much less DNA, perhaps this wasn’t the party for you.

The California Museum of Science and Industry honored as scientists of the year Robert Tjian, a specialist in gene regulation at UC Berkeley, and Ronald Evans, a researcher in molecular biology and genetics at the Salk Institute.

Leonard J. Pieroni, chairman and chief executive officer of the Parsons Corp., an engineering and construction company in Pasadena, was named industrialist of the year at the museum’s annual fund-raiser, which raised about $125,000.

Pieroni, himself a chemical engineer, pointed out that engineers bring science to “real world applications.”

Jeffrey N. Rudolph, the museum’s executive director, eagerly reported that in the 37 years the museum has celebrated scientists, 11 of its honorees have gone on to win Nobel prizes.

(A criterion in choosing scientist of the year is that the winner has not already won a Nobel.)

Two of those Nobel laureates--George Olah and Kary Mullis--attended the dinner, and a third laureate, Francis Crick, was there as well.

“He’s probably the most important biologist of the century,” Evans said of Crick, president of the Salk Institute and one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA. Evans quickly added: “I am talking about my boss.”

Wherever DNA goes, so does O.J. Simpson talk.

“Well, yes, everybody talks about it,” said Crick of DNA evidence. “It gets exceedingly tedious.”

Mullis, who invented the PCR technique used in DNA analysis, was more animated about the murder case.

He will be testifying as an expert for the defense, but made it clear what that meant.

“I think of myself as representing scientific methodology, not as a representative of O.J. Simpson. I’m being paid by O.J. because that’s the way the legal system works.”