Sally Ride, an American hero, lost her seventeen month battle with pancreatic cancer in La Jolla, California on July 23, 2012 at the age of 61.

Ride is best known for being the first American woman to travel to space. She was born May 26, 1951 in Encino, California. In the 1980s, Ride saw an ad in the student newspaper at Berkeley for astronauts. In an interview much later she recalled “the moment I saw that ad, I knew that’s what I wanted to do.” At the time she had already received degrees in Physics and English and was pursuing her Ph.D. in physics at Stanford University.

Ride was not the first woman in space – that honor goes to Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova who traveled to space in 1963. However, Ride was the first American who traveled to space and, in 1983, was the youngest person to travel into space at the age of 32. She inspired young women across the country with her historic trip and her work afterward.

Although Sally Ride was the first American woman to go into space, she was not the first to try. In the 1960s when the Mercury 7 was created the Mercury 13, a group of thirteen women training to go into space, was also created. The Mercury 13 included Jerrie Cobb, Bernice Steadman, Janey Hart, Jerri Truhill, Rhea Woltman, Sarah Ratley, Jan and Marion Dietrich, Myrtle Cagle, Irene Leverton, Gene Nora Jessen, Jean Hixson and Wally Funk. These women went through all of the same trainings and tests that the men of the Mercury 7 did, and some of them even scored higher on these tests. However, NASA did not open the opportunity of space travel for women until the year that Ride applied.

Sally Ride spent 343 hours in total in space. Her first mission was on the Challenger in 1983 and then she returned to space in October of 1984. Years later Ride described her view of the planet. “When the space shuttle’s engines cut off, and you’re finally in space, in orbit, weightless… I remember unstrapping from my seat, floating over to the window, and that’s when I got my first view of Earth. Just a spectacular view, and a chance to see our planet as a planet. I could see coral reefs off the coast of Australia. A huge storm swirling in the ocean. I could see an enormous dust storm building over northern Africa… just unbelievable sights.”

She was scheduled for another mission a few years later but it was cancelled after the 1986 Challenger disaster. She joined the board that investigated the Challenger shuttle explosion as well as the Columbia disaster in 2003. However, the cancelled missions did not distort Ride’s view of human exploration of the stars. She later said, “studying whether there’s life on Mars or studying how the universe began, there’s something magical about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. That’s something that is almost part of being human and I’m certain that will continue.”

After leaving NASA in the late 1980s Ride became a professor of physics at the University of California in San Diego. She also founded Sally Ride Science which was a foundation that permitted her to “pursue her long-time passion of motivating girls and young women to pursue careers in science, math and technology.”

Ride’s former Commander on her first mission, Captain Bob Crippen stated, “[Ride] proved that young women could do anything they wanted to do.” President Obama agreed in a statement released shortly after her death claiming, “as the first American woman to travel into space, Sally was a national hero and a powerful role model.”

However, Sally Ride was not always comfortable with the attention. Former husband and fellow former astronaut Steve Hawley stated, “Sally was a very private person who found herself a very public persona. It was a role in which she was never fully comfortable.” Indeed, she was so private that most did not know that she had broken another NASA record as the first gay/bisexual woman in space. Ride’s obituary states that she left behind her partner of twenty-seven years, Tam O’Shaughnessy. Although never revealed before, this new tidbit of information about her very private life provides just another dimension to the heroic and fascinating life of Sally Ride.

Image Courtsey of  x-ray delta

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IBM announced it is contributing a massive database of chemical data extracted from millions of patents and scientific literature to the National Institutes of Health. This contribution will allow researchers to more easily visualize important relationships among chemical compounds to aid in drug discovery and support advanced cancer research.

In collaboration with AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, DuPont and Pfizer, IBM is providing a database of more than 2.4 million chemical compounds extracted from about 4.7 million patents and 11 million biomedical journal abstracts from 1976 to 2000.

The announcement was made at an IBM forum on U.S. economic competitiveness in the 21st century, exploring how private sector innovations and investment can be more easily shared in the public domain. The publicly available chemical data can be used by researchers worldwide to gain new insights and enable new areas of research.

It will also help researchers save time by more efficiently finding information buried in millions of pages of patent documents. Access to this data will also allow researchers to analyze far larger sets of documents than the traditional manual process, adding a whole new dimension to the ability to search intellectual property.

The data was extracted using the IBM business analytics and optimization strategic IP insight platform (SIIP), a combination of data and analytics delivered via the IBM SmartCloud, and developed by IBM Research in collaboration with several major life sciences organizations.

This new cloud-driven method for curating and analyzing massive amounts of patents, scientific content and molecular data. It uses techniques such as automated image analysis and enhanced optical recognition of chemical images and symbols to extract information from patents and literature upon publication.

This is a task that otherwise takes weeks and months to complete manually, but can be done rapidly using this new technology. ”Information overload continues to be a challenge in drug discovery and other areas of scientific research,” said Steve Heller, project director for the InChI Trust, a non-profit which supports the InChI international standard to represent chemical structures.

“Rich data and content is often buried in patents, drawings, figures and scholarly articles. This contribution by IBM and its collaborators will make it easier for researchers to use this data, link to other data using the InChI structure representation and derive new insight.”

Over the past six years, several major life sciences organizations have worked on this project with IBM Research gaining access to a comprehensive chemical library extracted from worldwide patents and scientific abstracts. Public structure extraction tools developed by researchers at the National Institutes of Health were also used successfully in this project.

“The scientific community will receive enormous benefit from this advancement,” said Heller. “This is an important addition to the open chemistry data sets. The comprehensiveness of the data and the new ways researchers can look at these data and cross-link to other data associated with each chemical is expected to help with drug development to fight many forms of cancers and other human diseases, as well as the development of other chemical compounds.”

The data will be contributed to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), part of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), and the Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD) Group of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at the National Institutes of Health.

It will be incorporated in the NCBI’s PubChem, a public resource for the scientific community that serves as an aggregator for scientific results as well as in NCI CADD Group services such as the Chemical Structure Lookup Service and the Chemical Identifier Resolver.

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