1992 Academy Awards: NAS Honors 13 Scientific Luminaries

The National Academy of Sciences is scheduled to present 11 awards to 13 noteworthy individuals in the scientific community at its annual meeting in Washington, D.C., today. "Certain awards are annual, and some cycle differently--every two years, every five years," though all are given at the spring NAS meeting, says Mary Hofbauer Brown, NAS director of membership services. "This year we have a small crop--next year we'll have something like 16 or 17." Of the recipients, Brown says, "of course, all are outstanding, or they would not be receiving awards from NAS and other groups." This year's winners' CVs contain a wide variety of other awards, fellowships, and prizes, including, in the case of Chemical Sciences Award winner Donald Cram, the Nobel Prize. Only two honorees are members of NAS--Cram and Public Welfare Medalist Philip Hauge Abelson, former editor of Science magazine. Considered the academy's highest honor, the Public Welfare Medal is given annually to a member of the scientific community who has made a noteworthy contribution to science in general, and to the relationship between science and the public. Founded in 1914, the award has been given to such influential science figures as former surgeon general C. Everett Koop and New York Times science writer Walter Sullivan. For Abelson, a noted geologist before he became editor of Science--serving at the magazine for 22 years until his 1984 retirement--receiving the 1992 Public Welfare Medal "is very satisfying." "I'm very pleased--especially when I looked at the list of previous recipients," says Abelson, who has remained associated with Science since his retirement. Not that Abelson, who lists among his other awards the Presidential Medal of Science, has been overlooked here. But the NAS honor, which carries no accompanying cash award, he says, "means quite a bit, because this is recognition, you might say, from peers." The academy cited Abelson for "building Science magazine into an informative and widely read source of news about science and scientists--and their role in society." The awards, other than the Public Welfare Medal, to be presented at today's NAS annual meeting are as follows: Joseph L. Reed, a professor of oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, will receive the Alexander Agassiz Medal and a $6,000 prize for exploration and observation of the world's oceans. George C. Williams, a professor emeritus in the department of ecology and evolution at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, will receive the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal and a prize of $5,000 in recognition of his contributions to evolutionary thought. The NAS Award in Applied Mathematics and Numerical Analysis, a prize of $10,000, will be presented to Andrew J. Majda, a professor of mathematics and a faculty member in the program in applied and computational mathe- matics at Princeton University. Majda is cited for his contributions to the analysis and application of partial differential equations to supersonic flow, combustion, vortex motion, and turbulent diffusion. Nobelist Donald J. Cram, S. Winstein Professor of organic chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, will receive the NAS Award in Chemical Sciences, which consists of a $10,000 award and a bronze medal, for work on fundamental questions of stereochemistry. Alice P. Gast, an associate professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University, and Sangtae Kim, Wisconsin Distinguished Professor in chemical engineering, fluid mechanics, and rheology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, share the NAS Award for Initiatives in Research, a prize of $15,000. Gast is being honored for experimental research on polymer and colloidal systems, and Kim is being recognized for refinement of mathematical techniques in low Reynolds number hydrodynamics. The NAS Award in Mathematics, a $5,000 prize, goes to Robert MacPherson, a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for his role in the introduction and application of new approaches to the topology of singular spaces. Thomas W. Cline, a professor of genetics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Bruce Baker, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford, share the $20,000 NAS Award in Molecular Biology, and each will receive a gold medal. They are being recognized for their work in defining how sex is determined in Drosophila. Robert T. Watson, program director of the process studies program office of the earth science applications division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, will receive the NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing, a $5,000 prize for leading international reviews of stratospheric ozone research. The Troland Research Award, a prize of $32,000, goes to Martha Farah, an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, for empirical and theoretical analysis of visual cognition. And Stefan Gengston, docent at the Institute of Paleontology of Uppsala University in Sweden, will receive the Charles Doolittle Walcott Medal, a medal and prize of $2,000, for studies of the faunas of the Cambrian radiation, uncovering evidence for a major evolutionary event.

1992 Academy Awards: NAS Honors 13 Scientific Luminaries

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