For 1950 Pennsylvania Grad, It's Back To School As Chairman Of University's Board Of Trustees, Japan Prize Honors A Biologist And His Field; Obituary

For 1950 Pennsylvania Grad, P. Roy Vagelos, It's Back To School As Chairman Of University's Board Of Trustees Japan Prize Honors A Biologist And His Field Obituary -- Betty McGee Vetter P. Roy Vagelos, who recently retired as chairman of the board of directors and chief executive officer of Merck and Co. Inc. in Whitehouse Station, N.J., assumed office as chairman of the University of Pennsylvania's board of trustees in October. He had been a member of the board since 1988. According to Vagelos, his main task as chairman will be to "help the new president, Judith Rodin, to accomplish the vision she has for the university. "As chairman of the trustees, it will be my job to facilitate the running of the university and managing its fiscal health." Vagelos, who graduated from the university with a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1950, adds, "Penn has very strong graduate programs, and the president's target is on changing-- improving--the undergraduate experience." He is one of four new Penn appointees--along with university president Rodin; Jeremy Sabloff, director of the University Museum; and Steve Bilsky, director of intercollegiate athletics--who were students there. With regard to the undergraduate programs, Vagelos notes that the focus of the new administration and the board will be on providing students with more research experience at the undergraduate level making the academic curriculum more interdisciplinary; promoting a higher level of interaction between the students and faculty; and increasing a "globalization" of students' experiences through participation in more international exchange programs. "We have to really work on all aspects," stresses the 65-year- old Vagelos, who has also been a biomedical researcher and medical doctor. Vagelos projects that his input as a former CEO of a multinational pharmaceutical firm would probably be most valuable in the globalization and research aspects of the proposed changes. After graduating from Penn, Vagelos attended Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, receiving an M.D. in 1954. He completed his residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in 1954-56. For 10 years, from 1956 to 1966, he served at the National Institutes of Health's National Heart Institute, first as senior surgeon and later as head of the Section of Comparative Biochemistry. He went on to St. Louis, teaching at Washington University School of Medicine, where he held the position of chairman of the department of biological chemistry until 1975, when he joined Merck. Over the years his research has concentrated on lipids and enzymes; he has published more than 100 scientific papers in these areas. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1972 and to the American Philosophical Society in 1993. --Neeraja Sankaran Author: Karen Young Kreeger, pp.23 On November 28, Ernst Mayr, Alexander Agissiz Professor of Zoology, Emeritus, at Harvard University, was presented with the 1994 International Prize for Biology--more commonly known as the Japan Prize--which this year consisted of a $100,000 cash award and medal. The prize, one of the world's highest honors in biology, was awarded at a ceremony in Tokyo. Mayr, 90, says he was heartened by the fact that the prize was bestowed in recognition of his work in a field of study that, he maintains, is underappreciated: systematics. "The Japan Prize, just like the Balzan Prize [which Mayr won in 1983], has a different major theme each year. And this year the Japan Prize was for the field of systematics. One thing that I particularly appreciated is that [the selection committee] realized the importance of systematics. It's very often ignored and certainly in this country [the United States] not supported nearly as well as it deserves." Mayr, who received the National Medal of Science in 1969, is best known as one of the architects of the modern synthesis, a theory in evolutionary biology that combines a molecular and organismal viewpoint. He expounded his ideas in a book entitled Systematics and the Origin of Species (Columbia University Press, 1942). The book is recognized as a "Citation Classic," having been explicitly cited in more than 800 publications to date. A follow-up to the 1942 book--Animal Species and Evolution (Harvard University Press, 1963) is another Citation Classic, with more than 2,500 references to date. The modern synthesis theory is credited with integrating 20th- century discoveries in genetics with Charles Darwin's original theory of natural selection. "What the synthesis did was bring together two fields of evolutionary biology that up to that point [the early 1940s] were separate, did not understand each other, and only dealt with part of evolution," Mayr explains. "The naturalists, systematists, and paleontologists were explaining diversity, and the geneticists were explaining how adaptation happens. With the synthesis we brought these two fields together. The geneticists concentrated on single genes and the naturalists concentrated on whole individuals." The evolution of Mayr's career itself is a blending of five disciplines, he observes. "I started out as an ornithologist, and I'm still writing ornithological papers off and on. Then I concentrated on systematics and evolutionary biology, and then, in the last 25 years, the history and philosophy of biology." Mayr received his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Berlin in 1926. He came to Harvard in 1953 after a 21-year post at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The next addition to Mayr's vitae of 20 books and more than 640 journal articles will be a biology book "for the interested layperson as well as for biologists." He says of his current projects: "I'm doing what I've always done--work on books. I'm about finished with a book that will be a bird's-eye view of the whole field of biology." --Karen Young Kreeger Betty McGee Vetter, executive director of the Washington, D.C. based Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology (formerly the Scientific Manpower Commission), died November 18 of lung cancer in Arlington, VA. She was 70 years old. Over the course of her tenure at the commission, she became a nationally recognized collector and analyst of data on demographic and other characteristics of the United States scientific and engineering work force. Her particular areas of interest and expertise were the role of women and minorities and amployment opportunities for scientists and engineers. At the commission, she edited the digest Scientific, Engineering, Technical Manpower Comments and compiled the annual publication Professional Women and Minorities: A Human Resource Data Compendium. She also wrote more than 150 reports, book chapters, and articles. She received numerous honors for her work, including an honorary doctorate of laws from Illinois Wesleyan University in 1992. Vetter earned her bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Colorado in 1944. After graduate work in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and a stint in the Navy, she received her master's degree in theater and drama from Stanford University in 1948, and held academic appointments in California and Washington, D.C. before assuming her post at the commission.

For 1950 Pennsylvania Grad, It's Back To School As Chairman Of University's Board Of Trustees, Japan Prize Honors A Biologist And His Field; Obituary

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