National Academy Of Sciences Launches New Era, As Alberts Takes Helm

Academy members, with high hopes for his administration, expect Alberts to boost NAS's image and influence Members of the National Academy of Sciences say they are eagerly anticipating the presidency of Bruce M. Alberts. The University of California, San Francisco, molecular biologist assumes leadership of the 1,683-member honorary body--as well as the chairmanship of the 1,200-employee National Research Council (NRC)--on July 1. "The academy is going to change under Alberts because of the kind of person he is," says NAS member Marilyn Farquhar, coordinator of the new division of cellular and molecular medicine at UC-San Diego. Farquhar and other academy members say that, with the current funding crisis in the United States government and here, it is especially important for the academy, which represents the country's most highly respected scientists, to help shape national science and technology policy. To that end, they say, it is important for the academy to have a leader who will be able to work with the Clinton administration--and who can inspire his constituents to speak out for working researchers. Alberts fits the bill in this respect, they say. "Bruce Alberts will stimulate his colleagues to become more active in policy issues--by example," says Farquhar. Like many other academy members contacted for this article, Farquhar lauds Alberts's dedication as an educator as well as a person interested in science policy. "He's been a model in terms of taking an active role in the life sciences at many levels, from the teaching of high school science teachers to playing a leading role in the National Research Council," she says. While expressing admiration for Alberts's outreach to elementary and high school science teachers and their students--most notably through a five-year-old San Francisco program he started called City Science--academy members also praise his DNA replication research. He is renowned for his textbook The Molecular Biology of the Cell (2d ed., New York, Garland Publishing Inc., 1989), which Donald Brown, director of the embryology department at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., and cochairman of the NAS committee that nominated Alberts for the presidency, calls "one of best texts in modern biology." The 55-year-old Alberts, an outsider to Washington, acknowledges that his exclusively academic background is different from that of his predecessor, Frank Press. Press, who received the Japan Prize last month for his geophysics research in the 1950s and 1960s, was science adviser to President Jimmy Carter and a United States delegate to the Nuclear Test Ban Conferences in Geneva in 1959-61 and Moscow in 1963. When Alberts assumes the NAS presidency, Press will join the Carnegie Institution as the Cecil and Ida Green Senior Fellow. "I'm interested in trying to bring something to the National Research Council from my background," Alberts says. "It will be fun to try to institute some of what I have done in the university in an organization involved in science policy in Washington." Paul Doty, an emeritus professor of biochemistry at Harvard University who was Alberts's undergraduate and graduate adviser when the future academy president attended the Ivy League school in the 1960s, recalls that Alberts "took enough time to teach himself very broadly in the field apart from his research. He was looking for massive, comprehensive grasp of the whole material. This showed up in his book." "He is a genuine scholar," says Howard Green, George Higginson Professor of Cellular Physiology at Harvard Medical School. "It's a very good thing when a good scientist gets put into a top scientific position. There's a message in that that goes out to people in the country." A New Approach Alberts--who had declined being a candidate at first--says he ultimately decided to take the NAS job because of his desire to find the answer to the question, "Could we make it as much fun to work at the NRC as it is to work at a university?" Toward that end, Alberts says, he intends to "experiment with different ways of doing things." For example, he says, he hopes to "invent devices that make people interact with each other across the organization"--such as the annual retreats he helped institute at UC-San Francisco--"to get them to talk to each other, bounce ideas off each other. Organizations work better if everyone is contributing." Another innovation he envisions, Alberts says, is a fellows program, whereby recent college graduates would work at the academy--a way to "get people into the organization to take the place of students in a university." The presence of the fellows, he says, would be an "excuse to force people to work together to share ideas, and [make] contacts they wouldn't otherwise have." Peter von Hippel, a professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon in Eugene and an NAS nominating committee member, says Alberts's leadership "really can inspire other people." Especially gratifying, von Hippel says, is Alberts's readiness to "delegate responsibility so [a task] becomes a team effort. He's extraordinarily generous in giving credit to other people." Alberts says it's important that the people to whom he assigns a task "feel they can be constructive, that they're not being interfered with--that they can take their good ideas and fly with them." `What You See Is What You Get' In addition to their different realms of experience, Press and Alberts have contrasting personal styles, their constituents say. "I didn't know him well, but I thought Frank Press was reserved," whereas Alberts is "very gregarious, very approachable," says NAS member Richard Dickerson, director of the molecular biology institute at UCLA. "We're perfectly satisfied with his style," says nominating committee cochairman Brown. "It's absolutely candid information transfer--what you see is what you get." While Press appears "polished and smooth," Alberts gives the impression of "a slightly rumpled man who just got out of the lab and has some exciting things to talk about," Dickerson says. He adds that this style is likely to serve Alberts well in his new job: "Most people in the academy tend to be of that type." Alberts himself acknowledges the difference. "I tend to say outrageous things at times," he says, laughing. "I've never heard Frank say anything outrageous." Press says he is optimistic that Alberts will succeed in the capital city. In order to make it in Washington, the outgoing president says, one needs "a willingness to learn, flexibility, reasonability, and a little bit of experience. Bruce qualifies on all counts. Picking up the Washington culture should be the easiest thing for him." Although the West Coast has been his home base, Alberts is not a complete stranger to the academy's environs. Since 1988, he has chaired NRC's Commission on Life Sciences. He was also chairman of the NRC committee that produced the 1988 report "Mapping and Sequencing the Human Genome," which spearheaded the Human Genome Project. At the outset, there was dissent among committee members about whether to recommend the genome project, yet by the time the report came out, the committee was unanimously in favor of it. "We started with a committee with very diverse views," says Alberts. "My job was to try to create a consensus. The project that was shaped by the committee was different from any single person's original ideas." The Agenda Many NAS members believe that the most important thing on the agenda for the academy is to determine how it can play a role in the setting of national priorities for science and technology. The new president, Farquhar says, ought to "get in there, try to affect policy, and get a dialogue going with the administration and Congress. The situation is acute. We are at an impasse, as we have trained people and have opened many opportunities, but we have no resources to develop them." In a time of dwindling funds, Farquhar says, the academy should become "a very active body that can serve the country and the academic community. The scientific community needs a strong spokesman with a long-range view to represent it and to bring a new era in the life of the academy. Alberts represents just the right person at the right time for this mission." "I'm really excited about having [Alberts] appearing on the scene at the same time as the Clinton administration," says von Hippel. The academy, he says, "in the right hands, can be an effective force--helping the country cope with the problems and opportunities that arise" with scientific progress. "I really have high hopes for all this." Another top priority for Alberts will be an evaluation of NRC, with an eye toward curtailing its growth. In a March 19 letter to the members, Press wrote, "I believe that the NRC has reached a maximum manageable size.... We are so concerned with avoiding mistakes and ensuring quality that we have added bureaucratic layers of review that make our work more time-consuming and, therefore, more expensive." "On one hand, we all agree that restraining growth of NRC will enable us to do a better job," says NAS home secretary Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. "On the other hand, we all recognize the difficulties in restraining that growth." Raven, who, according to a Chemical & Engineering News report (W. Lepkowski, 70[39]:7, Sept. 28, 1992), was the NAS nominating committee's first choice for the president's job but declined candidacy, adds: "I think Frank Press has worked very hard to try to restrain that growth. [Alberts] will find it difficult to know how to cut it back. The NRC is a mechanism of extraordinary importance to the nation--it needs continuous maintenance, fine- tuning, attention, recruitment of members and others to take on studies." Alberts says he intends to seriously consider Press's suggestion to "replace a layer of management with a visiting committee...which would serve in an oversight role and monitor the...work performed by each of the major divisions of the NRC," as Press wrote in his March letter to the members. "I plan to get people I can trust to evaluate and oversee many parts of the operation where I'm not an expert," such as the academy's National Cooperative Highway Research Program, Alberts says, stressing that he intends to play the largest role in his own areas of expertise, biology and science education. "I want to try to find a lot of people to help--volunteers to spend a lot of time with the academy. My job is to make their experience pleasant and rewarding. "I really want to connect the NRC with mainstream of scientific community more than it's been connected in the past." The Message To academy members, Alberts says, he wants to convey the message that the research council "offers them an opportunity to become involved in science policy." The younger scientists who have not yet achieved academy-member status, Alberts says, should likewise be aware that NRC could benefit from their participation." Concerning Alberts's expected emphasis on education, Press notes that under his own tenure, the academy made significant progress, clearing the way for further achievements under the new president. "He doesn't have to elbow in; we're already there," Press says. As examples of the academy's current efforts, Press points to NRC's effort to develop education standards--basic descriptions of what teachers and students in grades K-12 should know about science (Ron Kaufman, The Scientist, July 6, 1992, page 3; May 3, 1993, page 3)--and to the National Science Resources Center, a joint effort of the academy and the Smithsonian Institution that serves as a curriculum information data-base, develops and disseminates resource materials for teachers, and sponsors outreach programs. "He just has to make sure that we're doing it [the education initiative] well, that the priorities are right, that we're developing good products, and that we keep expanding," Press says. "There's a national readiness, for the first time, to undertake some profound changes" on the science education front, Press says. "He can really shine with this initiative." Alberts makes the dramatic assertion that "We need nothing less than a revolution to change science education in this country." And he notes that "national standards alone won't make it happen in most local areas. You need resources, teacher education, political support." Likewise, he says, while the National Science Resources Center is a commendable effort, "none of this stuff is any good if nobody uses it. We don't have enough of a science lobby to get users. Most local communities just don't have the expertise in their population to know what they want in science education." That's where the academy fits in, Alberts says. "The academy is the kind of place--and has the prestige needed--to have an impact on this level. We can educate the people in Washington. We can educate scientists and mobilize them to change their local schools." Alberts expects to solicit help in this effort. "The scientific societies have tremendous outreach capabilities," he says. "We will work with them to educate their scientists about what opportunities and curricula [exist]." With all his high expectations for Alberts's presidency, von Hippel says, "I hope this [job] hasn't done Bruce a disservice. He treasures his science and his private time and his university. He really was drafted largely by his own conscience." EDITOR'S NOTE: This article, focusing on National Academy of Sciences president- elect Bruce Alberts's vision of the academy and his plans for its future, is the first part of a two-part series. The second part, which will appear in the July 12, 1993, issue, will discuss the legacy left to Alberts by his predecessor, Frank Press.

National Academy Of Sciences Launches New Era, As Alberts Takes Helm

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