Arts And Sciences Academy 'Revels In Independence'

Nestled in a sylvan glade not far from the bustling Cambridge, Mass., campuses of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' headquarters--despite its attractiveness--could easily go unnoticed by a passerby. Likewise, the academy itself--its long history as a major intellectual and social force notwithstanding--remains unknown to many people. "Certainly the arms control, federal government, and academic communities know about us, but our name recognition with the public is low," says academy executive officer Joel Orlen. "When I mention where I work, most people confuse the organization with the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the group that gives out the Academy Awards." The academy recognizes accomplishment in mathematics, the physical and biological sciences, med- icine, the social sciences and humanities, business, government, public affairs, and the arts. And while its scientific roster includes such luminaries as National Institutes of Health director Harold Varmus, Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, and vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk, the academy is much more than simply another notation on already-distinguished resumes. Though it carries no official government seal, its participation in domestic and international public affairs and its wide range of influential projects and publications make the academy unique among honor societies. In the early 1960s, for example, academy members helped establish the field of arms control. Through its leadership in the U.S. Pugwash Committee, the academy has helped formulate international nuclear weapons treaties. One effort currently on the drawing board is an assessment of the future of particle physics in the U.S., given the demise of the superconducting supercollider. Orlen lists several such projects that have turned into books: The Genetic Revolution: Scientific Prospects and Public Perceptions (Bernard D. Davis, ed., Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); National Energy Issues--How Do We Decide? Plutonium as a Test Case (Robert G. Sachs, ed., Cambridge, Mass., Ballinger Publishing Co., 1980); and The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology (Ernst Mayr and William B. Provine, Harvard University Press, 1980). "It's an active hatchery for ideas," says Harvard University physicist and science historian Gerald Holton, who helped create Daedalus, the quarterly journal and voice of the academy, in 1957. "The academy represents service to an ideal--to improve the condition of humankind." Former academy president and acoustics expert Leo L. Beranek, a professor, emeritus, of communications engineering at MIT, praises the academy's leadership for addressing "a broad range of social-policy issues, as well as reporting on political, economic, and social aspects of societies throughout the globe." Says Beranek: "There's really nothing like the academy." The academy's eclectic membership of 3,700 fellows and foreign honorary members includes 168 Nobel laureates and 62 Pulitzer Prize winners. "Dr. Beranek likes to say that he checks the elections of the National Academy of Sciences, and usually about 60 to 70 percent are already in the American Academy," says Orlen. "Of all recent American Nobel winners, about 75 percent were elected to the American Academy prior to winning the prize." In the academy's ranks, the ratio of scientists to nonscientists is approximately 50:50 and has been that way at least since the turn of the century, according to Holton. The academy was founded during the Revolutionary War in 1780 by a group led by John Adams (later the second president of the U.S.), with the mandate of electing "men and women of distinguished achievement into a society to promote the cultivation of the arts and sciences for the betterment of humanity." Early members included many of the nation's Founding Fathers; over the years, scientific luminaries such as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Alexander Agassiz joined the ranks. The academy became influential in modern world affairs with the fall 1960 Daedalus issue, titled "Arms Control," which was the result of a conference. The publication "contributed to the credibility of arms control as a respectable field," says cofounder Holton. "After reading Daedalus," Holton recalls, "a young senator, John F. Kennedy, wrote to tell me that if elected president, he would establish an arms-control agency, which is now the U.S. Arms Control Agency. "We weren't tied down to any government agency, and could approach the issue on a nonpartisan basis," Holton says. "These are the characteristics of both Daedalus and the academy--they revel in their independence." The academy's independent streak is apparent in the wide range of projects it takes on. The Initiatives for Children, for example, is a huge, complex project aimed at assessing various aspects of the lives of American youngsters. "We're interested in examining indicators of the status of children's lives and evaluating proposed interventions" in a number of areas, such as the family, health, economics, and education, says director Howard Hiatt, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Some of the project's study groups are focusing on secondary-school reform, with particular attention to science and math education. The academy is also the longest-standing U.S. member organization of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). IIASA, whose members are groups from the U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada, and 11 European countries, is "the principal nonpolitical, international site for sustained research on human dimensions of global change," explains Alan McDonald, executive director of the U.S. Committee for IIASA. Proposed in the late 1960s by Lyndon Johnson, "IIASA officially began in 1972--with the Soviet Union and the United States as the principal members--with the idea that they could collaborate to solve problems common to modern industrial states, such as pollution, health-care delivery, and the energy supply," McDonald says. Through its Committee on International Security Studies (CISS), the academy continues to foster projects that address arms control and security issues. For example, program director Jeffrey Boutwell, a professor of political science at MIT, and Harvard science historian Everett Mendelsohn have been intimately involved with the peace- negotiation process between Palestinian and Israeli security officials. CISS and the academy have played a key role in Pugwash, a loosely knit international organization of scientists, arms- control and military specialists, diplomats, and social scientists devoted to arms control, founded in 1957 at the height of the Cold War. Pugwash is "a neutral convener, and it brought physicists, chemists, and other scientists together from the United States, Russia, China, Europe, and other countries in a nonpartisan setting at a time when there wasn't any other forum to do it," says Boutwell. According to physicist John Holdren, Class of 1935 Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley, Pugwash meetings helped "resolve technical issues" involved in some of the major arms-control work in recent decades, including the antiballistic missile and chemical weapons treaties and the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks. In recent years, Pugwash proj-ects have focused on international energy and environmental concerns. Notable Pugwash participants include chemist Paul Doty, former CISS chairman and director for science and international affairs at Harvard; Richard Garwin, a physicist who recently retired from IBM Corp.'s Thomas J. Watson Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.; and physicist Herbert York, the first director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and President Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the comprehensive test-ban treaty negotiations. The academy also helped found the American Council for Learned Societies, an umbrella organization of scholarly societies in Washington, D.C., and the International Foundation for the Survival and Development of Humanity in 1988, which helped physicist and human-rights activist Andrei Sakharov leave the Soviet Union. Of course, a wide-ranging mission has its downside. While the academy's endowment of nearly $14 million more or less takes care of some of the day-to-day organizational expenses, projects and committees don't run by themselves. Whereas the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) serves as a federally backed scientific advisory board, the American Academy depends on private foundations for most of its money. Five years ago the academy launched its first fund- raising drive, with a goal of approximately $12 million. So far it's reached about $7 million. Spurred by a desire to "make ourselves more modern to represent emerging fields and institutions," Orlen explains, the academy has begun something of a youth movement. "About four years ago, we doubled the membership quotas and dropped the average age of election from 59 to the low 50s," he says. The election process lasts a year. Membership is divided into four classes: mathematical and physical sciences; biological sciences; social arts and sciences; and humanities. The membership committees in each class review other members' nominations, which eventually are sent to the entire academy for ranking. Proposed members, in ranked order, are returned to the membership committees, who continue to whittle down the candidates according to previously established criteria, finally recommending a group to the academy council--the governing body--for the final election. Approximately half of those originally nominated (the "appraisal list") get elected in any given year, according to academy officials. Members are known as fellows of the academy. The mostly male academy also is attempting to diversify, adding more women and minorities. In fact, since 1989, new membership policies have more than doubled the female membership to 280, or 8.8 percent of fellows. Of the 184 new fellows elected in March, 39 (21 percent) were women. Harvard neonatologist Mary Ellen Avery--recently elected to membership in NAS (N. Sankaran, The Scientist, June 13, 1994, page 1)--concedes that the lack of women members "reflects the status of academe. "Women for the most part weren't in the upper ranks of academe until very recently," Avery says. "It's only now that the younger women are finding they can get through the glass ceiling and rise to the appropriate degree of recognition. "The academy membership reflects the pool size," she says. "Change is inevitable because quite a few women are accomplished. Society wasn't fostering promotion of those groups 30 years ago like it is today." Perhaps the most visible academy product is Daedalus. European historian Stephen R. Graubard, who became its editor in 1961, describes the journal as a "continuing record of how the best minds that we can recruit think about crucial issues involving the social, intellectual, and political life of the United States and the world." Issues as often as not are turned into books. "What is remarkable about the journal is that we are allowed to wander," says Graubard, a professor of history at Brown University. He adds: "The best thing about being editor of Daedalus is that you can go onto anyone's turf and not be told to get off because it is the turf of Daedalus." Historian Holton recalls an issue in the spring of 1958, in which Nobel chemist Linus Pauling and physicist Edward Teller argued about nuclear fallout. Pauling, who later won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in arms control, argued for a ban on atmospheric nuclear testing. Teller contended that some testing might be necessary for the U.S. to maintain a powerful nuclear deterrent to the Soviets. In 1959, a biologist and a priest wrote about the coming of the birth control pill--"one of the first places where the public found out what the pill would be like," Holton says. And the 1969 ethics issue "was instrumental in establishing the field of medical ethics," he says. Many of the organization's members relish the monthly "Stated Meetings," which are held in at least three locations every year. Eight take place at the headquarters in Cambridge; one is in the Midwest at the University of Chicago; and two are in the western U.S.--one in Northern California, another in Southern California. There are regularly scheduled meetings in New York and in Washington, D.C., as well. Their purpose? A little socializing, and a chance to hear from renowned experts in fields outside one's own. Hematologist Helen Ranney, retired from UC-San Diego and now a pharmaceutical industry consultant in La Jolla, Calif., says that the Stated Meetings provide "some of the few opportunities that I have, being in medicine, to have interchanges about social policies and issues with those in the social sciences." Harvard's Avery attends "as many meetings as I can because I always see something through the eyes of a person in another discipline," she says. "We're all peers in a sense, professionally, but we don't meet to talk about our professions specifically. We go there to discuss social issues of common interest--that's a very special thing." Steven Benowitz is a science writer for Penn State University's Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pa.

Arts And Sciences Academy 'Revels In Independence'

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