Promoting 'Useful Knowledge' in the 21st Century

A few hundred feet from the Philadelphia birthplace of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, an anonymous brick building houses the nation's first learned society and think tank. Little known outside of academic circles, the American Philosophical Society (APS) came to be in the mid-18th century with the daunting charge of "promoting useful knowledge." A treasure trove of rare books and manuscripts, the organizer of sophisticated cross-disciplinary meetings, the supplier of various research grants, and publisher of scholarly papers, the 258-year-old society is still working to fulfill its mission and find its niche amid numerous modern-day think tanks and funding institutions. For the first time in 190 years, the American Philosophical Society will launch an ongoing public exhibition at its recently renovated Philadelphia building. "From the Laboratory to the Parlor: Scientific Instruments of Philadelphia, 1750-1875" will open Oct. 10 and run through March 2003. The exhibit focuses on the role of scientific instruments during development of the American colonies and the early republic In 1739, eminent Philadelphian and botanist John Bartram saw the need to stimulate discussion and philosophical and scientific inquiry in the American colonies. APS co-founder Benjamin Franklin slightly simplified Bartram's ideas and drafted an organizational charter four years later. It read, in part: "But as from the Extent of the Country, such Persons are widely separated, and seldom can see and converse, or be acquainted with each other, so that many useful particulars remain uncommunicated, die with the Discoverers, and are lost to Mankind, it is to remedy this inconvenience for the future, proposed, that One Society be formed of Virtuous or ingenious Men residing in the several Colonies, to be called The American Philosophical Society, who are to maintain a constant Correspondence." The APS has struggled with how best to fulfill its mission and "promote useful knowledge" ever since. Today, with an endowment of about $120 million, it continues to do so through humanities and social sciences fellowships, in cooperation with the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and through grants in the biological and physical sciences. As APS president Frank H.T. Rhodes says, the society supports "everything from archaeology to ancient history to biotechnology.... The grants are not huge. They're not able to compete with something like the [National Institutes of Health] or the [National Science Foundation]. But they're especially important for young scholars who are beginning their work." Rhodes, the president emeritus of Cornell University, says two things have changed since the society's beginnings: other organizations have been founded to advise the government on scientific matters, and, secondly, a "fragmentation of scientific knowledge" has resulted in the proliferation of specialist scientific societies, which has affected the way older societies operate. Originally modeled after the British Royal Society, the APS, in the last two centuries, has lost its advisory role to bodies like the National Academy of Sciences, formed in 1863, and the National Research Council, formed in 1916. "In some ways the Royal operates more these days like the National Academy of Sciences," comments Royal Society president Sir Robert May, who was recently inducted as an APS member, "although its origins, and its central value ... are more like the APS." The Royal Society, which has no government affiliation, recently has had influential public meetings on controversial topics including genetically modified organisms, the origins of HIV, and stem cells. The APS is reevaluating its mission and looking at possible ways to increase its impact and its presence. Rhodes has asked APS member Sheldon Hackney, former president of the University of Pennsylvania, to review the society's mission and priorities. The APS president says likes the idea of "dusting off a role for the society in the new millennium." The commission will look very broadly at the society's future role and, notes Rhodes, "there are no constraints." Under consideration are educational outreach activities for Philadelphia-area high school students and, perhaps through satellite and Web technology, to students in remote locations. Other possibilities: different funding strategies and opening up the society's semiannual meetings to a larger public audience. Decisions are due for early 2002. Exploring the Life of the Mind The APS--first scientific advisory body, first publisher of a peer-reviewed journal--has become less prominent but no less elite. The society boasts an exclusive group of 724 American and 138 foreign members hailing from a broad array of academic disciplines. Committees select members in numerous categories, including the humanities and mathematical, physical, biological, and social sciences, and the umbrella category of professions, arts, and affairs. Some of the more famous members include world leaders such as former president Jimmy Carter and the King of Spain Juan Carlos; musicians such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma and violinist Itzhak Perlman; former surgeon general C. Everett Koop; journalist Walter Kronkite; and numerous well-known physicists, biologists, and chemists, including physicist Freeman J. Dyson, former NIH director Harold Varmus, and double-helix discoverer James D. Watson. Current and past members consist of more than 200 Nobel laureates and a dozen former US presidents, including John Adams, John Quincy Adams, James Madison, and one-time APS president Thomas Jefferson. Despite the society's broad focus on, as May puts it, the "life of the mind," most of the 400 to 500 members that congregate at the society's meetings are scientists. The meetings are technically open to the public, but space is limited. The most recent APS meeting, held in April, included a session on "A Quartet of American Institutions: Their Contributions and Their Concerns," in which the librarian of Congress James H. Billington, former Merck CEO P. Roy Vagelos, and others focused on the changing roles of biomedical research companies, philanthropy, and museums. In another session, biologists Sydney Brenner and Ernst Mayr explored the impact of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Historian of science Janet Browne, author of Voyaging: A Biography of Charles Darwin, tracked the influence of evolutionary theory in society through 19th century newsprint caricatures; Frederick H. Burkhardt, author of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, told of the initial opposition to Darwin's reception of the Royal Society's prestigious Copley Medal. 'Knowledge' in Print Perhaps more impressive than the society's meetings are its collections of manuscripts and books on everything from Native American languages to the history of thermodynamics. According to manuscripts librarian Robert Cox, the collection is strong in areas including quantum mechanics and organic chemistry, and has possibly this country's best collections in natural history (before 1870), genetics, and evolutionary biology. Dating back to the society's founding in 1743, the library houses more than 300,000 volumes and bound periodicals, seven million manuscript pages, 100,000 images, and thousands of hours of audiotape. Among its most famous holdings: Lewis and Clark's original journals. At the end of the 18th century, Jefferson, while president of the United States and of the APS, asked the society to prepare instructions for Lewis and Clark's famous cross-country odyssey, then later donated the journals to the APS library. Also of note are the library's first editions of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia, Darwin's Origin of Species, and the folio of Audubon's Birds of North America. Acquiring books and manuscripts is very much an ongoing process. Librarians continue to add to the extensive genetics collection, which began in earnest in the 1960s, and enlarged considerably in the 1970s and '80s. The genetics collection committee is looking not only for archival materials such as manuscript letters, journals, and records, but, as described on its Web site (www.amphilsoc.org), "unfruitful books, popular, diversionary, and 'lunatic' literature and ephemera necessary to document the social history of genetics, its impact on thought, and its abuses." The genetics collection, says former APS librarian and executive officer Whitfield Bell, began with the acquisition of rare Darwin papers in the 1940s and early 1950s that would have been sold and scattered among autograph dealers. "Having spent all that money on Darwin and evolution, there was nothing to do but to go ahead and buy more things on Darwin," he remarks, adding that the APS holds the largest collection of letters written by Darwin. "The next step it seemed to me, to us, was to move into genetics," says Bell, who's currently researching the history of the APS. The society, for example, holds the early papers of Theodor Dobzhansky, one of the premier evolutionary and population geneticists of the 20th century, and Charles Davenport, one of the founders of the eugenics movement in America in the early 1900s. Davenport's contribution includes 124 boxes of private papers and personal memorabilia covering the period 1878 to 1944. Dobzhansky's includes 16 boxes containing 8,500 items of general correspondence from 1927 to 1975, transcripts of interviews from 1962, 54 notebooks and diaries, correspondence between Mayr and Dobzhansky between 1937 and 1975, and much more. In recent years, extensive APS Web site materials have made the details and materials of such collections much more accessible to any interested party, Cox says; he recalls one case in which members of a Native American Indian tribe requested information about their ancestors' language through the Web. Yet, increasing the profile and sharing the human and material resources of the history-rich APS in other capacities could prove difficult. "I personally don't think that we need to exert ourselves to make ourselves well known to the general public," says Bell, adding that the APS is simply of interest to a relatively small audience. "People talk about outreach. I'm not sure I know exactly what they mean, and I'm not sure they do either." The society has started to reach out to the public in some sense by organizing an exhibition, slated to officially open in October, at the society's Philosophical Hall. On display will be a collection of restored 19th century scientific instruments--everything from microscopes to weighing machines to disinfecting machines. APS executive officer and geneticist Alexander G. Bearn sees the exhibit as the type of opportunity that could help inspire high school students to explore a science career. "We're very much limited by funds," he says. "To launch a really effective, first-rate outreach to the high school kids, it's absolutely imperative that we get outside money." Bell does endorse efforts like the one slated for 2003, the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition: with the help of a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the society will construct a facsimile of the explorers' original journals that will go on tour along Lewis and Clarke's original route and will be displayed in schools and historical societies across the country. Bell also thinks that science lectures geared toward high school students, like those given at the Royal Institute of London, might be a possibility for the APS, but he adds that American high school seniors might be "busier doing other things than attending lectures." Bearn has a slightly different vision: "For the next several years, [the APS] will be recognized primarily by scholars. But I think as years go by ... it will also be known as a scholarly institution which is contributing to the environment and people in Philadelphia." For More information APS library http://www.amphilsoc.org/library/ NLM's Profiles in Science http://www.profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ Nobel Museum http://www.nobel.se/ The Changing Art of Archiving While many scientists and the media focus on current and future advances in science, the lesser known archivist has the tough task of preserving the decades-old documents of pioneering researchers. The goal: to detail not so much the field's status but how it got where it is and who is responsible. Not surprisingly, the Web has profoundly changed the archivist's charge, with positive and negative results. Archival projects abound: academic institutions often keep the materials of accomplished alumni. For example, double helix discoverer James Watson has promised his papers to Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory in New York, an institution he has been associated with for nearly 30 years. Independent organizations, such as the 250-year-old American Philosophical Society (APS) in Philadelphia, also hold vast collections. The APS has boxfuls of rare, original papers and books from dozens of past and current scientists, including geneticists, biochemists, physicists, chemists and soon, even bioinformaticians--everything from laboratory notebooks to personal correspondence. The National Library of Medicine's (NLM) three-year-old project, Profiles of Science, aims to periodically digitize the archival collections of prominent 20th century biomedical scientists such as Julius Axelrod, a pharmacologist and neuroscientist who shared the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and Marshall Nirenberg, a biochemist who shared the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. While numerous historical records have been, or will be, digitized, the information age has been a mixed blessing for archivists confronting this difficult task. "The problem is getting much worse because so much is happening now in electronic form, says Alexa McCray, director of NLM's Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications. "Do you save your E-mail? I save mine, but I don't know that I will save it in perpetuity." APS manuscripts librarian Rob Cox emphasizes that personal letters, not just lab notebooks, are crucial acquisitions if researchers are to get a more "rounded view of an individual." The added exposure of the Web, he continues, has made it more difficult to do his job, because more Internet browsers mean more requests for everything from genealogical information to origins of Native American languages. Adding to the problem, scientists oftentimes either don't recognize the importance of preserving their work for posterity, or don't care to. The very nature of today's scientific fields has also changed the art of archiving. The APS library and the Profiles in Science project are actively trying to piece together bioinformatics-related collections." What will be most interesting is what was the input data into the tool, whatever it is, and then what was the output of that," McCray comments. "And all of that should be available in electronic forms, in one way or another." McCray emphasizes the importance of collaboration among archiving organizations, specifically those what interlink archived collections. The NLM and the APS are working together to digitize some papers of Barbara McClintock, who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 for her discovery of so-called mobile genetic elements. The NLM is also working with the Nobel Foundation's "e-museum" to create individual sites for laureates who can explain their prize-winning work in lay language. McCray sees the widespread linkage and standardization of data, specifically metadata--a document included with manuscripts that has title, description, page numbers, intellectual property rights, and other information--as the key to seamless searches across multiple sites hosted at multiple institutions. "In principle, if people adhere to the same standards," she notes, "then you can have a good distribution system." --Eugene Russo

Promoting 'Useful Knowledge' in the 21st Century

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