| | 1 | Name: | Owen Biddle | | | Year Elected: | | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1/4/1737 | | | Death Date: | 3/10/1799 | | | | | | |
Owen Biddle (4 January 1737–10 March 1799) was a clockmaker, druggist, and merchant, and a member of the Young Junto (elected c. 1766 shortly before it was renamed the American Society). Born in Philadelphia, Biddle was active for many years in the American Society, serving on the committees that designed its seal and negotiated its union with the American Society in 1769. He acted as a curator and conducted scientific experiments; most notably, he carefully observed the 1769 Transit of Venus, publishing his findings in the first volume of the APS Transactions. Biddle was also a manager of the Silk Society and a member of the Union Library Company. His involvement in the fight for American independence began with signing the Non-Importation Agreement of 1765 and continued with his election to Philadelphia’s Revolutionary Committee in 1774. He served as a delegate to draft Pennsylvania’s state constitution in 1776 and served on the State Board of War in 1777. Biddle also worked for the Continental Congress, first by managing its lottery and later by acting as deputy commissary of forage for the army. Once the APS resumed its meetings, he held offices, helped plan the legislative charter in 1780, and gave the annual oration in 1781. When bankruptcy redirected his energies back to the Society of Friends, he spent his remaining years devoted to Quaker education. Biddle’s final endeavor, the creation of the Westtown School, was made possible with funding from APS Member John Dickinson. His brother Clement Biddle was a member of the Young Junto; and his nephews Thomas Biddle, John G. Biddle, and Clement C. Biddle; and brother-in-law James Wilkinson were APS members. (PI) | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Owen Gingerich | | | Institution: | Harvard University & Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory | | | Year Elected: | 1975 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1930 | | | Death Date: | May 28, 2023 | | | | | | |
Owen Gingerich is a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and of the History of Science at Harvard University. In 1992-93 he chaired Harvard's History of Science Department. Professor Gingerich's research interests have ranged from the recomputation of an ancient Babylonian mathematical table to the interpretation of stellar spectra. In the past four decades Professor Gingerich has become a leading authority on the 17th-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler and on Nicholas Copernicus. His publications include a 600-page monograph surveying copies of Copernicus' great book De revolutionibus, for which he was awarded the Polish government's Order of Merit in 1981; later an asteroid was named in his honor. In 2006 he published God's Universe, a volume arguing that faith and science can coexist even in considerations of the nature of life. In 1984 he won the Harvard-Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa prize for excellence in teaching. In June 2007 he was awarded the Prix Janssen by the French Astronomical Society. He has been a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1975.
In June 2017 he received Benedict Polak Prize, which he described this way: "I have just returned from Poland, where I have received the Benedict Polak Prize, which I daresay no other APS member has ever heard of. Friar Benedict the Pole was drafted in 1245 as a translator-scholar to accompany a Papal group to visit the Khan of Mongolia. The present Benedict Polak Prize was established three years ago to honor explorers in any realm of human knowledge, and is to be given each year to a Polish citizen and to a foreigner. I received this year's prize for my Copernican researches. The Polish citizen prize went to my friend Jerzy Gassowski, the archaeologist who identified Copernicus' bones in an unmarked grave under the cathedral floor in Frombork. The prizes are given in Leczyca, a small village with the founding church in Poland and the church home of Benedict the Pole. It is hard to imagine that enough citizens of Leczyca would turn up for such an occasion, but actually people came from all over Poland. The president of Poland was not present in person, but sent a citation as well as a private and specific congratulatory letter to me." | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Owen Lattimore | | | Year Elected: | 1943 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1900 | | | Death Date: | 5/31/89 | | | | |
| 4 | Name: | Richard Owen | | | Year Elected: | 1845 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
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| 5 | Name: | Sir Francis P.C. Owen | | | Year Elected: | 1876 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
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| 6 | Name: | Dr. Ray D. Owen | | | Institution: | California Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1984 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 207. Genetics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1915 | | | Death Date: | September 21, 2014 | | | | | | |
Ray David Owen was born in 1915 on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and remembers that a farm was a great place to grow up. He attended Genesee State Graded School (two teachers, eight grades) and then commuted to Waukesha High School, doing farm chores before and after school. Then he went to Carroll College, a Presbyterian Church-connected liberal arts college also in Waukesha, majoring in biology and minoring in chemistry, math, English and French. In 1937, he entered graduate school at the University of Wisconsin and took his Ph.D. in genetics in 1941. He joined the work in dairy cattle blood group inheritance that was to shape his research career in the fields of immunology and genetics. In 1946, on leave from the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, he went to Caltech as a Gosney Fellow; in 1947 he accepted appointment as an Associate Professor of Biology at Caltech, and with the exception of a year's leave at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1956-57, he had been at Caltech ever since. He has published numerous research papers, mainly in the fields of mammalian genetics and immunology and in such areas as tissue and organ transplantations and developmental studies, some with relation to cancer. General Genetics, the textbook he wrote with Adrain Srb of Cornell University, was for many years the most-used textbook in the field. He values several honorary degrees and awards.
During most of the 1960s he served as Chairman of the Division of Biology at Caltech. From 1975-80 he was Dean of Students and Vice President of Student Affairs as well as a Professor of Biology. He taught a freshman course, Current Research in Biology; a laboratory course in immunology; and courses in general biology and in genetics
A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and numerous other professional societies and organizations, he had served as President of the Genetics Society of America, as a member of the Board of directors of the American Society of Human Genetics, and as a member of the Editorial Board of the Annual Review of Genetics. He frequently held responsibilities at the national level - for example, as Chairman of the Genetics Study Section of the National Institutes of Health, of the Genetics Training Committee of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, of the Advisory Council of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and of the advisory board in Biology and Medical Sciences of the National Science Foundation. For three years he was the "Scientist-Member" of the three-person President's Cancer Panel, acting in an advisory capacity to Presidents Nixon and Ford.
He says that many aspects of his life have given him pleasure: his family, his home and garden (he specializes in camellia and chrysanthemums), his travels and his friends in the international community of scientists, his research, his teaching, and his students, in whose happy and productive lives he has found part of his own fulfillment. If he were to single out one particular activity he remembers with pride, it would probably be his chairmanship of an ad-hoc faculty committee on the freshman year at Caltech, whose work led to three good changes: the inauguration of pass/fail grading to make the adjustment to Caltech less traumatic for its freshman; the introduction of electives into a previously rigid freshman curriculum; and, especially, the admission of women to Caltech's freshman class.
Ray D. Owen died September 21, 2014, at the age of 98 in Pasadena, California. | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. Stephen Owen | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402b | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
Stephen Owen is widely viewed as the most important scholar-critic of Chinese literature in the West. He is the James Bryant Conant University Professor and former Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, he was the first specialist in his field to be made a University Professor at Harvard. At a time when understanding China is a major priority for the United States, Dr. Owen has, in a long series of distinguished books and articles, opened the door for Westerners to a new understanding of Chinese literature and culture. Though his specialty is the T'ang Dynasty (618-906 A.D.), he has impressive mastery of the range of Chinese literature over its 2,500 years. His work has been informed by recent Western work in literary theory and by a comparatist perspective. He has paid attention in new ways to Chinese literary theory, for example in Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics. His work shows a remarkable combination of learning, literary sensitivity, and elegance of style, as in the admirable readings of Chinese poetry in Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature. His magisterial An Anthology of Chinese Literature is an amazing poetic and scholarly accomplishment; almost all of the translations are by Dr. Owen himself, and they bring the translation of Chinese poetry, stories, plays, and essays to a new level of lucidity and literary distinction. His translations and annotations show how Chinese poetry is a genuine tradition, for example in its subtle use, in later poems, of allusions to earlier poems. Though his books are written in English and primarily for Western readers, they have such general importance that many of them have been translated into Chinese and published in China. He has a working knowledge of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Turkish. Without a doubt Dr. Owen has brought Chinese literature within the domain of the comparative study of literature. | |
| 8 | Name: | Sir Owen W. Richardson | | | Year Elected: | 1910 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1879 | | | | |
| 9 | Name: | Owen J. Roberts | | | Year Elected: | 1934 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1875 | | | Death Date: | 5/17/55 | | | | |
| 10 | Name: | Owen J. Wister | | | Year Elected: | 1866 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1826 | | | Death Date: | 2/24/1896 | | | | |
| 11 | Name: | Owen Wister | | | Year Elected: | 1897 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1860 | | | Death Date: | 7/21/38 | | | | |
| 12 | Name: | Owen D. Young | | | Year Elected: | 1929 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1873 | | | Death Date: | 7/11/62 | | | | |
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