| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Julius Adler | | | Institution: | University of Wisconsin, Madison | | | Year Elected: | 1989 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1930 | | | Death Date: | April 2, 2024 | | | | | | |
Born in Germany in 1930, Julius Adler received his A.B. from Harvard University in 1952 and his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin with Henry Lardy in 1957. Subsequently he did postdoctoral studies with Arthur Kornberg at Washington University (1957-59) and with Dale Kaiser at Stanford University (1959-60). In 1960 he became assistant professor in the Departments of Biochemistry and Genetics at the University of Wisconsin. He became professor of biochemistry and genetics in 1966 and Edwin Bret Hart Professor in 1972 and is presently emeritus professor of biochemistry and genetics at Wisconsin. Dr. Adler is known for discovering the mechanism of bacterial chemotaxis, the swimming of Escherichia coli towards higher concentration of some compounds and away from others. He discovered its chemoreceptors, which are methylatable proteins. Dr. Adler and his students studied the structure of the bacterial flagellum and its basal body and found the membrane potential to be the source of energy for motility. He and his group discovered the proteins that mediate between the receptors and the flagella by isolating mutants lacking each of them. Dr. Adler has continued to study the basis for response to conflicting stimuli and is presently conducting research on sensory reception and decision making in Drosophila fruit flies. Adler is the recipient of the Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology from the National Academy of Sciences and was awarded the Otto Warburg Medal by the German Society for Biological Chemistry in 1986. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Julius Axelrod | | | Institution: | National Institute of Mental Health | | | Year Elected: | 1995 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1912 | | | Death Date: | December 29, 2004 | | | | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. David Baltimore | | | Institution: | California Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1997 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1938 | | | | | | |
David Baltimore has had a long and distinguished career as a creative scientist, gifted administrator and effective spokesperson on social and civic aspects of science. His research on virology and cancer has over the years been of extraordinary importance and includes the co-discovery of reverse tanscriptase with Howard Temin. In 1975, at the age of 37, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and he has also received the Eli Lilly Award in Microbiology and Immunology (1971), the Gairdner Foundation Annual Award (1974) and the National Medal of Science (1999). Dr. Baltimore founded and served as the first Director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, a premier research facility, while also serving for over 25 years on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty. In 1990 Dr. Baltimore was appointed president of Rockefeller University, and in 1997 he accepted the same position at the California Institute of Technology, where he served as president until 2006. He continues to serve Caltech as President Emeritus and Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Biology and maintains a research laboratory dedicated to the use of gene therapy to treat cancer and HIV infection, transcriptional regulation and cell cycle controls. He was recently awarded Research!America's Builders of Science Award recognizing leaders in medical and health research. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Bonnie L. Bassler | | | Institution: | Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2012 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1962 | | | | | | |
Bonnie L. Bassler is currently both an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and and Endowed Squibb Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. Born in Illinois she received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1990. She has won a number of awards, including: the Eli Lilly and Company Research Award, American Society for Microbiology, 2006; the President's Distinguished Teaching Award, Princeton University, 2008; the Richard Lounsbery Award, National Academy of Sciences, 2011; the Shaw Prize, 2015; the Max Planck Research Award, 2016; the Dickson Prize in Medicine, 2018; and the 2020 Gruber Genetics Prize. In 2019 she became a member of the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars. She is a member of the American Society for Microbiology (president); the American Academy for Microbiology (chair, Board of Governors); the National Academy of Sciences, 2006; and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2007.
Bonnie Bassler discovered the universal use of chemical communication among bacteria, leading to a new paradigm of bacteria as interacting organisms. Early in her career, she discovered that bacteria use multiple chemical signals to communicate. She showed that this process, called quorum sensing, allows bacteria to coordinate behavior as a population and thereby act like multicellular organisms. Bassler subsequently made the seminal and startling discovery that bacteria communicate across species, and she identified the universal inter-species communication molecule. On the human health front, Bassler demonstrated that quorum sensing controls virulence in disease-causing bacteria, and that by manipulating quorum sensing she can halt virulence in globally-important pathogens. Her research paves the way for novel antibiotics targeting quorum sensing, and her group successfully demonstrated such therapeutic strategies. Bassler is internationally recognized for her passionate commitment to science education and outreach and to increasing gender and racial diversity in science, mathematics, and engineering. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2012. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Seymour Benzer | | | Institution: | California Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1962 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1921 | | | Death Date: | November 30, 2007 | | | | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Barry R. Bloom | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1937 | | | | | | |
Barry Bloom's passion has been to relate the cutting edge of biomedical science to the needs of the 85% of the world's people living in resource-poor developing countries. His initial research analyzed the complex mechanisms of the immune response by developing in vitro models, enabling him to discover the first lymphokine or cytokine, non-antibody products of activated lymphocytes that regulate the functions of the immune system and mediate inflammation, tissue damage and resistance to microbial infection. After teaching the first course on immunology in India, he began research on leprosy. With collaborators, he created the first DNA library containing all the genes of the leprosy and the tubercle bacilli, thereby ultimately enabling the complete genomes of these major pathogens of humans to be sequenced. Those libraries and the first monoclonal antibodies produced against these pathogens were given to the World Health Organization (WHO) to distribute free of charge to scientists all over the world, helping to stimulate a global effort against these diseases. He has more recently explored the genetic basis of resistance of experimental animals against tuberculosis which integrates knowledge of the host and pathogen in understanding the disease. When there was a serious increase in tuberculosis in the U.S. in the early 1990s his group established, against conventional wisdom, that active transmission of infection, rather than reactivation of old infections, was an important component of the epidemic. Such transmission required implementation of stringent public health measures. He has worked in an official capacity for the WHO for the past 37 years and has advised the National Institutes of Health, the National Academy of Sciences and the White House on scientific issues and on international health policies. Dr. Bloom is currently Dean of the Faculty of the Harvard School of Public Health. | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. David Bodian | | | Institution: | Johns Hopkins University | | | Year Elected: | 1973 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1910 | | | Death Date: | 9/18/92 | | | | |
| 8 | Name: | Dr. Theodore H. Bullock | | | Institution: | University of California, San Diego | | | Year Elected: | 1970 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1915 | | | Death Date: | December 20, 2005 | | | | |
| 9 | Name: | Dr. Purnell W. Choppin | | | Institution: | Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 1988 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1929 | | | Death Date: | July 3, 2021 | | | | | | |
Purnell W. Choppin was President Emeritus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), serving from 1987-99. HHMI, one of the world's largest philanthropic organizations, supports research at medical schools, universities, and research institutes across the country and operates grants programs for science education at every level from elementary school through postdoctoral training, and for international biomedical research. He is also a principal of The Washington Advisory Group, LLC, which provides strategic counsel and management consulting services to universities, governments, and not-for-profit organizations. Before joining HHMI, Dr. Choppin was at the Rockefeller University, where he was Leon Hess Professor of Virology, vice president for academic programs, and dean of graduate studies. Dr. Choppin was a member of many scientific and professional societies, including the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the Association of American Physicians. In 1985-86 he was President of the American Society for Virology. His honors and awards include the Howard Taylor Ricketts Award from the University of Chicago (1978); the Selman A. Waksman Award for excellence in microbiology from the NAS (1984); the University of California, San Francisco Medal (2000); and many honorary degrees. Dr. Choppin was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1988. He died on July 3, 2021. | |
| 10 | Name: | Dr. W. Maxwell Cowan | | | Institution: | Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 1987 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1931 | | | Death Date: | June 30, 2002 | | | | |
| 11 | Name: | Dr. Hallowell Davis | | | Institution: | Central Institute for the Deaf | | | Year Elected: | 1965 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1896 | | | Death Date: | 8/22/92 | | | | |
| 12 | Name: | Dr. Gerald M. Edelman | | | Institution: | The Scripps Research Institute; The Neurosciences Institute | | | Year Elected: | 1977 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1929 | | | Death Date: | May 17, 2014 | | | | | | |
Biologist Gerald Maurice Edelman won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1972 for his work on the immune system and his discovery of the structure of antibody molecules. He was a professor of neurobiology at The Scripps Research Institute and the founder and director of The Neurosciences Institute, a nonprofit research center that studies the biological basis of higher brain function in humans. Dr. Edelman is noted for his theory of mind, which he elucidated in a trilogy of technical books, and in briefer form for a more general audience in his books Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992) and Wider than the Sky : The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness (2004). Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge (2006) offered reflections on how an understanding of the human brain and the phenomenon of consciousness might impact the nature of human knowledge itself. His other works include Topobiology (1988), which contains a theory of how the original neuronal network of a newborn's brain is established during development of the embryo, and Neural Darwinism (1987), which proposes a theory of memory built around the idea of plasticity in the neural network in response to the environment. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Dr. Edelman holds an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. from Rockefeller University, where he had been a member of the faculty prior to joining the Scripps Institute. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1977. Dr. Edelman died on May 17, 2014, at the age of 84. | |
| 13 | Name: | Dr. Anthony S. Fauci | | | Institution: | Georgetown University | | | Year Elected: | 2001 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1940 | | | | | | |
Immunologist Anthony S. Fauci received his M.D. degree from Cornell University Medical College in 1966. He then completed an internship and residency at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. In 1968, Dr. Fauci came to the National Institutes of Health as a clinical associate in the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). In 1974, he became Head of the Clinical Physiology Section and in 1980 was appointed Chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation, a position he still holds. Dr. Fauci became Director of NIAID in 1984. Dr. Fauci has made many contributions to basic and clinical research on the pathogenesis and treatment of immune-mediated diseases. He has pioneered the field of human immunoregulation by making a number of scientific observations that serve as the basis for current understanding of the regulation of the human immune response. In addition to his noted work on polyarteritis nodosa, Wegener's granulomatosis, and lymphomatoid granulomatosis, Dr. Fauci has made seminal contributions to the understanding of how the AIDS virus destroys the body's defenses, making it susceptible to deadly infections. His research has been instrumental in developing strategies for the therapy and immune reconstitution of patients with this disease, as well as for a vaccine to prevent HIV infections. In 2008 his team identified a new human receptor for H.I.V., an important advance in the field that could provide fresh avenues for the development of additional therapies. Anthony Fauci has held major lectureships all over the world and is the recipient of numerous awards for his scientific accomplishments. He received this nation's largest award in medicine, the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, for his overall contributions to the advancement of science and his distinguished public service, and in 2005 received the nation's highest honor in science: the National Medal of Science. In 2007 he was presented with the Lasker Award for his roles in two major government programs: the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and Project Bioshield, which seeks to improve countermeasures against potential bioterror agents. He was also awarded the 2007 George M. Kober Medal of the Association of American Physicians, the organization's highest honor. In 2008 Dr. Fauci was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom "for his determined and aggressive efforts to help others live longer and healthier lives." In 2021 he was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, the Dan David Prize, and the Ivan Allen Jr. Prize for Social Courage. Dr. Fauci was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2001. | |
| 14 | Name: | Dr. Louis B. Flexner | | | Institution: | University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 1979 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1902 | | | Death Date: | 3/29/96 | | | | |
| 15 | Name: | Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek | | | Institution: | CNRS Institut Alfred Fessard | | | Year Elected: | 1978 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1923 | | | Death Date: | December 11, 2008 | | | | | | |
A physician and medical researcher, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek was the co-recipient, along with Baruch Blumberg, of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his groundbreaking study of the disease Kuru. He is known for establishing the role of "slow viruses" in human disease, espeically of the nervous system. In addition to his studies of kuru in New Guinea, he has extensively studied Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in Europe and the Americas. Born in Yonkers, New York in 1923, Dr. Gajdusek obtained his M.D. from Harvard University in 1946 and performed postdoctoral research at both Harvard and the California Institute of Technology. He studied virus and rickettsial diseases at the Pasteur Institute in Tehran, Iran from 1954-55 and became head of laboratories for virological and neurological research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1958. He was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 1974. | |
| 16 | Name: | Dr. Laurie H. Glimcher | | | Institution: | Dana Farber Cancer Institute; Harvard Medical School | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1951 | | | | | | |
Laurie H. Glimcher is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Richard and Susan Smith Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She earned her M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1976, where she spent most of her career, including as Irene Heinz Given Professor of Immunology.
Laurie Glimcher has elucidated the molecular pathways that regulate the development and activation of cells in the immune system - pathways critical for both the development of protective immunity and for the pathophysiologic immune responses underlying autoimmune, infectious, allergic, and malignant diseases. She discovered the first Th1-specific transcription factor, T-bet, and demonstrated that it is the master-regulator of Type 1 immunity in cells of both the adaptive and innate immune system. She also discovered XBP1, the first transcription factor required for both plasma cell differentiation and the Endoplasmic Reticulum (ER) Stress Response. She then demonstrated a link between ER stress and proinflammatory/autoimmune diseases. Most recently she discovered that XBP1 is key in the maintenance of cancer stem cells in triple negative breast cancer. Further, IRE1/XBP1 also controls anti-tumor immunity by disrupting dendritic cell homeostasis. Hence reducing IRE1/XBP1 activity should simultaneously inhibit tumor cell growth and activate type 1 anti-tumor immunity.
She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1996), the National Academy of Sciences (2002), and the American Association of Immunologists, (president, 2003-04). Laurie Glimcher was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. | |
| 17 | Name: | Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon | | | Institution: | Washington University School of Medicine | | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Jeffrey Gordon is the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his A.B. from Oberlin College and his M.D. from the University of Chicago. He joined the Washington University faculty after completing his clinical training in internal medicine and gastroenterology, and doing post-doctoral research at the NIH. He was Head of the Department of Molecular Biology and Pharmacology from 1991-2004 before becoming the founding Director of a University-wide, Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology. His lab’s interdisciplinary studies of the genomic and metabolic foundations of mutually beneficial host-microbial relationships in the human gut have helped create a new field of research that focuses on understanding of the role of our microbial communities in shaping postnatal development, health status and disease predispositions.
Gordon's work has provided an extended view of ourselves as a composite of species from all three domains of life, where genes in our gut microbial community genomes (microbiomes) endow us with attributes we have not had to evolve on our own. His group has developed new experimental and computational approaches to characterize the assembly and dynamic operations of human gut communities; this work has involved studies of gnotobiotic animal models, twins concordant or discordant for physiologic phenotypes, and children and adults representing diverse geographic, cultural and socio-economic conditions. A central issue he and his students have addressed and continue to pursue is how our gut microbiomes contribute to obesity and to childhood undernutrition. Their findings concerning how our gut microbiomes determine the metabolic, physiologic and immunologic effects of the various foods we consume are altering the way healthy diets can be defined, providing new views of how our changing lifestyles impact health, revealing how functional maturation of the microbiome is related to healthy growth of infants and children, and helping to usher in a new era of microbiome-directed therapeutics. Gordon has been the research mentor to 120 PhD and MD/PhD students and post-doctoral fellows since he established his lab at Washington University. Recently, working with colleagues in Bangladesh, Gordon has developed therapeutic foods designed to support and nurture the development of a healthy gut microbiome in the first few years of life. A new therapeutic food was shown to repair defective microbial community development in children with malnutrition and restore their growth toward a normal trajectory.
Jeffrey Gordon is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. He is the recipient of the Robert Koch Award from the Koch Foundation, the Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology from the National Academy of Sciences, the Passano Laureate Award from the Passano Foundation, and the Dickson Prize in Medicine. In 2015 he was awarded the Keio Medical Science Prize, in 2017 the Horwitz Prize and the Sanofi-Institut Pasteur International Award, in 2018 the British Royal Society's Copley Medal, and in 2021 the Kober Medal and the Balzan Prize. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. | |
| 18 | Name: | Dr. David H. Hubel | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1982 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1926 | | | Death Date: | September 22, 2013 | | | | | | |
David Hubel received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Torsten Wiesel, for his pioneering work on the functioning of the visual system of mammals. His studies have shown how the visual cortex develops physiologically and how it records what the eye sees. This work has led to new understanding and treatment of childhood eye afflictions and to studies of cortical plasticity. Born in Ontario, Canada in 1926, Dr. Hubel received his M.D. from McGill University in 1951. He worked at Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1952-59 and at Walter Reed Hospital, where he began comparing the activity of sensory cells in waking and sleeping animals. Dr. Hubel had been a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty since 1959 and was Research Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard University at the time of his death. David Hubel died September 22, 2013, at age 87, in Lincoln, Massachusetts. | |
| 19 | Name: | Dr. Bela Julesz | | | Institution: | Rutgers University | | | Year Elected: | 1995 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1928 | | | Death Date: | December 31, 2003 | | | | |
| 20 | Name: | Dr. Katalin Karikó | | | Institution: | University of Szeged, University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1955 | | | | | | |
Katalin Karikó is professor at University of Szeged and adjunct professor of neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, where she worked for 24 years. She is former senior vice president at BioNTech SE, Mainz, Germany, where she worked between 2013-2022. She received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from University of Szeged, Hungary, in 1982. For four decades, her research has been focusing on RNA-mediated mechanisms with the ultimate goal of developing in vitro-transcribed mRNA for protein therapy. She investigated RNA-mediated immune activation and co-discovered that nucleoside modifications suppress immunogenicity of RNA, which widened the therapeutic potentials of mRNA. She is co-inventor on mRNA-related patents for application of non-immunogenic, nucleoside-modified RNA. Nineteen of those are granted by the US. She co-founded and from 2006-2013 served as CEO of RNARx, a company dedicated to develop nucleoside-modified mRNA for therapy. Her patents, co-invented with Drew Weissman on nucleoside-modified uridines in mRNA is used to create the FDA-approved COVID-19 mRNA vaccines by BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna to fight the pandemic. For their achievement they received many prestigious awards, including the Japan Prize, the Horwitz Prize, the Franklin Award, the Princess Asturias Award, the BBVA award, the Breakthrough Prize, the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award and the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. | |
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