APS Member History

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1	Name:	Dr. Sidney Altman
	Institution:	Yale University
	Year Elected:	1990
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1939
	Death Date:	April 5, 2022

	Born in Montreal in 1939, Sidney Altman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989 for making one of the most original and important discoveries in molecular biology. After discovering the t-RNA precursor molecules, he systematically explored their enzymatic conversion to a functional state. This led him to the realization that the catalysis is carried out by the RNA portion of the enzyme nucleoprotein. The importance of this contribution cannot be overstated; it has caused a reevaluation of the previous view that all enzymes are proteins and has provided the explanation of a number of previously observed phenomena. Dr. Altman joined the faculty at Yale University as an assistant professor in 1971, subsequently becoming a professor in 1980 and chairman of the department in 1983. Dr. Altman also served as Dean of Yale College from 1985-89, helping to bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences. A man of wide cultural interests and an admired teacher, Dr. Altman is currently Sterling Professor of Biology and Chemistry at Yale. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

2	Name:	Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich
	Institution:	Stanford University
	Year Elected:	1990
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1932

	Paul R. Ehrlich received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1957. Co-founder with Peter H. Raven of the field of coevolution, he has pursued long-term studies of the structure, dynamics, and genetics of natural butterfly populations. He has also been a pioneer in alerting the public to the problems of overpopulation, and in raising issues of population, resources and the environment as matters of public policy. He continues to study the dynamics and genetics of natural populations of checkerspot butterflies (Euphydryas), research that has applications to such problems as the control of insect pests and optimum designs for nature reserves. His policy research on the population-resource-environment crisis takes a broad overview of the world situation but also works intensively in such areas of immediate legislative interest as endangered species and the preservation of genetic resources. A special interest of Dr. Ehrlich's is cultural evolution, especially with respect to environmental ethics. Professor Ehrlich is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. He has received several honorary degrees, the John Muir Award of the Sierra Club, the Gold Medal Award of the World Wildlife Fund International, a MacArthur Prize Fellowship and the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (given in lieu of a Nobel Prize in areas where the Nobel is not given) and in 2001 the Eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America and the Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. Through his book Ecoscience, a standard undergraduate text, and the training of a large squad of graduate students, Dr. Ehrlich has exerted a major influence on environmental biology.

3	Name:	Dr. Tibor Jermy
	Institution:	Plant Protection Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest
	Year Elected:	1990
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	208. Plant Sciences
	Residency:	International
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1917
	Death Date:	September 23, 2014

	Tibor Jermy was distinguished for his work in ecology, especially insect-plant relationships. He was the foremost proponent of the sequential theory of the evolution of insect-plant relationships, emphasizing the asymmetry of the relationship. He postulated that the explosive evolution of the plant kingdom provided the diverse biochemical basis for the radiation of phytophagous insects without significant evolutionary feedback from the insects to the plants. He proposed that the evolution of host specialization is an autonomous process initiated by random heritable changes in the insects' host recognition trait. In the 1950s Dr. Jermy conducted pioneering work on the functioning of ecosystems, and through his fluency in Hungarian, English, German and Russian, he helped unlock a storehouse of literature that had previously been unknown to Western scientists. Born in 1917, Dr. Jermy had a Ph.D. from the University of Budapest. He began his career as an agricultural entomologist at the Plant Protection Institute of the Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture, where he focused on the biology and control of pest insects. He went on to direct the Institute from 1969-79 and became Director Emeritus in 1979. Dr. Jermy had also served as a Ford Foundation fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and as visiting scientist at the Agricultural University of Wageningen in the Netherlands and the USDA Agricultural Research Laboratory in Yakima, WA. Among other learned societies he was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1976) and an Honorary Member of the British Ecological Society (1992). He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1990. His many awards include the Golden Medal of Wrok (1977), the Hungarian State Prize (1983) and the Golden Medal of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Tibor Jermy died September 23, 2014, at the age of 97, in Budapest, Hungary.

4	Name:	Dr. Edward B. Lewis
	Institution:	California Institute of Technology
	Year Elected:	1990
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	207. Genetics
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1918
	Death Date:	July 21, 2004

5	Name:	Dr. Maxine F. Singer
	Institution:	Carnegie Institution of Washington & National Institutes of Health
	Year Elected:	1990
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1931

	Maxine Frank Singer has made major contributions to the biochemistry of nucleic acids and more recently to our knowledge of the mammalian genome structure and organization. She has also served with distinction as chair of the editorial board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and as president of the Carnegie Institution, and she is widely recognized as an articulate author and spokesperson for science. After receiving her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Yale University in 1957, Dr. Singer joined the research staff of the National Institutes of Health. She would later serve as chief of the Laboratory of Biochemistry at the National Cancer Institute from 1980-87, where she led fifteen research groups engaged in various biochemical investigations. Dr. Singer's research contributions have ranged over several areas of biochemistry and molecular biology, including chromatin structure, the structure and evolution of defective viruses, and enzymes that work on DNA and its complementary molecule, RNA. In recent years, her foremost contributions have been in studies of a large family of repeated DNA sequences called LINES - sequences interspersed many times in mammalian DNA. She and her co-workers have been especially interested in the LINE-1 sequence, which is repeated thousands of times in human DNA. LINE-1, she early concluded, is capable of insertion into new places on chromosomal DNA, and researchers elsewhere later found that LINE-1 insertions into a gene whose product is required for blood clotting are associated with cases of hemophilia. Believing that the mechanism of LINE-1 transposition might have broad significance for understanding genetic diseases, Dr. Singer and her colleagues have concentrated their experiments on learning how LINE-1 elements move. Throughout her career, Dr. Singer has assumed leading roles in influencing and refining the nation's science policy. In 1988 she became President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, where she led the biologists, astronomers and earth scientists who make up the Institution's six scientific departments. Dr. Singer is presently President Emerita of the Carnegie Institution while also retaining her association with the National Cancer Institute as Scientist Emerita. Her several awards for public service include the Distinguished Presidential Rank Award (1988) and the National Medal of Science (1992), the nation's highest scientific honor bestowed by the President of the United States, "for her outstanding scientific accomplishments and her deep concern for the societal responsibility of the scientist." Most recently, she was honored with the 2007 Public Welfare Medal, the National Academy of Sciences' most prestigious award recognizing extraordinary use of science for the public good.

6	Name:	Dr. Paul Talalay
	Institution:	Johns Hopkins University
	Year Elected:	1990
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1923
	Death Date:	March 10, 2019

	Paul Talalay, M.D. was John Jacob Abel Distinguished Service Professor of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He held an S.B. degree in biophysics from M.I.T. and an M.D. degree from Yale. Following surgical training at Massachusetts General Hospital, he moved to the University of Chicago, rising to the academic ranks of Professor of Biochemistry, Professor of Medicine, and Professor in the Ben May Laboratory for Cancer Research. After serving for 12 years as Director of the Department of Pharmacology at Johns Hopkins Medical School, he relinquished this position to devote himself full time to research. Dr. Talalay devoted his career to cancer research. For more than 2 decades he was involved in devising strategies for chemoprotection against the risk of cancer, a field in which he is recognized as a pioneer. His efforts focused on achieving protection by raising the enzymes concerned with the detoxication of carcinogens. Analysis of the chemistry and the molecular biology of boosting enzymes of detoxication led him and his colleagues to devise simple cell culture methods for detecting chemical and especially dietary (Phyto)chemicals that raise these enzymes. This work led to the isolation of sulforaphane as the most potent inducer of protective enzymes in broccoli. These findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, attracted world-wide attention, and led to the organization of the Brassica Chemoprotection Laboratory at Johns Hopkins. This unique laboratory is exclusively dedicated to identifying edible plants that are particularly rich in protective enzyme-inducer activity. Dr. Talalay's honors, in addition to his appointment as a University Distinguished Service Professor, included appointment to one of the first lifetime professorships of the American Cancer Society and membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He published more than two hundred papers in internationally respected scientific journals. He received an honorary D.Sc. degree from Acadia University. The M.D.-Ph.D. Student Library at Johns Hopkins has been named in his honor. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1990. Paul Talalay died March 10, 2019 in Baltimore, MD at the age of 95.