Class
| • | 2. Biological Sciences | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Donald Kennedy | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 1976 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1931 | | | Death Date: | April 21, 2020 | | | | | | |
Donald Kennedy was a Professor of Environmental Science and President of Stanford University. He received AB and Ph.D. degrees in biology from Harvard University.
His research interests were originally in animal behavior and neurobiology - in particular, the mechanisms by which animals generate and control patterned motor output. His research group explored the relationship between central "commands" and sensory feedback in the control of locomotion, escape, and other behaviors in invertebrates. Among the issues considered were how environmental variables that could not be "anticipated" by the animal's genetic endowment could be compensated in fixed behavioral patterns and whether certain circuit arrangements for a given class of motor output were favored in different evolutionary outcomes.
In 1977 Dr. Kennedy took leave from Stanford to serve as Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for two and a half years. This followed an increasing academic interest on his part in regulatory policy regarding health and the environment. Kennedy had already chaired the National Academy of Sciences study on alternatives to pesticide use and participated in the World Food and Nutrition Study. Following his return to Stanford in 1979, Dr. Kennedy served for a year as Provost and for twelve years as President, a time marked by renewed attention to undergraduate education and student commitment to public service, and successful completion of the largest capital campaign in the history of higher education. During that time Dr. Kennedy continued to work on health and environmental policy issues, as a member of the Board of Directors of the Health Effects Institute (a non-profit organization devoted to mobile source emissions), Clean Sites, Inc. (a similar organization devoted to toxic waste cleanup), and the California Nature Conservancy.
His research program toward the end of his career, conducted partially through the Institute for International Studies, consisted of interdisciplinary studies on the development of policies regarding such trans-boundary environmental problems as: major land-use changes; economically-driven alterations in agricultural practice; global climate change; and the development of regulatory policies. He co-directed the Environmental Studies Program in the Institute for International Studies, and oversaw the introduction of the environmental policy quarter at Stanford's center in Washington, DC in 1993. Dr. Kennedy was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Donald Kennedy died April 21, 2020 in Redwood City, California at the age of 88. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Henry A. Lardy | | | Institution: | University of Wisconsin, Madison | | | Year Elected: | 1976 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1917 | | | Death Date: | August 4, 2010 | | | | | | |
Henry A. Lardy was the Vilas Professor of Biological Sciences Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was introduced to biochemical research as an undergraduate at South Dakota State University in 1937. The Experiment Station Chemistry Laboratory employed two or three chemistry majors during their junior and senior years, and he was fortunate to be selected. In his senior thesis research he reported a treatment for selenium poisoning in animals that was successful in treating a human case. In May of 1939 he became a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin and there discovered a medium that permitted sperm storage for 7 - 10 days with retention of motility and fertilizing capacity and made artificial insemination practical. While studying the metabolism of sperm he discovered the uncoupling of oxidative phosphorylation by dinitrophenol. After a year of postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Professor Herman Fischer at the University of Toronto, he returned to the University of Wisconsin as an assistant professor. His research with graduate students involved carbohydrate chemistry and metabolism which led to our proving that the "nonphosphorylating glycolsis" of the Needham school was non-existent. He also discovered that the metabolic function of the vitamin Biotin is to fix carbon dioxide into organic structures. In 1950 the university opened an "Institute for Enzyme Research," and Dr. Lardy was one of two professors designated to conduct research and train students and postdoctoral fellows in the facility. From then until 1988, he supervised the worked of 60 graduate students and more postdoctorate fellows. Their research was summarized in Comprehensive Biochemistry, Vol. 36 (1986) and in a "Reflections" chapter in the Journal of Biological Chemistry 278:3499 (2003). After becoming Emeritus Professor, Lardy's research has dealt with steroids that cause weight loss in obese persons and animals, improve memory and decrease cholesterol. Lardy had continued to be an active member of the university's bioscience community until just months before his death on August 4, 2010 at the age of 92. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Vernon B. Mountcastle | | | Institution: | Johns Hopkins University | | | Year Elected: | 1976 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1918 | | | Death Date: | January 11, 2015 | | | | | | |
Vernon B. Mountcastle was born in Shelbyville, Kentucky, educated in the public schools of Roanoke, Virginia and attended Roanoke College, Salem, Virginia, from which he graduated in 1938 with honors in chemistry. He then attended Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. He received his MD in 1942 and interned in Surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, July 1942-43. He then served in the U.S. Naval Amphibious Forces for three years, with two major campaigns in the European Theater of War: Anzio, Italy and Normandy, France.
Following demobilization, he had the intent to follow a career in Neurosurgery, and in preparation went to spend a year in the research laboratories in Neurophysiology with Professor Philip Bard, then director of the Department of Physiology. He never left, and spent his entire career in research on the function of the brain, and at Johns Hopkins. Mountcastle was director of the Department of Physiology from 1964-80, and then became for nine years Director of the Philip Bard Laboratories of Neurophysiology. He retired from active laboratory work and in that time established the Mind-Brain Institute, located on the arts and sciences campus of Johns Hopkins University. He spent his retirement years in writing monographs, including Perceptual Neuroscience. The Cerebral Cortex and The Sensory Hand. Neural Mechanisms in Somatice Sensation.
Dr. Mountcastle married Miss Nancy Clayton Pierpont of Salem, Virginia in 1945. They have two surviving children and six grandchildren. His hobbies were English literature and history. He had also been an avid sailor, tennis player and horseman most of his life.
Vernon Mountcastle contributed to understanding brain functions in four areas: (a) the functional organization of the somatic afferent system and cerebral cortex; (b) the dynamic mechanisms of signal processing in the somatic afferent system; © the correlation between sensory performance and central neural events in waking, non-human primates and the general laws governing those relations; and (d) the neural mechanisms of the parietal lobe system in spatial perception and directed visual attention.
He showed by electrophysiological methods the precise representation of the body form in the somatic afferent system at levels of thalamus and cortex, and demonstrated the specificity of sets of columns, modular units composed of chains of neurons powerfully connected in the vertical, trans-laminar directions. This was confirmed in anesthetized and waking cats and monkeys, in both the sensory and association areas of the cortex. It is now generally accepted as a principle of organization of the cerebral cortex, and is incorporated into present concepts of cortical distributed systems.
Mountcastle then used the method of single neuron analysis to explore the dynamic neuronal operations in the somatic afferent system, and how they relate to somatic sensory performance. He conceived that this could be done by direct, simultaneous application of the methods and concepts of Psychophysics and Neurophysiology, together with new methods for studying the higher functions of the brain in performing, non-human primates. This general method is now a widely used and productive method in CNS physiology.
The general principle evolving from this series of investigations is that the relation of the observer (monkey or human) to events in the external world varied along quantitative continua set by the transducing properties of the receptors and first-order fibers engaged by the stimuli. Thereafter, the relation of performance to central neural events along a linear continuum. This generality has been confirmed for a number of somesthetic submodalities.
An extensive series of experiments was carried out on the sense of vibration, which provides a signature of the temporal order of the impulses discharges evoked by the vibrating stimuli. Studies were made from the level of the first-order input in monkeys to that of sensory performance measured in psychophysical experiments in monkeys and humans: the functional properties of neural elements are identical in the two primates. This included direct studies of cortical activity during detections and discriminations. A major finding was that the neural code in the postcentral somatic sensory cortex upon which discrimination depends is the temporal order of impulse discharge. This was later pursued to define the code transformations that intervene between the input portal in the somatic sensory cortex of the postcentral gyrus to the output from the motor cortex leading to overt discrimination.
A major change was a shift of emphasis from study of sensory systems to that of higher functions, particularly of the parietal lobe system. This required new methods and new concepts to deal with the conditionality of higher functions. It was discovered that sets of parietal lobe neurons were embedded in distributed systems that control the projection of the arm towards a target, the shaping of a hand to grasp the target, and sets differentially active during directed visual attention. It was then found that the visual world is represented in the parietal lobe system in a manner completely different from that of the striate system. It provides a halo surrounding the head of extreme sensitivity to visual events in the immediate behavioral surround, of the flow of the visual world during movements of the eyes, head and body. These neural mechanisms are inferred to serve the illusions of vection. This work opened for direct electrophysiological study the higher functions of the brain, a research program now actively pursued in many laboratories. It has led to a deeper understanding of the disorders of attentions and of consciousness that follows parietal lobe lesions in man.
Vernon Mountcastle died January 11, 2015, at age 96, at his home in Baltimore, Maryland.
He had been awarded the American Philosophical Society's Karl Spencer Lashley Award in 1974 and was elected to its membership in 1976. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Lewis Thomas | | | Institution: | Sloan-Kettering; Cornell University Medical College | | | Year Elected: | 1976 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 204. Medicine, Surgery, Pathology and Immunology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1913 | | | Death Date: | 12/3/93 | | | | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Edward O. Wilson | | | Institution: | Harvard University; E.O. Wilson Foundation | | | Year Elected: | 1976 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1929 | | | Death Date: | December 26, 2021 | | | | | | |
Edward O. Wilson is Pellegrino University Research Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. A preeminent biological theorist, he earned B.S. and M.A. degrees in biology from the University of Alabama and his Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University. He joined Harvard's faculty in 1956 and distinguished himself as a researcher, professor of zoology and curator in entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Dr. Wilson conducted pioneering work on chemical communication from the 1950s through the 1970s. His accomplishments include the first comprehensive account of pheromones in ants, and (with Bossert) the first evolutionary analysis of the physical and chemical properties of pheromones; the creation (with MacArthur) of the theory of island biogeography, a basic part of modern ecology and conservation biology; the creation of the discipline of sociobiology, in 1975; and the first modern syntheses of knowledge of social insects, in 1971, and (with Hölldobler) of ants in particular, in 1990. Dr. Wilson's current work continues to focus on entomological and environmental research. Two of E.O. Wilson's 25 books have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize - On Human Nature (1978) and The Ants (1990), co-authored with Hölldobler. His acclaimed The Diversity of Life (1992), which brought together knowledge of the magnitude of biodiversity and the threats to it, had a major public impact. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998) draws together the sciences, humanities, and the arts into a broad study of human knowledge, while The Future of Life (2002) offers a plan for saving Earth's biological heritage. Among Dr. Wilson's recent volumes is a monograph including 337 species new to science, Pheidole in the New World: A Hyperdiverse Ant Genus (2003), another book with Hölldobler, Superorganism (2008), and The Social Conquest of Earth (2012). In 2010 he wrote his first novel, Anthill, which was followed in 2013 by Letters to a Young Scientist. He was founder and also serves as honorary chairman of the Encyclopedia of Life, an online resource (www.eol.org) that aims to provide detailed information on every species known to science. The project's first 30,000 pages went online in February 2008, with the remaining 1.77 million pages predicted to be available within the next decade. Dr. Wilson is the recipient of over one hundred awards recognizing his international contributions to science and humanity. These include the National Medal of Science (1976), the Japan International Prize for Biology (1993), the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1990), the Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society (1999), the Brookly Botanic Garden Visionary Award (2012) and the Cosmos Prize of the Japan’s Expo ’90 Foundation (2012). The citation of the APS award reads "in recognition of the great contributions this scientist has made through his research on ants to a better understanding of their societal relationships. Using exacting methods he has produced a new understanding of the processes which produce man's creative achievements by subjecting them to the rigorous analyses used in studying the physical and chemical characteristics of ants and other species." E.O. Wilson was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 1976. | |
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