Class
| • | 2. Biological Sciences | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Francisco José Ayala | | | Institution: | University of California, Irvine | | | Year Elected: | 1984 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1934 | | | Death Date: | March 3, 2023 | | | | | | |
Francisco J. Ayala is a retired Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. On June 12, 2002, President George W. Bush awarded him the National Medal of Science at the White House, and in 2010, Dr. Ayala won the Templeton prize. From 1994-2001, Dr. Ayala was a member of the U.S. President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology. He has been president and chairman of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1993-96) and of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society of the U.S (2004-05). Dr. Ayala is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and numerous foreign academies and has received many prizes and honorary degrees. Born in Madrid, Spain, he has lived in the United States since 1961 and became a U.S. citizen in 1971. He has published more than 1,000 articles and is author or editor of 37 books. His scientific research focuses on population and evolutionary genetics, including the origin of species, genetic diversity of populations, the origin of malaria, the population structure of parasitic protozoa, and the molecular clock of evolution. He also writes about the interface between religion and science and on philosophical issues concerning epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of biology. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. K. Sune D. Bergström | | | Institution: | Karolinska Institutet | | | Year Elected: | 1984 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1916 | | | Death Date: | August 15, 2004 | | | | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. A. McGehee Harvey | | | Institution: | Johns Hopkins University | | | Year Elected: | 1984 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 204. Medicine, Surgery, Pathology and Immunology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1911 | | | Death Date: | 5/8/98 | | | | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Eric R. Kandel | | | Institution: | Columbia University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 1984 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1929 | | | | | | |
Eric Kandel received his M.D. from New York University School of Medicine in 1956. He was a resident in psychiatry and staff psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, 1960-65, before turning his attention to neurobiology. In 1965 he returned to New York University, serving as associate professor in the department of physiology and psychiatry. He moved to Columbia University in 1974 as professor in the departments of physiology and psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. He also directed the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, 1974-83, and was appointed University Professor in 1983. He has also been professor in the departments of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Columbia and senior investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Renowned for his pathbreaking contributions to our knowledge of mind, Eric Kandel shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. Through studies of invertebrates such as the giant marine snail, Aplysia, he has succeeded in reframing memory and other mental processes as series of molecular events determined by the physicochemical qualities of cellular life. Well-known for his contributions to textbooks such as Principles of Neural Science, Dr. Kandel is the author of In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (2006) and The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconsccious in Art, Mind and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present (2012). The recipient of the Karl Spencer Lashley Prize in Neurobiology (1981) and the Wolf Prize in Biology and Medicine (1999), Eric Kandel is a member of the National Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences (1974), and the Royal Society. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1984. In 2006 Dr. Kandel was awarded the American Philosophical Society's Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences. The citation read "in recognition of his leadership in the study at the cellular and molecular levels of the biology of the mental processes, and especially the character of learning and memory. The American Philosophical Society salutes Eric Kandel for advancing the study of learning and memory - long the provinces of philosophy and psychology - into the "empirical language of biology." Kandel is the author of The Disordered Mind: what Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves (2018). | |
| 5 | 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. | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Gunther S. Stent | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 1984 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1924 | | | Death Date: | June 12, 2008 | | | | |
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