American Philosophical Society
Member History

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1Name:  Sir Michael J. Berridge
 Institution:  The Babraham Institute; University of Cambridge
 Year Elected:  2007
 Class:  2. Biological Sciences
 Subdivision:  201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
 Residency:  International
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1938
 Death Date:  February 13, 2020
   
 
Michael John Berridge was born in 1938 in Gatooma, a small town in the middle of Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe. He began his education at Jameson High School where he was fortunate in being taught biology by Pamela Bates who fostered his academic interests and encouraged him to pursue a scientific career. He enrolled in the University of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in Salisbury to read Zoology and Chemistry where he received his B.Sc. (1st Class Honours) in 1960. He then travelled to England to begin research on insect physiology with Sir Vincent Wigglesworth at the University of Cambridge and was awarded his Ph.D. in 1964. He than travelled to the United States to begin a period of post-doctoral study first at the University of Virginia and later at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. During his stay in Cleveland he began his interest in how cells communicate with each other and was fortunate to obtain valuable advice from Dr Ted Rall who a few years earlier had worked together with Earl Sutherland who received a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the second messenger cyclic AMP. In 1969 Berridge returned to Cambridge to take up an appointment at the AFRC Unit of Insect Neurophysiology and Pharmacology. He currently is an Emeritus Babraham Fellow at The Babraham Institute Laboratory of Molecular Signalling. Berridge is best known for his discovery of the second messenger inositol trisphosphate (IP3), which plays a universal role in regulating many cellular processes including cell growth and information processing in the nervous system. His studies on cell signalling began with his interest in trying to understand the control of fluid secretion by an insect salivary gland. His introduction and development of this simple model system paved the way for a number of significant observations which culminated in the major breakthrough of uncovering a new second messenger system responsible for regulating intracellular calcium signalling. A role for second messengers in controlling fluid secretion was first recognised when cyclic AMP was found to mimic the stimulatory action of 5-hydroxytryptamine. Subsequent studies revealed that calcium was also important and Berridge was one of the first to draw attention to the integrated action of the cyclic AMP and calcium messenger systems. He showed that signal calcium could be derived from both external and internal reservoirs. A major problem emerged as to how cells gained access to their internal stores of calcium. Berridge provided the first direct evidence to support Michell's hypothesis that the hydrolysis of inositol lipids played a role in calcium signalling. Interest in inositol phosphates began to intensify when Berridge developed a new approach of measuring their formation as a direct way to study receptor-mediated inositol lipid hydrolysis. Of particular significance, was his introduction of the lithium amplification technique to provide an exquisitely sensitive method for measuring inositol lipid turnover. His work on lithium provided new insights into how this drug controls manic-depressive illness. Using the lithium amplification method, Berridge demonstrated that hormones stimulated a rapid formation of IP3, which led him to propose that this metabolite might function as a second messenger. Such a messenger role was rapidly verified when IP3 was found to mobilize calcium when injected into cells. It is now apparent that the IP3/calcium signalling system regulates a wide range of cellular processes such as fertilization, secretion, metabolism, contraction, cell proliferation and information processing in the brain. This work has sparked a worldwide interest in the role of this signalling system in cell regulation. His most recent work has concentrated on the spatial and temporal aspects of calcium signalling. He was one of the first physiologists to provide evidence that the level of calcium might oscillate when cells are stimulated by a hormone. He also showed that oscillation frequency varied with agonist concentration, which led him to propose that the signalling system was frequency-modulated. Berridge's discovery of the IP3/calcium pathway provided an explanation of such oscillatory activity. His laboratory has been at the forefront of recent studies exploiting rapid confocal imaging techniques to characterize the elementary events of calcium signalling. This radically new understanding of how calcium signals are produced has provided new insights into both neural and cardiac cell signalling. Berridge became a Fellow of Trinity College in 1972 and was elected a Fellow of The Royal Society in 1984. In 1999 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For his work on second messengers Berridge has received numerous awards and prizes, including The King Faisal International Prize in Science, The Louis Jeantet Prize in Medicine, The Albert Lasker Medical Research Award, The Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics, The Wolf Foundation Prize in Medicine and The Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine. In 1998 Berridge was knighted for his service to science.
 
2Name:  Dr. Lina Bolzoni
 Institution:  Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
 Year Elected:  2007
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402b
 Residency:  International
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1940
   
 
Lina Bolzoni is professor of Italian literature at the University of Pisa and the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. She has served on the University of Pisa faculty since 1976 and chaired the Department of Italian Literature from 1989-91 and 1995-97. She has also held visiting professorships at the Collège de France and Harvard, New York and Princeton Universities. She received her Ph.D. from the Scuola Normale Superiore in 1974. Lina Bolzoni has pioneered the study of relationships between literature and philosophy, literature and the figurative arts, and between memory and preaching for our generation. She has made the study of sacred and secular oratory her special province and has explored the relationship between the art of memory and figurative practice in both art and literature. She has been a generous colleague at the Scuola Normale and an innovative supporter of electronic scholarship, even exploring relationships between medieval systems of memory and modern neurological patterns of memory and modes of perception. Her approach to the study of literature is innovative and disciplined, expanding the canon in imaginative ways. Dr. Bolzoni's published works include L'universo dei poemi possibili. Studi su Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, 1980; Il teatro della memoria. Studi su Giulio Camillo, 1984; The Gallery of Memory. Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of Printing, 1995; The Web of Images. Vernacular Preaching from its Origins to St. Bernardino da Siena, 2002; and Poesia e ritratto nel Rinascimento, 2008. She has been honored with the Premio Viareggio per la saggistica, 2002; the Premio Brancati Zafferana Etnea per la saggistica, 2002; and the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jean Scaglione Prize, 2003. Lina Bolzoni is also a member of the Accademia La Colombaria, Firenze. She was elected an international member of the American Philosophical Society in 2007.
 
3Name:  Dr. Nicholas Canny
 Institution:  Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies, University of Galway
 Year Elected:  2007
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  303. History Since 1715
 Residency:  International
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1944
   
 
Nicholas Canny, a historian, has been a Member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council since 2011. He held an Established Chair in History at the National University of Ireland, Galway, 1979-2009, where he also served as Founding Director of the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities, 2000-11, and as Vice President for Research, 2005-8. He was President of the Royal Irish Academy 2008-11and in 2020 received it's highest honor, the Cunningham Medal. He is a Member of Academia Europaea, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and of the Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid). He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2007. He has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; professeur invité at the École des Hautes Études, Paris, and was Parnell Senior Research Fellow at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, 2005-6. An expert on early modern history broadly defined, he edited the first volume of The Oxford History of the British Empire (1998) and, with Philip D. Morgan, edited The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, c1450-c1850 (2011). His major book is Making Ireland British, 1580-1650 (Oxford, 2001), for which he was awarded the Irish Historical Research Prize 2003; a prize he had previously won in 1976 for his first book The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: a Pattern Established, 1565-76. He was invited to give the Raleigh Lecture for 2011 to the British Academy which has been published as ‘A Protestant or Catholic Atlantic World? Confessional Divisions and the Writing of Natural History’ in Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 181, pp. 83-121.
 
4Name:  Dr. Paul J. Crutzen
 Institution:  Max Planck Institute for Chemistry
 Year Elected:  2007
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry
 Residency:  International
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1933
 Death Date:  January 28, 2021
   
 
Paul Crutzen was a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Center for Atmospheric Sciences from 1992 to 2008. He was also Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, Utrecht University, and the former director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. He has made substantial and fundamental contributions to our understanding of the formation and decomposition of ozone - processes that are also affected by our emissions of different kinds of gas. In particular, he has shown the importance of nitrogen oxides for the ozone balance. Crutzen has also made contributions to the understanding of how the reactions that decompose ozone are considerably reinforced by cloud particles in the stratosphere. That the dilution of the ozone layer is strongest just above the poles of the earth - in particular over Antarctica - is due to this effect. The extremely low temperatures lead to the creation of a very large amount of cloud particles. Research on the chemical mechanisms in the ozone layer has shown signs of the negative impact of humans. There are now far-reaching international agreements on the prohibition of emission of freons and other gases destroying ozone in the so-called Montreal Protocol. Crutzen has also studied how ozone is created in the lower stratum of the atmosphere, the troposphere, where the amount of ozone has increased in the last century due to car exhausts and other emissions. Besides contributing to the greenhouse effect, ozone close to the ground also causes damage to crops and human health. Paul Crutzen shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland. His most recent interests are in the following areas: global modeling of atmospheric chemical processes (2-D, 3-D) for troposphere, stratosphere and lower mesosphere; interactions of atmospheric chemistry with climate; studies of the potential role of halogen photochemistry with ozone in the marine boundary layer; and tropospheric chemistry, including the role of biomass burning in the tropics and subtropics. More recently Crutzen has involved himself with studies of geo-engineering to reduce the heating of Earth's climate by carbon dioxide emissions. He also published a paper showing that the production of biofuels (e.g. ethanol from maize and biodiesel from rapeseed) to replace fossil fuels may not cool climate. Crutzen also proposed that over the past 200 years human activities have grown so much that the introduction of a new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene, is justified. He died on January 28, 2021.
 
5Name:  Dr. Anne Cutler
 Institution:  University of Western Sydney, Australia
 Year Elected:  2007
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  305
 Residency:  International
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1945
 Death Date:  June 7, 2022
   
 
Born in Australia, as a postwar baby-boomer, Anne Cutler could benefit from a little-known side-effect of the wartime disruption of Europe: the extraordinarily high quality of language teaching in 1950s Australian schools. Overqualified refugee academics surviving by teaching their native language included her Belgian high-school teacher of French, and her Austrian teacher of German (with a University of Vienna Ph.D.). This background led her to study languages - at Melbourne University, where, thanks to regulations mandating a "science subject" in BA degrees, she discovered psychology as well. Psycholinguistics, investigating language with the methods of experimental psychology, emerged as an independent discipline in nice time for her Ph.D. study (at the University of Texas). Her research has centred on the recognition of spoken language, beginning (in her Ph.D.) with the role of rhythm and intonation in comprehension; since these vary greatly across languages, this prompted her to cross-linguistic comparisons. Her most important discoveries have concerned how adult processing of spoken language is exquisitely adapted to suit the native language (making for great efficiency in listening to the native language, but difficulty in listening to structurally different foreign languages). Her research was conducted from 1982 to 1993 at the Medical Research Council's Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, UK (which she joined after postdoctoral fellowships at MIT and the University of Sussex), and from 1993 at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, where she served as director until 2013. She is currently Research Professor at Australia's MARCS Institute at the University of Western Sydney. Her awards include the Spinoza Prize of the Dutch Science Council (1999); further, she is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, the Academia Europaea, the Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen, and the National Academy of Sciences (US).
 
6Name:  Dr. Rashid Alievich Sunyaev
 Institution:  Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Germany; Russian Space Research Institute
 Year Elected:  2007
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  101. Astronomy
 Residency:  International
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1943
   
 
Rashid Alievich Sunyaev is director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics and chief scientist of the Russian Academy of Sciences's Space Research Institute. Hailing from the former Asian Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, he became one of the most important and prolific members of the Moscow group that pioneered relativistic astrophysics. Together with its leader Yakov Zel'dovich, he studied the relic radiation from the Big Bang, formulating the so-called Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, which has led to early tests of cosmological models that are still valid and which have provided impetus to one of the most active areas of observational cosmology. Through continuing collaborations around the globe, Sunyaev has served as a particularly effective scientific bridge between East and West. In 2010, he was appointed to a three year term as the Maureen and John Hendricks Visiting Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study. In addition to the 2008 Crafoord prize, he has received a range of awards including the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1995), the Gruber Cosmology Prize (2003), the Heineman Prize in Astrophysics (2003), the King Faisal International Prize for Science (2009), the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences (2011), and the Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute (2012). He is a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the German Academy of Natural Sciences Leopoldina, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 2007.
 
Election Year
2007[X]