APS Member History

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21	Name:	Archibald MacLeisch
	Year Elected:	1976
	Class:	4. Humanities
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1892
	Death Date:	4/20/82

22	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.

23	Name:	Dr. Vladimir Prelog
	Institution:	Federal Institute of Technology
	Year Elected:	1976
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry
	Residency:	International
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1906
	Death Date:	1/7/98

24	Name:	Dr. Lucian Pye
	Institution:	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
	Year Elected:	1976
	Class:	3. Social Sciences
	Subdivision:	304. Jurisprudence and Political Science
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1921
	Death Date:	September 5, 2008

	Lucien W. Pye, Ford Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was one of the nation's leading authorities on comparative politics, and especially on the politics of Asian countries, particularly China. A former president of the American Political Science Association (1988-89), Professor Pye was a political scientist whose speciality had been the comparative study of political cultures and political psychology. His works have illuminated the manner in which the fundamental impulses of Asian cultures find reflection in contemporary Asian political developments. A major theme of his research is the impact of modernization on traditional Asian societies. With intellectual roots in anthropology, psychology, and psychoanalysis, as well as political science, Professor Pye has compared in numerous published works the political behavior and political cultures of Asian nations. He had been an advisor on foreign affairs to the United States government, both the executive branch and Congress, and he was a member of many organizations concerned with U.S.-Asian relations. He made a major contribution in shaping the direction of scholarly research on Asia in the United States. Professor Pye served on the influential Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council from its founding in 1955 and was chairman of the Committee from 1963-72. He was a trustee of the Asia Foundation from 1963-2004, a member of the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1966-82, and director of the Council's China Project. He had been a member of the executive committee of the Asia Society, chairman of the Advisory Board of the Universities Service Centre in Hong Kong, and member of the Board of Governors of the East-West Center in Honolulu. As Vice-Chairman of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, Professor Pye made numerous trips to China since the resumption of diplomatic contacts between the U.S. and China in 1971. Lucian Pye was born in 1921 in Shansi province, China. He attended the North China American School near Beijing. In 1943 he received his B.A. from Carleton College. During World War II he was an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. He completed graduate studies at Yale University, receiving his M.A. degree in 1949 and Ph.D. in 1951. From 1949-52 he was an instructor and assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and in 1951-52 he was a research associate in International Relations at Yale University. From 1952-56 he was a research associate in the Center for International Studies at Princeton University. Professor Pye joined the MIT faculty in 1956. In 1958, under the auspicies of the MIT Center for International Studies, he undertook field work in Burma in order to research the cultural and psychological sources of the country's problems in political development. During the 1960's, he conducted field work in Hong Kong, Vietnam, the Philippines, Korea, Indonesia, and India. In 1955-56 he was visiting lecturer at Columbia University, and in 1959-61 visiting lecturer at Yale. On retiring from MIT he was a visiting professor at George Washington University in 1993, at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1994, and at Balliol College, Oxford University in 1995. Since 1990 he has been an associate in research at the Fairbank Center, Harvard University. Dr. Pye has been elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Before his presidency he was earlier elected vice-president and a member of the Council of the American Political Science Association. He has been a member of the board of the Association of Asian Studies. From 1963-67 he was a member of the selection committee of the Foreign Area Fellowship Program, and since 1975 he has been on the selection board of the Luce Scholar program. Professor Pye was a recipient of the Wilbur Cross Medal of the graduate school of Yale University, the Harold D. Lasswell Award at the International Society of Political Psychology, and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. He received the Auxiliary Research Award for the Social Science Research Council. And in 1963-64 he was a Fellow of the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, California. Professor Pye was the author/editor of 27 books. Lucian Pye died September 5, 2008, in Boston after a long illness. He was 86.

25	Name:	Dr. Neil J. Smelser
	Institution:	Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
	Year Elected:	1976
	Class:	3. Social Sciences
	Subdivision:	301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1930
	Death Date:	October 2, 2017

	Neil Smelser was born in 1930 in Kahoka, Missouri, and spent his youth in Phoenix, Arizona. He received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1952, a second B.A. from Oxford University in 1954 (M.A., 1959), and a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1958. He was a member of the department of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1958-94 and Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1994-2001. He published extensively in the fields of social theory, social change, economic sociology, social movements, the sociology of education, and psychoanalysis (he trained in psychoanalysis at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, graduating in 1971). He was elected President of the American Sociological Association in 1996, and was also a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Neil Smelser died October 2, 2017, at the age of 87.

26	Name:	Dr. Verner E. Suomi
	Institution:	University of Wisconsin
	Year Elected:	1976
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	106. Physics
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1915
	Death Date:	7/30/95

27	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

28	Name:	Dr. Frank H. Westheimer
	Institution:	Harvard University
	Year Elected:	1976
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1912
	Death Date:	April 14, 2007

29	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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