Formation | March 3, 1863 |
---|---|
Founders | Alexander Dallas Bache Abraham Lincoln |
Founded at | 2101 Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C., U.S. 20418 |
Type | NGO |
Coordinates | 38°53′46″N77°02′12″W / 38.89598°N 77.03658°W |
Parent organization | National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine |
Endowment | $553.9 million (2020) [1] |
Website | nasonline |
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the National Academy of Medicine (NAM).
As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Election to the National Academy is one of the highest honors in the scientific field. Members of the National Academy of Sciences serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation" on science, engineering, and medicine. The group holds a congressional charter under Title 36 of the United States Code.
Congress legislated, and President Abraham Lincoln signed, a 1863 Act of Congress establishing the National Academy of Sciences as an independent, trusted government institution created for the purpose of "providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology [and] to provide scientific advice to the government 'whenever called upon' by any government department", [2] an objective that promulgated the academy with the broad and enduring purpose of enriching and providing resources to any part of the federal government—rather than as a tool of one branch, or executive agencies, which adds a risk or propensity of becoming the tool of one part of the government. The goal was somewhat unusual at the time, and also different than other knowledge based entities serving a branch of government, such as the Library of Congress. The academy receives no compensation from the government for its services. [3]
As of 2024 [update] , the National Academy of Sciences includes 2,687 NAS members and 531 international members. [4] It employed about 1,100 staff in 2005. [5] [6] Some 190 members have won a Nobel Prize. [4] By its own admission in 1989, the addition of women to the academy "continues at a dismal trickle"; at that time there were 1,516 male members and 57 female members. [7]
The National Academy of Sciences is one of the 135 member organizations of the International Science Council (ISC). Although there is no formal relationship with state and local academies of science, there often is informal dialogue. The National Academy is governed by a 17-member Council, made up of five officers (president, vice president, home secretary, international secretary, and treasurer) and 12 Councilors, all of whom are elected from among the academy membership. [8] Agencies of the United States government fund about 85 percent of the academy's activities. Further funding comes from state governments, private foundations, and industrial organizations. [9]
The council has the ability ad-hoc to delegate certain tasks to committees. For example, the Committee on Animal Nutrition has produced a series of Nutrient requirements of domestic animals reports since at least 1944, each one being initiated by a different sub-committee of experts in the field for example on dairy cattle.[ citation needed ]
The National Academy of Sciences meets annually in Washington, D.C., which is documented in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), its scholarly journal. The National Academies Press is the publisher for the National Academies and makes more than 5,000 publications freely available on its website. [10]
From 2004 to 2017, the National Academy of Sciences administered the Marian Koshland Science Museum to provide public exhibits and programming related to its policy work. The museum's exhibits focused on climate change and infectious disease. In 2017, the museum closed and made way for a new science outreach program called LabX. [11] [12]
The Act of Incorporation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln on March 3, 1863, created the National Academy of Sciences and named 50 charter members. Many of the original NAS members came from the so-called "Scientific Lazzaroni", an informal network of mostly physical scientists working in the vicinity of Cambridge, Massachusetts (c. 1850). [13]
In 1863, the organizers enlisted the support of Alexander Dallas Bache, and also Charles Henry Davis, a professional astronomer who had been recently recalled from the Navy to Washington to head the Bureau of Navigation. They also elicited support from Swiss-American geologist Louis Agassiz and American mathematician Peirce, who together planned the steps whereby the National Academy of Sciences was to be established. Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts was to name Agassiz to the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution. [14]
Agassiz was to come to Washington, D.C., at the government's expense to plan the organization with the others. This bypassed Joseph Henry, who was reluctant to have a bill for such an academy presented to Congress. This was in the belief that such a resolution would be "opposed as something at variance with our democratic institutions". Nevertheless, Henry soon became the second President of NAS. Agassiz, Davis, Peirce, Benjamin Gould and Senator Wilson met at Bache's house and "hurriedly wrote the bill incorporating the Academy, including in it the name of fifty incorporators". [15]
During the last hours of the session, when the Senate was immersed in the rush of last-minute business before its adjournment, Senator Wilson introduced the bill. Without examining it or debating its provisions, both the Senate and House approved it, and President Lincoln signed it. [15]
Although hailed as a great step forward in government recognition of the role of science in American society, at the time, the National Academy of Sciences created enormous ill-feelings among scientists, [15] whether or not they were named as incorporators.
The act states:
[T]he Academy shall, whenever called upon by any department of the Government, investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art, the actual expense of such investigations, examinations, experiments, and reports to be paid from appropriations which may be made for the purpose, but the Academy shall receive no compensation whatever for any services to the Government of the United States. [16]
The National Academies did not solve the problems facing a nation in Civil War as the Lazzaroni had hoped, nor did it centralize American scientific efforts. [15] However, election to the National Academy did come to be considered "the pinnacle of scientific achievement for Americans" until the establishment of the Nobel Prize at the end of the 19th century. [17] : 30
In 1870, the congressional charter was amended to remove the limitation on the number of members. [18]
In 2013, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked to write a speech for the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address in which he made the point that one of Lincoln's greatest legacies was establishing the National Academy of Sciences in that same year, which had the long-term effect of "setting our Nation on a course of scientifically enlightened governance, without which we all may perish from this Earth". [19]
The academy currently (as of late-2024) has 6892 members, including international ones, both past and present. 3218 of them are living. Existing members elect new members for life. Up to 120 members are elected every year while up to 30 foreign citizens may be elected as international members annually. The election process begins with a formal nomination, followed by a vetting period, and culminates in a final ballot at the academy's annual meeting in April each year. Members are affiliated with a specific scientific field in one of six so-called "classes", which include: Physical and Mathematical Sciences; Biological Sciences; Engineering and Applied Sciences; Biomedical Sciences; Behavioral and Social Sciences; and Applied Biological, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences. [6]
Over the entire history of the NAS, Harvard University is associated with the most members (331) overall, while the University of California at Berkeley is associated with the most members (255) without including the medical school. E.g. of the topmost schools, UC Berkeley/MIT/Princeton/Caltech do not have medical schools, while Harvard/Stanford do. The top ten institutions, two of which are from the University of California System and another four of which are in the Ivy League, account for nearly 28% of all members ever elected. Those ten are also precisely the only institutions in the entire history of the NAS to have had 100 or more members overall.
On the list for living members, only 14 institutions have 50 or more members overall, including the medical school (where it applies). They represent 32% of all living members of the NAS.
Top 14 Primary Institutions (50 and more Living Members) | Living Members (Including Medical School) | Living Members (Excluding Medical School) |
---|---|---|
Harvard University** | 183 [20] | 115 [21] |
Stanford University** | 175 [22] | 146 [23] |
University of California at Berkeley | 138 [24] | 138 [25] |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 121 [26] | 121 [27] |
Princeton University | 92 [28] | 92 [29] |
Columbia University** | 75 [30] | 66 [31] |
California Institute of Technology | 69 [32] | 69 [33] |
Yale University** | 67 [34] | 49 [35] |
University of Chicago** | 60 [36] | 60 [37] |
University of California San Diego** | 54 [38] | 51 [39] |
Max Planck Institutes (Germany) | 52 [40] | 52 [41] |
University of California Los Angeles** | 51 [42] | 43 [43] |
University of Washington** | 50 [44] | 45 [45] |
National Institutes of Health | 50 [46] | 50 [47] |
Top 10 Primary Institutions (All-time Members) | All-time Members (1863–2024) (Excluding Medical School) | All-time Members (1863–2024) (Including Medical School) |
---|---|---|
University of California at Berkeley | 255 [48] | 255 [49] |
Harvard University** | 235 [50] | 331 [51] |
Stanford University** | 234 [52] | 274 [53] |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 219 [54] | 219 [55] |
Princeton University | 133 [56] | 133 [57] |
California Institute of Technology | 132 [58] | 132 [59] |
University of Chicago** | 129 [60] | 130 [61] |
Columbia University** | 124 [62] | 136 [63] |
University of California San Diego** | 116 [64] | 122 [65] |
Yale University** | 103 [66] | 137 [67] |
The National Academy of Sciences maintains multiple buildings around the United States. The National Academy of Sciences Building is located at 2101 Constitution Avenue, in northwest Washington, D.C.; it sits on the National Mall, adjacent to the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building and in front of the headquarters of the U.S. State Department. The building has a neoclassical architectural style and was built by architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. The building was dedicated in 1924 [68] and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Goodhue engaged a team of artists and architectural sculptors including Albert Herter, Lee Lawrie, and Hildreth Meière to design interior embellishments celebrating the history and significance of science. [69] The building is used for lectures, symposia, exhibitions, and concerts, in addition to annual meetings of the NAS, NAE, and NAM. Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences hosts exhibitions exploring intersections of art, science, and culture such as Mathemalchemy. [70] The 2012 Presidential Award for Math and Science Teaching ceremony was held here on March 5, 2014. Approximately 150 staff members work at the NAS Building. In June 2012, it reopened to visitors after a major two-year restoration project which restored and improved the building's historic spaces, increased accessibility, and brought the building's aging infrastructure and facilities up to date. [71]
More than 1,000 National Academies staff members work at The Keck Center of the National Academies at 500 Fifth Street in northwest Washington, D.C. The Keck Center provides meeting space and houses the National Academies Press Bookstore. [72] The Marian Koshland Science Museum of the National Academy of Sciences – formerly located at 525 E St., N.W. – hosted visits from the public, school field trips, and permanent science exhibits. [73]
NAS also maintains conference centers in California and Massachusetts. [72] The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center is located on 100 Academy Drive in Irvine, California, near the campus of the University of California, Irvine; it offers a conference center and houses several NAS programs. The J. Erik Jonsson Conference Center, located at 314 Quissett Avenue in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, is an NAS conference facility.
The president is the head of the academy, elected by a majority vote of the membership to serve in this position for a term to be determined by the governing Council, not to exceed six years, and may be re-elected for a second term. The academy has had 22 presidents since its foundation. [74] The current president is geophysicist Marcia K. McNutt, the first woman to hold this position. Her term expires on June 30, 2022. [75]
The academy gives a number of different awards:
In 2005, the national science academies of the G8 forum (including the National Academy of Sciences) and science academies of Brazil, China, and India (three of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the developing world) signed a statement on the global response to climate change. The statement stresses that the scientific understanding of climate change had become sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action. [77]
On May 7, 2010, a letter signed by 255 Academy members was published in Science magazine, decrying "political assaults" against climate change scientists. [78] [79] This was in response to a civil investigative demand on the University of Virginia (UVA) by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, seeking a broad range of documents from Michael E. Mann, a former UVA professor from 1999 to 2005. [80] [81] Mann, who currently works at the University of Pennsylvania, is a climate change researcher, and Cuccinelli alleges that Mann may have defrauded Virginia taxpayers in the course of his environmental research. Investigations had cleared Mann of charges that he falsified or suppressed data. [82]
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), also known as the National Academies, is a congressionally chartered organization that serves as the collective scientific national academy of the United States. The name is used interchangeably in two senses: (1) as an umbrella term or parent organization for its three sub-divisions that operate as quasi-independent honorific learned society member organizations known as the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and the National Academy of Medicine (NAM); and (2) as the brand for studies and reports issued by the unified operating arm of the three academies originally known as the National Research Council (NRC). The National Academies also serve as public policy advisors, research institutes, think tanks, and public administration consultants on issues of public importance or on request by the government.
Christiane (Janni) Nüsslein-Volhard is a German developmental biologist and a 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate. She is the only woman from Germany to have received a Nobel Prize in the sciences.
The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. Founded in 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, it was renamed to the Max Planck Society in 1948 in honor of its former president, theoretical physicist Max Planck. The society is funded by the federal and state governments of Germany.
Paul Greengard was an American neuroscientist best known for his work on the molecular and cellular function of neurons. In 2000, Greengard, Arvid Carlsson and Eric Kandel were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system. He was Vincent Astor Professor at Rockefeller University, and served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Cure Alzheimer's Fund, as well as the Scientific Council of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. He was married to artist Ursula von Rydingsvard.
Marlan Orvil Scully is an American physicist best known for his work in theoretical quantum optics. He is a professor at Texas A&M University and Princeton University. Additionally, in 2012 he developed a lab at the Baylor Research and Innovation Collaborative in Waco, Texas.
Charles L. Bennett is an American observational astrophysicist. He is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, the Alumni Centennial Professor of Physics and Astronomy and a Gilman Scholar at Johns Hopkins University. He is the Principal Investigator of NASA's highly successful Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).
Brigid L. M. Hogan FRS is a British developmental biologist noted for her contributions to mammalian development, stem cell research and transgenic technology and techniques. She is currently a Professor in the Department of Cell Biology at Duke University, Born in the UK, she became an American citizen in 2000.
Michael Lawrence KleinNAS is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Science and director of the Institute for Computational Molecular Science in the college of science and technology at Temple University in Philadelphia, US. He was previously the Hepburn Professor of Physical Science in the Center for Molecular Modeling at the University of Pennsylvania.
Alessandra Buonanno is an Italian-American theoretical physicist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam. She is the head of the "Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity" department. She holds a research professorship at the University of Maryland, College Park, and honorary professorships at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and the University of Potsdam. She is a leading member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which observed gravitational waves from a binary black-hole merger in 2015.
Aviv Regev is a computational biologist and systems biologist and Executive Vice President and Head of Genentech Research and Early Development in Genentech/Roche. She is a core member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and professor at the Department of Biology of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Regev is a pioneer of single cell genomics and of computational and systems biology of gene regulatory circuits. She founded and leads the Human Cell Atlas project, together with Sarah Teichmann.
Alan D. D'Andrea is an American cancer researcher and the Fuller American Cancer Society Professor of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School. D'Andrea's research at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute focuses on chromosome instability and cancer susceptibility. He is currently the director of the Center for DNA Damage and Repair and the director of the Susan F. Smith Center for Women's Cancer.
Claudia Felser is a German solid state chemist and materials scientist. She is currently a director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids. Felser was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2020 for the prediction and discovery of engineered quantum materials ranging from Heusler compounds to topological insulators.
Vassiliki Kalogera is a Greek astrophysicist. She is a professor at Northwestern University and the director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). She is a leading member of the LIGO Collaboration that observed gravitational waves in 2015.
Professor Carol L. Prives FRS is the Da Costa Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. She is known for her work in the characterisation of p53, an important tumor suppressor protein frequently mutated in cancer.
Suzanne T. Staggs is an American physicist who is currently the Henry DeWolf Smyth Professor of Physics at Princeton University. Staggs has led the development of numerous cosmic microwave background experiments and is currently the principal investigator (PI) of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and founding member of the Simons Observatory (SO). In 2020, Staggs was elected into the National Academy of Sciences.
Erwin Friedrich Wagner is an Austrian biochemist known for his research on the molecular basis of cancer and associated conditions such as inflammation and cachexia. He was deputy director of the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) in Madrid, Spain, until 2019. Since 2019, Wagner is a group leader affiliated with the Medical University of Vienna.
Jelena Vučković is a Serbian-born American professor and a courtesy faculty member in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University. She served as Fortinet Founders Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University from August 2021 through June 2023. Vučković leads the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics (NQP) Lab, and is a faculty member of the Ginzton Lab, PULSE Institute, SIMES Institute, and Bio-X at Stanford. She was the inaugural director of the Q-FARM initiative. She is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of The Optical Society, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Membership of the National Academy of Sciences is an award granted to scientists that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of the United States judges to have made “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research”. Membership is a mark of excellence in science and one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive.
Christopher Kevin Glass is an American biophysicist, holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Distinguished Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego He works on the molecular mechanisms that control macrophage functions in health and disease.