american academy of arts & sciences Bulletin · summer 2007 Bulletin Page 23 A Poetry Reading by Galway Kinnell Page 13 Education in the Developing World David E. Bloom, Michael R

summer 2007 Bulletin

Page 23

A Poetry Reading by Galway Kinnell

Page 13

Education in the Developing WorldDavid E. Bloom, Michael R. Kremer, and Gene B. Sperling

The Future of the Media in Society, Page 1

Sloan and Teagle Foundations Support Academy Research Programs, Page 2

Hellman Fellowship in Science Policy, Page 5

Presentations by Academy Fellows Darlene Clark Hine and Barbara Newman, Page 26

inside:

american academy of arts & sciences

vol. lx, no. 4

Page 33

Stem Cells: Politics and PromiseIrving L. Weissman

Page 6

Stem Cell Challenges in Biology and Public PolicyDouglas A. Melton

ContentsUpdate

The Future of the Media in Society 1

Support for Academy’s Research Programs 2

Visiting Scholars Program 4

Hellman Fellowship in Science Policy 5

Academy Meetings

In Cambridge

Stem Cell Challenges in Biology and Public Policy

Douglas A. Melton 6

Education in the Developing WorldDavid E. Bloom, Michael R. Kremer, and Gene B. Sperling 13

A Poetry Reading by Galway Kinnell 23

An Evening of Chamber Music 25

In the Midwest

Presentations at Northwestern UniversityDarlene Clark Hine and Barbara Newman 26

Gathering at the University of Michigan 32

In the West

Presentation at Stanford UniversityStem Cells: Politics and Promise

Irving L. Weissman 33

Remembrances 39

Noteworthy 41

From the Archives 44

american academy

of arts & sciences

Calendar of Events

Saturday,October 6, 2007

Stated Meeting and Induction Ceremo-ny–Cambridge

Location: Sanders Theatre, Harvard Uni-versity

Time: 3:30 p.m.

Sunday, October 7, 2007

Stated Meeting–Cambridge

Energy and Climate Change

Speakers: Rosina M. Bierbaum (Universityof Michigan), Richard A. Meserve (CarnegieInstitution of Washington), William K.Reilly (Aqua International Partners, LP),and Richard L. Revesz (New York University)

Location: House of the Academy

Time: 10:00 a.m.

Monday,October 15, 2007

Stated Meeting–Stanford

Nuclear Power without Nuclear Proliferation

Speakers: Hans Blix (Weapons of Mass De-struction Commission), Michael M. May (Stanford University), William Perry(Stanford University), and Scott Sagan(Stanford University)

Location: Stanford University

Time: 5:30 p.m.

Saturday,November 10, 2007

Stated Meeting–Chicago

The Disappearance of Species

Speakers: May Berenbaum (University ofIllinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Neil L.Shubin (Field Museum and University ofChicago)

Location: The Field Museum

Time: 5:30 p.m.

Wednesday,November 14, 2007


Harvard University’s New Allston Campus

Speakers: Stefan Behnisch (Behnisch Ar-chitekten) and Christopher Gordon (All-ston Development Group, Harvard Univer-sity)


Time: 5:30 p.m.

Tuesday,November 20, 2007

Stated Meeting–Berkeley

The World’s Energy Problem and What We CanDo About It

Speaker: Steven Chu (Lawrence BerkeleyNational Laboratory)

Location: University of California, Berkeley

Time: 5:30 p.m.

Wednesday,December 12, 2007


Performing the Passion: J.S. Bach and the Gospel of John

Speaker: Margot Fassler (Yale University)


Time: 5:30 p.m.

For information and reservations, contact the Events Of½ce (phone: 617-576-5032; email: [email protected]).

The role of a free and effective press in ademocracy and its impact on the formulationof public policy are at the center of two on-going Academy studies. The ½rst deals withhow information about science and technol-ogy is diffused through the media. It is led byDonald Kennedy, former Stanford UniversityPresident and Editor-in-Chief of Science maga-zine; and Geneva Overholser of the Univer-sity of Missouri School of Journalism. Thesecond examines reporting on business andthe economy and includes among the projectadvisors Princeton University economistsAlan Blinder and Alan Krueger. Both projectstake into account the impact of new tech-nologies and evolving patterns of news con-sumption on economic models that havelong supported traditional print and broad-cast media.

As Ghiglione points out, the technologicalrevolution and market forces present tradi-tional media with enormous challenges. On-line advertising competitors devour majorsources of revenue that have long been tradi-tional media’s lifeblood. With advertising andcirculation revenues falling, traditional mediashrink their news staffs, resulting in fewerresources for serious, investigative reporting.

Today, the future of journalism is best de½nedby a set of dif½cult questions. Who will pro-vide the costly news analysis and worldwidecoverage necessary to inform citizens? Willtraditional media keep reinventing them-selves to meet the demands of the economic,cultural, and technological future? How canbusiness, government agencies, educationalinstitutions, foundations, and other nonpro-½t organizations encourage needed changesin the media? Can the sense of excitementand experimentation that surrounds journal-ism on the web lead to new models of public-

service journalism? Can traditional consum-ers of news become more open to qualityjournalism presented in online formats?

Many of these questions served as the basisfor discussion at an Academy meeting on the“Future of News” at the Time-Life Buildingin New York in December 2006. Hosted byTime, Inc. Chief Executive Of½cer Ann Mooreand chaired by former Time, Inc. Editor-in-Chief Norman Pearlstine, the program in-cluded a panel consisting of John Carroll,former Editor of the Los Angeles Times; JeffJarvis, City University of New York journal-ism professor and blogger; Jill Abramson,Managing Editor of the New York Times;Jonathan Klein, President of cnn/us; andGeneva Overholser, Hurley Chair in PublicAffairs Reporting at the University of Mis-souri School of Journalism.

To advance the study, the Academy will part-ner with universities and other institutionswith established journalism programs to spon-sor a series of workshops designed to assessthe transformation in journalism. Accordingto Ghiglione, the Academy’s multidiscipli-nary membership makes it an ideal convenerof this project. Scholars and practitioners injournalism, computer science, technology,business, and other ½elds can advance ourunderstanding of the future of news trans-mission–its quality, speed, and form. Thesocial sciences can provide guidance on howto increase the accountability of those whoreport and analyze the news–to make theirwork more professional and transparent as away of increasing public trust. The humani-ties can offer insights into such unchanginghuman needs as community and personalcontact in a world where digital-age technol-ogy may diminish as well as empower the in-dividual.

Academy Fellow Loren Ghiglione, the RichardSchwarzlose Professor of Media Ethics at North-western University, spent six weeks this spring as asenior visiting scholar at the Academy. He is devel-oping plans to expand the Academy’s work on theevolving role that the media are playing in our soci-ety, and especially the changing nature of journal-ism in today’s digital world.

Elected to the Academy in 2004, Ghiglione editedand published newspapers in New England fortwenty-six years before directing journalism pro-grams at Emory University, the University ofSouthern California, and Northwestern Univer-sity for a decade. He is former President of theAmerican Society of Newspaper Editors and for-mer Dean of the Medill School of Journalism atNorthwestern.

Program Development

The Future of the Media in Society

Loren Ghiglione

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Bulletin of the American Academy Summer 2007 1

Support for Academy’s Research Programs

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has award-ed the Academy a grant to bring togetherleading scientists and engineers, former pub-lic of½cials, policy experts, ethicists, indus-try executives, and others from outside thescienti½c community to discuss how scien-tists can better understand and appreciatethe public’s response to various aspects oftheir work.

Considerable attention has been focused onstrengthening public education about scienceand technology. The communication gap be-tween scientists and the lay public, however,remains wide, and in some quarters is grow-ing. The two strategies that are generally of-fered to help close this gap are 1) raising pub-lic understanding of science by improvingscience education, communication, and lit-eracy at all levels, and 2) enhancing scientists’ability to communicate the signi½cance oftheir work to the general public. Both strat-egies are necessary and important.

The focus on science education and bettercommunication, however, overlooks an essen-tial dimension of the problem: the scientists’obligation to understand the broader socialand cultural context in which their work isreceived and to accept that sometimes thepublic’s concerns about science stem not fromignorance but from legitimate worries.

Public attitudes about science and technologyare complex, informed by a variety of sourcesand influenced by diverse ethical, religious,and cultural values. In certain areas–for ex-ample, global warming, biomedical research,or research on dangerous pathogens–scien-ti½c progress and public policy concerns maycome into conflict.

Through a series of roundtable discussions,the Academy’s new study will focus on thepublic’s attitudes about a number of issues,such as the unintended social consequencesof scienti½c and technological advances; theshort- and long-term safety of the work; andthe broader ethical, religious, and social im-plications. Through this effort, the Academyhopes to foster a sustained and more effectivedialogue between scientists and the public.

“Science communication is commonly per-ceived to flow in only one direction, fromscientists to the public,” said Neal Lane, Acad-emy Fellow and Cochair of the Initiative forScience, Engineering, and Technology. “Butif scientists can listen to the public’s concernsabout their work, and if they have a better un-derstanding of the public’s unease about sci-ence and technology, the social contract uponwhich their work depends will be strength-ened. We hope this Academy project will fos-ter needed dialogue between scientists andthe public.”

Fellows interested in working on this topicare encouraged to contact Academy ceo

Leslie Berlowitz and Program Of½cer KatieDonnelly.

Fellows advising on this project includeCharles Vest (National Academy of Engineer-ing), Neal Lane (Rice University), HunterRawlings (Cornell University), Paul Nurse(Rockefeller University), Alan Alda (NewYork City), Greg Papadopoulos (Sun Micro-systems), Ralph Gomory (Alfred P. SloanFoundation), and Alan Leshner (AmericanAssociation for the Advancement of Sciences).

This study is part of the Academy’s Initiativeon Science, Engineering, and Technology,which examines, in broad terms, how theworld of science, engineering, and technolo-gy is changing; how to help the public under-stand those changes; and how we as a socie-ty can better adapt to those changes. Moreinformation about the Initiative on Science,Engineering, and Technology is available onthe Academy’s website at http://www.amacad.0rg/projects/initSciTech.aspx.

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Awards Grant for Science Project

2 Bulletin of the American Academy Summer 2007

With a grant from the Teagle Foundation,the Academy will advance work this fall onThe Humanities Departmental Survey–TheTemplate Project, an Academy effort to gath-er new information from college and univer-sity humanities departments. The data col-lected will become part of the HumanitiesIndicators Project–an ongoing effort to com-pile and categorize existing data in the hu-manities.

In awarding the grant, Teagle FoundationPresident and Academy Fellow W. RobertConnor noted that this project will address a“crucial need for data collection in the hu-manities.” Humanities scholars, foundations,and educational policymakers lack importantinformation about roughly one-third of thedisciplines that form the core of a liberal artseducation. The absence of basic empiricaldata has become a particularly urgent prob-lem now, when new economic, curricular,and ideological pressures threaten supportfor the humanities.

The Template Project is a collaborative effortto collect, compare, and analyze data fromhumanities departments across several aca-

Teagle Foundation Supports Data Collection in the Humanities

demic disciplines, including history, modernlanguages and literature, art history, religion,and linguistics. Working with national hu-manities organizations and disciplinary as-sociations, such as the Modern Language As-sociation and the American Historical Asso-ciation, project participants have developeda survey instrument designed to bring con-sistency to already existing data collectionefforts in the humanities.

Arnita Jones, Executive Director of the Ameri-can Historical Association, summed up theproject’s importance to humanities disci-plines: “With this project, the Academy hasprovided the humanities community an op-portunity to . . . work cooperatively towardshared goals in the realm of data collection.Once the value of the departmental surveydata is demonstrated, I feel certain that otherdisciplinary associations will be eager to par-ticipate. Its long-term implications are sig-ni½cant.”

The survey is designed to gather data, includ-ing the number and nature of faculty in eachhumanities discipline (tenured versus adjunct;full-time versus part-time); the form gradu-

ate teaching takes (e.g., seminars, indepen-dent study); the distribution of teachingloads (undergraduate versus graduate); thenumber of majors and minors; jobs securedby graduates; and other areas of concernthat can be used to produce indicators of thehealth of the humanities in higher education.The survey will be administered this academ-ic year.

The Statistical Research Center, which con-ducts similar surveys within physics, astron-omy, and allied ½elds, will administer thesurvey and compile the data. The data will beanalyzed by the American Political ScienceAssociation, along with data collected inde-pendently in 2006 from political science de-partments. Results will be made availableelectronically.

The Template Project is part of a larger Hu-manities and Culture Initiative receiving ½-nancial support from the Andrew W. MellonFoundation, Walter B. Hewlett, the WilliamR. Hewlett Trust, the William and FloraHewlett Foundation, the Rockefeller Foun-dation, and the Sara Lee Corporation. Moreinformation about the project is available onthe Academy’s website at http://www.amacad.org/ projects/indicators.aspx.


American University–Cornelius Kerwin, President Boston College–William P. Leahy, S.J., President Boston University–Robert A. Brown, President Brandeis University–Jehuda Reinharz, President Brown University–Ruth J. Simmons, President The City University of New York–Matthew Goldstein, Chancellor Columbia University–Lee C. Bollinger, President Cornell University–David J. Skorton, President Dartmouth College–James Wright, President Duke University–Richard H. Brodhead, President Emory University–James W. Wagner, President George Washington University–Steven Knapp, President Harvard University–Drew Gilpin Faust, President Indiana University–Michael McRobbie, President Johns Hopkins University–William R. Brody, President Massachusetts Institute of Technology–Susan Hock½eld, President Michigan State University–Lou Anna K. Simon, President New York University–John Sexton, President Northwestern University–Henry S. Bienen, President Ohio State University–Gordon Gee, President Pennsylvania State University–Graham Spanier, President Princeton University–Shirley Tilghman, President Rice University–David W. Leebron, President Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey–Richard L. McCormick,

President Smith College–Carol T. Christ, President Stanford University–John L. Hennessy, President Syracuse University–Nancy Cantor, Chancellor and President Tufts University–Lawrence S. Bacow, President University of California, Berkeley–Robert J. Birgeneau, Chancellor University of California, Davis–Larry N. Vanderhoef, Chancellor University of California, Irvine–Michael V. Drake, Chancellor University of California, Los Angeles–Norman Abrams, Acting Chancellor University of California, San Diego–Marye Anne Fox, Chancellor University of Chicago–Robert J. Zimmer, President University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign–Richard Herman, Chancellor University of Iowa–Sally K. Mason, President University of Maryland–C. D. Mote, Jr., President University of Michigan–Mary Sue Coleman, President University of Minnesota–Robert Bruininks, President University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill–James Moeser, Chancellor University of Notre Dame–Rev. John Jenkins, President University of Pennsylvania–Amy Gutmann, President University of Pittsburgh–Mark A. Nordenberg, Chancellor University of Southern California–Steven B. Sample, President University of Texas at Austin–William Powers, Jr., President University of Virginia–John T. Casteen III, President University of Wisconsin-Madison–John D. Wiley, Chancellor Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University–Charles W. Steger,

President Wellesley College–Kim Bottomly, President Yale University–Richard C. Levin, President

A growing number of colleges and universities is collaboratingwith the Academy by participating in its studies on higher educationand by helping to support its Visiting Scholars Program. The Acad-emy is grateful to these University Af½liates for their con½dence inits efforts to support interdisciplinary research and to expand oppor-tunities for postdoctoral scholars and junior faculty.

Fellowship Programs2008–2009

Deadline: October 15, 2007

Visiting Scholars ProgramApplications are being accepted for the Visiting ScholarsProgram. Preference will be given to untenured junior facul-ty, but postdoctoral scholars are also urged to apply. Mem-bers of the Academy are encouraged to inform students andjunior colleagues about this year-long, residential fellow-ship opportunity at the Academy.

The Academy is especially interested in applicants whosework relates to its research areas: Science, Technology & Glob-al Security; Social Policy & American Institutions; Humanities &Culture; and Education. Projects that address American cul-tural, social, or political issues from the founding period tothe present are welcome, as are studies that examine devel-opments in public policy. Proposals should take into accountthe Academy’s emphasis on interdisciplinary work, as wellas its interest in broadening public understanding of impor-tant intellectual trends and contemporary policy choices.Candidates should also consider the relationship of theirwork to archival, library, and other intellectual resources in the Boston area.

Hellman Fellowship in Science Policy

The Hellman Fellowship is open to scientists who want totransition to a career in policy or acquire experience work-ing on science policy issues. For more information aboutthis fellowship opportunity, please see page 5.

All Scholars participate in conferences, seminars, and eventsat the Academy while advancing their independent research.

For details about the Hellman Fellowship, please contactAcademy Program Of½cer Katie Donnelly: phone: 617-576-5008; email: [email protected]. For informationabout the Visiting Scholars Program, please contact its Director Alexandra Oleson: phone: 617-576-5014; email:[email protected].

University Af½liates


F. Warren Hellman (Hellman & Friedman LLC)

The Academy is pleased to announce a $1million grant from the Hellman Family Foun-dation to establish the Hellman Fellowshipin Science and Technology Policy. The fellow-ship will be open to scientists who want totransition to a career in policy or to acquireexperience working on science policy issues.While in residence at the Academy in Cam-bridge, the Hellman Fellow will work withsenior scientists and policy experts on criticalnational and international policy issues re-lated to science, engineering, and technology.

In establishing this new opportunity at theAcademy, Warren Hellman observed,“Through the Hellman Fellows program, ourfamily for many years has supported youngscholars at various universities. Supportingscholarship on science policy at the Academyis to be encouraged, bringing the knowledgeof leading scientists to bear on the process ofpolicymaking at both the national and inter-national level.”

The Hellman Fellowship Program will pro-vide a setting and resources for an individualwith training in science and engineering todevelop expertise on issues of science, engi-neering, and technology policy; increase thecadre of science policy professionals who areengaged in substantive discussion of scienceand engineering research questions, with abroad understanding of their social implica-tions; and expand the Academy’s capacity toconduct projects and studies focused on thechallenges facing scienti½c research and sci-ence education.

Hellman Fellows will be assigned to one ormore of the ongoing research projects of theInitiative for Science, Engineering, and Tech-nology. The mission of the Initiative is to ex-

amine, in broad terms, how the world of sci-ence and technology is evolving, how to helpthe public understand these changes, andhow society can better adapt to these devel-opments. The topics of projects currentlyunderway include 1) alternative models forthe federal funding of science, 2) scientists’understanding of the public, 3) science in theliberal arts curriculum, 4) stemming nuclearproliferation, and alternative paths to a moresecure nuclear future, and 5) the social andtechnical requirements for Internet security.

In acknowledging the award, Leslie Berlowitz,Academy ceo, noted, “This generous giftwill enable the Academy to advance the dis-cussion of the vital role science and technol-ogy play in society today. The Academy is ex-tremely grateful to the Hellman Family Foun-dation and to Warren Hellman, Fellow of theAcademy, member of the Academy Trust,and a director of the Hellman Family Foun-dation, for this grant.”

Hellman Fellows will be appointed for a one-year term (with the possibility of a one-yearrenewal), with the ½rst appointment to be-gin on September 1, 2008. The deadline forapplications is October 15, 2007. We encour-age Fellows of the Academy to recommendcandidates for this fellowship. A descriptionof the fellowship, eligibility, and applicationprocedures are on the Academy website athttp://www.amacad.org/hellman.aspx.

Hellman Fellowship in Science Policy


Academy Meetings

Stem Cell Challenges inBiology and Public Policy

Harvey F. Lodish

Harvey F. Lodish is Professor of Biology and Bio-engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology and Member of the Whitehead Institute forBiomedical Research. He has been a Fellow of theAmerican Academy since 1999.

Introduction

It is a great personal and professional plea-sure to introduce Douglas Melton. Doug isan Investigator at the Howard Hughes Med-ical Institute, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Pro-fessor of the Natural Sciences at HarvardUniversity, and a founding Codirector of theHarvard Stem Cell Institute. He is uniquelyquali½ed to talk to us this evening about

Douglas A. MeltonIntroduction by Harvey F. Lodish

This presentation was given at the 1910th Stated Meeting,held at the House of the Academy in Cambridge on Febru-ary 7, 2007.

stem cell challenges in biology and publicpolicy. Being an Investigator at the HowardHughes Medical Institute means that he hasaccess to private funds and can work on hu-man embryonic stem cells despite the prohi-bitions that our government has placed onthis research.

Doug grew up in Chicago, the son of a grocery-store manager, and earned his undergraduatedegree in biology from the University of Illi-nois at Urbana-Champaign. He received aMarshall Scholarship to study at CambridgeUniversity in England, earning an A.B. in thehistory and philosophy of science. Doug wenton to take his Ph.D. in molecular biology atboth Trinity College and at the Medical Re-search Council Laboratory of Molecular Bi-ology with Sir John Gurdon, the ½rst personto create an adult animal by nuclear transfer–that is, by cloning. One of the pioneers in ear-ly embryonic development, Gurdon showedthat, in frogs, it is possible to remove the dna

from an egg, replace it with the dna from anadult frog cell, and have an egg that developsinto a genetic duplicate of the frog from whichthe donor dna came. In a sense, this was the½rst highly controversial experiment in de-velopmental biology, presaging all the cur-rent discussions about embryonic stem cellresearch and cloning.

But more important, in that laboratory Dougdid some fundamental work on the develop-ment of the early frog embryo. It was inquiriesinto that basic science question that domi-nated his work when he moved to Harvard asan assistant professor in biochemistry andmolecular biology. There, he did some won-derful experiments on frog development.When the frog egg, which is very large, di-vides, the two daughter cells have very differ-ent fates: their descendents become very dif-ferent kinds of cells in the embryo and theadult frog. A fundamental question in devel-opmental biology is why?

What Doug showed is that a certain part ofthe egg contains a high concentration of amessenger rna called Veg1, which is notfound in other parts of the egg. When the celldivides, Veg1 messenger rna goes into oneof the cells but not the other. That messengerrna, in turn, encodes a secreted hormone inthe tgf beta family, which speci½es parts ofthe body axis in the frog embryo. In particu-lar, it induces formation of the dorsal meso-derm. Doug also uncovered the segment ofthe messenger rna that caused it to be lo-calized in this section of the egg.

This research occupied him until the mid-1990s, when personal reasons made him


diseases from which many people in our so-ciety suffer. But stem cells are probably in thepublic’s mind for a different reason, namely,they touch on the question of what it meansto be human, speci½cally on when life begins.

There are a number of different aspects tothis subject, all of which we could discuss,but I will begin with the biology. Then I willtalk about how stem cell research affects or isaffected by public policy and politics, whichis related to the philosophical or metaphysi-cal aspects of this work. This then brings usinto what laws might or might not be passedto restrict it. I will say rather little about thelong-term requirement that some commer-cialization will have to take place if this re-search is ever going to bene½t patients.

To put stem cells in context, I am going toshow you a couple of slides about how biolo-gists got to this point in their work. This slide(see Slide 1) oversimpli½es the last century ofbiology by saying that it focused almost ob-sessively on dna, beginning with Mendel’s

change the direction of his research towardpancreas development, particularly the de-velopment of the insulin-secreting cells inthe pancreatic islets. He recognized, far be-fore any of us did, that the only rational wayto treat juvenile diabetes, where the immunesystem destroys normal islet cells, is by islettransplantation. This, in turn, requires asource of islets that we can only obtain inlarge numbers by developing embryonicstem cells.

Thus Doug embarked on a very impressiveseries of studies concerning how the pancreasis normally formed during development andhow the body produces more islet cells dur-ing adult life. Many body tissues have stemcells; for example, there are stem cells in theblood that make more blood cells; there arestem cells in the liver that make liver cells.But rather strikingly, and just in the past fewyears, Doug showed that the insulin-secret-ing cells in the pancreas do not seem to beformed from stem cells. Rather, they repro-duce by dividing: one insulin-producing celldivides into two, and so forth. This is an ex-ample of the kind of important fundamentalscience that Doug carries out to understandthe genes, the cells, and the tissues that di-rect organ formation.

In his talk, Doug will consider the practicalimplications of his work: how one can coaxundifferentiated embryonic stem cells intoforming insulin-secreting cells. This applica-tion is important not only to understand allthe genes and the extracellular factors thatcatalyze this process, which is of interest tothe basic scientist, but also for potential ther-apeutic purposes. For example, Doug hasdone some fundamental studies to try togrow embryonic stem cells into insulin-se-creting cells that will respond to a rise inblood sugar as they normally should: by se-creting insulin. He is not there yet, but he isgetting close.

What is fascinating about Doug is apparentby just looking at his lab website. If you lookat the keywords for his research interests,you will ½nd the expected terms: “pancreas,”“diabetes,” “cell biology,” “chemical biolo-gy,” “developmental biology,” “human em-bryonic stem cells,” and “transgenic mice.”But you will also ½nd “bioethics” and “lawand public policy.” I think that reflects Doug’s

leadership in explaining the importance ofresearch on human embryonic stem cells tothe general public and to lawmakers. He doesthis privately and without a lot of flair. Hehas spoken to former Massachusetts Gover-nor Mitt Romney, to President George Bush,and to Vice President Cheney–all, I am sorryto say, with little effect, but I give him enor-mous credit for trying. He is an editor of Sci-ence and has received many honors for hiswork, including election to this Academy,the National Academy of Sciences, and theInstitute of Medicine.

Douglas A. Melton

Douglas A. Melton is Thomas Dudley Cabot Pro-fessor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard Univer-sity and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Med-ical Institute. He has been a Fellow of the Ameri-can Academy since 1995.

Presentation

When I started my stem cell research, Inever imagined that it would create so muchinterest in the public’s mind. On the one hand,scientists do like people to know what theyare doing and want others to pay attention toit, particularly young people. But I have toadmit, I am surprised when the President andother public ½gures speak about stem cell re-search on the national stage and when it ispresented on television news programs andeven in various comedy acts. I might reflect,for just a minute, on why that is the case.

To biologists, stem cells are interesting for tworeasons. One, they can teach us a lot abouthow animals develop; how cells work. Sec-ond, they have the potential to help alleviate

To biologists, stem cells areinteresting for two reasons.One, they can teach us a lotabout how animals develop;how cells work. Second, theyhave the potential to helpalleviate diseases from whichmany people in our societysuffer.


SLIDE 1

work with peas and his ½nding that inheritedelements determine our character and ex-tending to the discovery that dna was thechemical basis of hereditary material. Theresults of the double helix experiment werepublished in 1953, followed by the elucida-tion of the genetic code, the demonstrationthat dna could be sequenced, and then thesequencing of the whole genome.

So the public might be forgiven for thinkingthat all of biology is really dna: that dna isdestiny and that dna is all that biologists“do.” But I would suggest that we are nowliving in a century that will not be so muchabout dna, but instead will center on ½gur-ing out how pieces of dna, or genes, interactto make the real unit of life, the cell.

For fun, I will say that this century will be thecentury of cells and stem cells. Why stemcells? In my view, stem cells are the most in-teresting. Let me provide a short primer onwhat stem cells do and why biologists ½ndthem interesting.

A stem cell has two main properties. First, astem cell can self-renew (see Slide 2)–that is,it can divide and make a copy of itself. “Self-renewal” should make you think of “repair,”“regeneration,” “replenishment.” If we couldunderstand the genetic program, the basicsof how a cell makes an exact copy of itself,that knowledge would strengthen our under-standing of how we can repair or replenishour bodies. Second, stems cells have the ca-pacity to make different kinds of daughtercells by means of a process called “differenti-ation,” which signi½es to specialize, to becomedifferent from one another (see Slide 3). Thisslide shows that a blood stem cell can makeall the different kinds of cells found in theblood. The adult stem cell for blood is knownto many of you: it is the cell found in the bonemarrow that is used to treat cancer patients

after radiation. A bone-marrow transplant isactually a transplant of adult hematopoetic,or blood-forming, cells.

Now, these two properties, self-renewal anddifferentiation, are highlighted in a very spe-cial way in an embryonic stem cell. Embryon-ic stem cells can also self-renew and differen-tiate, but interestingly, and most important-ly, they can make any cell type found in thebody: blood cells, nerve cells, the cells of thepancreatic islet that make insulin, etc., etc.(see Slide 4) Adult stem cells, in contrast, arerestricted. Adult blood stem cells, for example,make blood; they do not make fat, nerves, orpancreatic islets–they only make blood.

The capacity of embryonic stem cells to makeany part of the body is especially signi½cantbecause not all tissues in adults have a stemcell. The pancreas–particularly the pancre-atic beta cell–does not have an adult stem cell,which is important as we begin to talk aboutdisease: if a person has lost a particular celltype, like a pancreatic beta cell, it no longerhas the capacity to make more. Thus if thisnation were to say that we could only work

on adult stem cells, that measurewould more or less consign peo-ple with certain diseases to be in-eligible for new therapies fromstem cells.

The ability of embryonic stemcells to make any part of the bodyis fascinating to biologists be-cause we can, as I said, begin tostudy properties of self-renewaland differentiation; to determinehow a cell knows which genes toturn on and off to make differentcell types. But the real reason itgets so much public attention lies

in its potential for treating degenerative dis-eases, particularly the diseases of neurode-generation, including Alzheimer’s, Parkin-son’s, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (als,sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s Disease),spinal muscular atrophy, cardiovascular dis-ease, and diabetes.

The biomedical community has largely failedto make signi½cant advances in understand-ing these afflictions, but they will becomeever more important as our society ages. Justto put a number on this, I will cite data takenfrom the year 2000: the number of patientswho could bene½t from some new treatmentsfor these diseases is 128 million in the United

States alone, not to mention all overthe world.

Tying together stem cells and thesediseases is relatively simple to do.While these diseases are multigenic,and interact with the environmentor require an environmental stimu-lus, they are, in general, the result ofa de½ciency in a particular cell type.Here are two examples. The ½rst iscardiovascular disease. Since we canmake cardiomyocytes (heart musclecells) from embryonic stem cells,imagine how useful that will be tolearning about how to repair the

heart. Could one transplant those cells? Couldone learn how they develop normally, howto keep them in better shape, and what caus-es them to become dysfunctional or die?

I want to say a bit more about the area inwhich I work–diabetes–to give a slightlydifferent example. In the case of diabetes, asHarvey mentioned, the principal problem inType 1 or juvenile diabetes is that the cells

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SLIDE 2

SLIDE 4


SLIDE 3

that make insulin are absent. They are calledpancreatic beta cells and they produce insulinin response to glucose in the blood. Withoutthose cells, a patient will not survive. The cellsare destroyed by an autoimmune attack. It isobvious, then, that if you have a cell that canmake pancreatic beta cells, why not try to½gure out how to make it at a scale so thatyou might transplant it into patients?

Here is a picture of the pancreas, which is nextto the duodenum at the bottom of the stom-ach tube (see Slide 5). Inside the pancreas areislets, little islands of cells. The pancreas hasabout a million pancreatic islets in it: the pan-creas is about the size of a banana, and theislets are like a million little raisins pepperedthrough it. The key cell here is the pancreaticbeta cell, the one that makes insulin.

The blood vessels are next to the islet, so thatwhen you have a drink with sugar in it or eata meal–and your stomach turns the food orsugar into glucose–your body is able to makeuse of that energy source because these cellssecrete insulin. In the case of Type 1 diabetes,however, the cells that make insulin are de-stroyed, so the patient cannot make insulinand requires daily blood-glucose tests and in-sulin injections for survival.

The evidence in mice for the conclusion thatno adult stem cells exist for these beta cells isnow quite convincing. Once all of the betacells expire–either killed by an autoimmuneattack or otherwise removed– the mouse doesnot have the capacity to make more beta cells.To make more of these cells, we must turn toembryonic stem cells. How do we try to cre-ate beta cells using embryonic stem cells?

We believe we can do that throughthe process of progressive differen-tiation (see Slide 6). A cell does notdecide to become a muscle cell, ora nerve cell, or a pancreatic betacell in just one step. As in the edu-cation of a child, many steps are re-quired. We have focused on each ofthese steps for the last few years,studying in normal animals howsignals are sent to cells to tell themwhat to do. We have adapted meth-ods for putting human embryonicstem cells into dishes that have lotsof little wells in them–kind of likebingo cards with three hundred orfour hundred little wells in each ofthem. Next, we treat each well with a differentchemical, and we look for which chemicals

tell the cell to move onestep further. In this system-atic way, we are able tomove forward step bystep in directing the dif-ferentiation of cells intothe type of cell we wouldlike. This process takesseveral years. In some cas-es–and I will discuss mo-tor neurons in a few min-utes– scientists are muchfurther along than in oth-ers. Thinking ahead to thefuture, we have every rea-son to believe that we willbe able to make your fa-

vorite cell type. Let us say, for example, thatyou are concerned about getting a little bittoo plump. If we make fat cells in a dish, wecould begin to study much more easily whatmakes them divide and what makes themgrow–and how we could control their divi-sion, or the amount of adipose tissue in aperson. And I could make the same argu-ment for any type of cell in the body.

But let us return to cases like heart disease ordiabetes. I want to emphasize that for thesedegenerative diseases, there is a single celltype that is missing or defective. In Alzhei-mer’s, the defective cell is a basal forebrainneuron; in Parkinson’s, it is the dopamine-producing midbrain neuron; in als, it is themotor neuron. In each of these cases, scien-tists are studying how to take this very potentembryonic stem cell and tell it what it should

become. Having embryonic stem cells thatcan make any part of the body is an extreme-ly powerful capability. However, several fac-tors make these degenerative diseases dif-½cult to study. First, all of them are complexgenetic disorders. In other words, they are

not the result of a single genetic defect. Anexample of a simpler disease is cystic ½brosis.If a patient has a mutation in a gene calledthe cystic ½brosis transmembrane regulator(cftr), it does not matter what other genesthe patient has, or in what form, or in whatenvironment he or she grows up: that pa-tient will have cystic ½brosis. That is a verysimple–monogenic–type of disease; incontrast, all of the degenerative diseases Ihave mentioned are multigenic. Worse yet,in every case, we do not know all the genesinvolved, so for almost every disease, wehave very poor or inadequate animal models.

Also, in each of these cases, there is an envi-ronmental trigger that has yet to be identi½ed.One way to think about this situation is toenvision identical twins–with the samegenes, of course–only one of whom has the

SLIDE 5

If we could understand thegenetic program, the basicsof how a cell makes an exactcopy of itself, that knowledgewould strengthen our under-standing of how we can re-pair or replenish our bodies.


SLIDE 6

disease. In such a case, there had to be an envi-ronmental trigger, whether it was the amountof exercise they did, or the food they ate, orthe length of time they spent sitting in thesun. In most cases, we are not sure what thesignal is, but we know that it has to exist.

Finally, these diseases are dif½cult to studybecause of the long gap between the primarycause and the effect. When a patient appearswith one of these diseases, the primary causecould have been something that happenedmany years earlier.

With these challenges in mind, I want to out-line why we want to do somatic-cell nucleartransfer, or, as it’s more popularly known, hu-man cloning. Let’s take the case of als, whichinvolves a degeneration of the motor neu-rons. This disease occurs at an unfortunatelyhigh frequency in our population; most peo-ple with als do not survive for more thanthree years, although some people survivefor as many as ½ve years. There is no treat-ment and no cure, and we do not really knowthe primary cause.

At the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, we aretrying to remove the study of this diseasefrom patients and reduce it to examiningcells in a petri dish. In this way, we can com-bine the potential of stem cell biology withsomatic-cell nuclear transfer.

For a patient suffering from als, we wouldnormally do a skin biopsy, with the intentionof isolating the nucleus from one of the skin

watched them develop into motor neuronsthat are distinctly different from the normaltype of motor neuron. They observed a de-fective cell phenotype–the pathology of thehuman disease–in a petri dish.

Again, I want to be clear about why we wantto do this, because if we make defective mo-tor neurons, they are of no use for transplan-tation back into a patient. We make defectiveneurons because we want to do what is called“pharmaceutical” or “chemical” screening,where we look for chemicals that prevent thecells from dying, from having these so-calledamyloid inclusion bodies. This screening, ifit works well, could lead us to ½nd chemicals,and eventually drugs, that do not necessarilycure or reverse the disease, but at least slowdown the degeneration. In the ideal case, theymight even stop the disease from progressingfurther.

Exchanging genetic material–by somatic-cellnuclear transfer–enables us to reduce thestudy of degenerative human diseases to apetri dish, and thus to ½nd drugs that mayslow or even stop the progression of thosediseases. This outcome is quite different fromthe cellular transplantation you read about inthe media, which, in my opinion, is still yearsaway.

So you might reasonably ask, “How could any-one object to this?” I have made primarily ascienti½c argument about what we want todo, what the cells can do, and why we wantto do it. The tricky part is the intersection ofthis subject with religion and politics. I wouldlike to take this opportunity at the end of mytalk to outline my views on this matter.

cells. Remember, while we do not know all ofthe genetic variants that cause the person toget the disease, we do know that all of thegenes are inside the nucleus of every cell inthe patient’s body. Because of the work ofJohn Gurdon and others, we know it is possi-ble to remove this nucleus and inject it intoan egg recipient–an unfertilized humanoocyte–to create what are called patient-speci½c stem cells.

For those of you who have read anythingabout this work in the newspapers, you prob-ably know that scientists want to make pa-tient-speci½c stem cells in order to trans-plant them back into people. I am not talkingabout that tonight because I think such aprocedure is years away. I believe what ismore important is to be able to make dis-ease-speci½c–patient-speci½c–stem cells–not ones that we would put back in a patient,but ones that we would use to understandthe root causes or mechanisms of these dis-eases. Let’s see how that is actually done.

There are two people involved in making dis-ease-speci½c (als) embryonic stem cells.First, beginning with an als patient, a skinbiopsy is performed to get skin cells that willserve as the nuclear donor. Separately, a fe-male oocyte donor is required–here usingthe same procedures that in-vitro fertiliza-tion (ivf) clinics use to obtain an unfertil-ized egg or oocyte. The nucleus is removedfrom that oocyte and replaced with the skincell nucleus from the als patient. This trans-planted cell will divide several times to forma blastocyst, a very early stage of embryonicdevelopment, from which an embryonic stemcell can be derived.

Why would one want to create a diseasedstem cell? One reason is to study its develop-ment alongside that of normal cells, to askthe simple question of what goes wrong?Why do motor neurons in patients who haveLou Gehrig’s disease screw up? Why do thesecells die? As we can all appreciate, it is im-possible to study these questions in peoplevery effectively, but if we watch the develop-mental process unfold in a petri dish, we canbegin to understand what is going on. Sig-ni½cant progress has been made using thisapproach through the work of my colleaguesKevin Eggan and Lee Rubin, who made ge-netically altered stem cells, using the geneticalteration in cells found in als patients, and

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The ability of embryonicstem cells to make any partof the body is fascinating tobiologists because we canbegin to study properties ofself-renewal and differentia-tion; to determine how a cellknows which genes to turnon and off to make differentcell types.

Exchanging genetic material–by somatic-cell nucleartransfer–enables us to reducethe study of degenerative hu-man diseases to a petri dish,and thus to ½nd drugs thatmay slow or even stop theprogression of those diseases.


Our nation does not seem to be very good athaving inclusive, well-informed discussionsabout matters such as this, even though near-ly a decade has passed since the issue was ½rstdiscussed in the halls of Congress and else-where. While we wait, other nations are mov-ing ahead.

In my view, the problem is twofold, and it isrelated to the question of when life begins.To a biologist, that is not really the rightquestion, because life began eons ago. It isbetter to ask, “When does a person begin?”When does a cell or a fertilized egg becomea person?

First, let me be clear that I consider this to bea metaphysical, not a scienti½c, question andin my view all citizens have a right to reachan answer about this question. Society shouldnot look to science for an answer, becausethe question is unanswerable in terms of theexperiments that we might do. I think it ispossible to have respect for a fertilized egg,

or a four-cell embryo, and not consider it tobe the same thing as a baby. I could give you anumber of ways of thinking about this, butone sort of operational de½nition is that a fer-tilized egg can be kept in the freezer for tenyears and retain the potential or capacity tomake a person, and a baby cannot.

Of course, the real question is whether theyare morally equivalent, and what rights orlaws should be applicable to the treatment ofeggs. I mentioned that during the treatmentof infertility, in ivf clinics, human eggs andembryos are present, and that there is alwaysegg and embryo loss. So when a couple at-tempts to have a baby by ivf treatment, theprocess always involves the loss or destruc-tion of embryos. They are either frozen orthrown away, or they die during the proce-dure. Our society has concluded that to treatinfertility, it is acceptable to suffer the loss ofthose eggs and cells. But somehow we have

The problem centers on the source of thecells. As you know, there are two kinds ofstem cells: adult and embryonic stem cells.The controversy surrounds embryonic stemcells that come from an early stage of develop-ment called the blastocyst. In early develop-ment, after the egg is fertilized, cell divisionproceeds to form eight, then sixteen, thenthirty-two cells in a ball. At this early stage,the solid mass of dividing cells is sometimescalled a morula, after the Latin word for mul-berry or raspberry, because that is pretty muchwhat this state of embryo development lookslike on the outside: they have little bumpslike a raspberry, though of course, it is muchsmaller than a raspberry, more like the peri-od at the end of a typed sentence. The cellscontinue to divide to form a ball with morecells called the blastocyst. At this stage ofembryonic development the cells are unspe-cialized, or undifferentiated; there are no tis-sues or organs nor even any specialized nerveor muscle cells. The question is, what is themoral status of this ball of cells that has thepotential to become a human being?

We derive embryonic stem cells by takingthe cells out of the middle of the blastocystand growing them in a culture dish–this isthe creation of a stem cell line. For those whoare not biologists, I want to make clear thatthis is not something that has a brain or armsor a heart–it is not at all what you mightnormally think of as an embryo or a fetusthat has form and patterned tissues.

How do we obtain these blastocysts for re-search? Currently, we get leftover or excessblastocysts from ivf clinics, and we havebeen doing so for some years now. In collab-oration with Dr. Douglas Powers at Bostonivf, we have isolated about thirty-two humanembryonic stem cell lines, and we continueto derive cell lines, using this excess or left-over material. When a couple goes in for in-fertility treatment, more human eggs are fer-tilized than are implanted in nearly everycase. The leftover fertilized eggs are usuallyfrozen or discarded. There are estimated tobe four hundred thousand frozen embryos inthe United States today; we have used aboutthree hundred to derive our human embry-onic stem cell lines.

As I have indicated, this research has becomecontroversial because of questions arisingabout the moral status of the frozen embryos.

gotten into this paradox: when you ask thequestion, “Could you use that same materialto treat these diseases?” the answer seems tobe no. To me, this is very puzzling. Why is itpermissible to use procedures that result inthe loss of human eggs and embryos to treatinfertility, but not for the treatment of de-generative diseases?

Furthermore, if this type of research is wrong –if it is unethical and morally wrong to dothis work–we should not be discussingwhether to use federal dollars or private dol-lars; we should just not be doing it. But if itis right, why do it with so many restrictions?Why make it so dif½cult for scientists to dothings that have the potential to help people?

One of my favorite quotes, related to the sec-ond main point I want to make, comes frommy–as Harvey nicely said–ineffective tripsto Washington. What I have discovered isthat no matter how and when I try to discussthis issue, it is inextricably bound to the tor-tuous politics of abortion. So this inclined meto read the Roe v. Wade decision, which has awonderful line from Supreme Court JusticeHarry Blackmun: “We need not resolve thedif½cult question of when life begins. Whenthose trained in the respective disciplines ofmedicine, philosophy, and theology are un-able to arrive at any consensus, the Judiciary,at this point in the development of man’sknowledge, is not in a position to speculateas to the answer.” I do not need to remindyou of how many years our nation has been“arguing” or “debating” the Roe v. Wade deci-sion. I fear that we will ½nd ourselves in asimilar position over stem cell research.

What is the way forward? If I could be so boldas to make some suggestions, the ½rst wouldbe to try to have an informed public discus-sion and establish a federal–not a state–pol-icy. I think our nation has taken the wrongpath in creating state funding and regulations.This approach ties the hands of scientists interms of the free dissemination of reagentsand ideas, which is not good for the sciencenor, ultimately, for patients. Moving awayfrom establishing state policies, of course,would mean we would have to explore stemcell potential with federal funding and feder-al regulatory oversight.

While numerous states, including Massachu-setts, California, and others, are passing leg-islation that governs these “experiments,”

This research has becomecontroversial because ofquestions arising about themoral status of the frozenembryos.


other states, like Texas, have no regulations,which means that scientists there are doingwhatever they like. In the absence of federalpolicy, we will end up with an unsatisfactorysituation, with people arguing over who ownsthe rights to what research. If someone doesan experiment in Texas and creates a stem cellline, can it be transferred across state borders?To a scientist, this seems like an odd questionto be asking if what you are trying to do is tounderstand the basic properties of these cells.

My last suggestion is one that could help clari-fy issues: a clear and complete federal ban onso-called human reproductive cloning. Younotice that I used the word “cloning” when Italked about somatic-cell nuclear transfer, andit is the right term. But in general, people tendto think of cloning as making genetic copies,replicas, of babies. No scientist I know thinksthat is a good idea. It would help us reach afederal policy if everyone just agreed that itwas a bad idea and passed a law that bannedit. My own opinion is that the law has not beenpassed because some groups want to use thatconfusion to try to stop all research in this area.

Now, this might make you think that I am apessimistic person, which is not true. I wantto ½nish by telling you about a good thing thatis going on in Boston. With the help of a largenumber of hospitals and all of the differentschools within Harvard University, we creat-ed the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. Peoplefrom many disciplines, who agree that thisproblem is both important and dif½cult, havecome together to establish common rules,common institutional review boards, andcommon funding for work not supported byfederal funding. We are also collaboratingwith colleagues at neighboring institutions,particularly mit, to try to move the scienceforward. At the moment, there are about 40principal investigators, which means almost600 people are involved in this venture. Everysix weeks we have interlab meetings that bringtogether hundreds of students and postdocs.Federal restrictions do not mean that scien-tists are sitting on their hands. Of course,we would make faster and better progress ifour government clari½ed the rules and pro-vided federal funding, but work is proceed-ing at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute never-theless.

© 2007 by Harvey F. Lodish and Douglas A.Melton, respectively.

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Alan Lightman (MIT), Jamshed Bharucha (Tufts University), andLawrence Bacow (Tufts University)

Herman Chernoff (Harvard University), Bertram Malenka (North-eastern University), and Benoit Mandelbrot (Yale University)

Gerald Holton (Harvard University), Howard Hiatt (Brigham andWomen’s Hospital), and Irving London (MIT)


David E. Bloom

David E. Bloom is Clarence James Gamble Profes-sor of Economics and Demography and Chair ofthe Department of Population and InternationalHealth at the Harvard School of Public Health.He was elected to the American Academy in 2005.

I am pleased to have this opportunity toshare with you some of the work that I’vebeen doing on education for the last few years.I’ve done a great deal of this work with JoelCohen of Rockefeller and Columbia Univer-sities. Joel and I direct the Academy’s project

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Education in the Developing WorldDavid E. Bloom, Michael R. Kremer, and Gene B. Sperling

This panel discussion was given at the 1912th Stated Meeting, held at the House ofthe Academy in Cambridge on March 14, 2007. It is part of the Academy’s majorproject on Universal Basic and Secondary Education (ubase), cochaired by DavidE. Bloom and Joel E. Cohen. This project has collected new data and new thinkingon the long-term value of education in the developing world. The meeting provid-ed an opportunity for Fellows, other experts, and the media to learn about a majorAcademy program. The ubase project is supported by grants from the Williamand Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Golden Family Foundation, and the Sergei S.Zlinkoff Fund for Medical Education and gifts from John and Cynthia Reed andPaul Zuckerman.

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on Universal Basic and Secondary Education(ubase), an initiative that focuses on therationale, means, and consequences of pro-viding a quality education to all of the chil-dren in the world. The project is obviouslyquite ambitious, and perhaps that’s why ittook us ½ve years to produce our latest publi-cation, Educating All Children: A Global Agenda.

I have also conducted studies on higher educa-tion, primarily with Henry Rosovsky of Har-vard University and Matthew Hartley of theUniversity of Pennsylvania.

To begin, I’d like to comment on the differentways in which the world is falling short in pro-viding educational opportunities in develop-ing countries. Then, I’d like to spell out thevarious justi½cations for addressing these de-½ciencies and to argue that we’re not dealingwith an insurmountable problem.

H. G. Wells once described human history asa race between education and catastrophe.Looking at the state of global education overthe last few decades, I ½nd the image of a racequite apt.

Many of the world’s aspirations for educationare reflected clearly in a series of United Na-tions declarations, programs of action, andconventions and covenants. I’d like to drawyour attention to four documents in particu-lar. The ½rst is the Convention on the Rightsof the Child, which was drafted between 1975and 1990. Signed by 195 countries and rati½edby 193, it is the world’s most nearly universal-ly accepted human-rights treaty. The only twocountries that haven’t rati½ed this conventionare Somalia and the United States; this maybe the only thing these two countries have incommon. Article 28 of the Convention statesthat primary education should be compulso-ry and available free to all.

The second statement emerged in 1990 at theWorld Conference on Education for All, heldin Jomtien, Thailand. The 155 delegates in at-tendance declared their interest in universal-izing primary education and dramatically re-ducing illiteracy by the year 2000. The dele-gates left that meeting greatly energized. Theircountries made quite respectable education-al advances in the 1990s, but by 2000 it wasclear that the goal of universal primary edu-cation was nowhere close to being achieved.

The global community granted itself an ex-tension when it adopted a new framework

for action in 2000 at the Dakar World Educa-tion Forum. The 164 representatives presentat the meeting again declared their commit-ment to universal primary education, but thistime by 2015. In 2000, the international com-munity was also reinvigorating its collectiveeducational goal by including the universalcompletion of primary education by 2015among the United Nations Millennium De-velopment Goals. I would note here that, inaddition, the Millennium Development Goalscall for the elimination of gender disparity inprimary and secondary education, preferablyby 2005, which has come and passed, and inall levels by 2015. All 191 member nations ofthe United Nations pledged to meet thosegoals.

It is important to note that all four of thesestatements pertain to education at the primarylevel. None mention secondary or tertiaryeducation, and none refer to the quality ofeducation, but these are also areas in whichthe world is experiencing severe de½cits.

In 2000, one-sixth of the world’s children ofprimary-school age, 97 million in all, werenot enrolled in school; and more than half ofthose 97 million were girls. It’s also quite ap-parent now that the 2015 deadline for univer-sal primary education will not be met. Evenif countries continue to enjoy the same rateof increase in educational access that theyhave experienced since 1990–the year of theJomtien conference–we estimate that 114million primary-age kids will still be out ofschool in 2015. Educational access is not ex-panding fast enough to keep pace with theincrease in school-aged population, and theshortfall in primary education is only the tipof the iceberg.

The story of our global educational de½citsbecomes even more bleak when you shift thefocus to secondary education. As part of theubase project, we’ve estimated that 226 mil-

lion children of secondary-school age are notattending school–or 30 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds worldwide, and a slightly higherpercentage of 12- to 17-year-olds in developingcountries. The global shortfalls I’m speakingabout are equally striking if one looks at thetertiary level. People living in developingcountries account for 85 percent of the world’spopulation but little more than 50 percent ofthe world’s university students.

These enrollment de½cits at all levels are quiteconsequential. On the basis of historical andcomparative analysis, countries that exhibitsluggishness in the expansion of schooling½nd it dif½cult to advance both economicallyand socially. Part of the problem is that thesecountries have a thin and fragile skill base.For example, women who don’t make it tosecondary school tend to have more childrenthan those who do, and they tend to give theirchildren childhoods that are materially spar-ser, thereby building a much weaker founda-tion for future economic progress.

Low enrollment rates at the tertiary level alsosuggest that developing countries are forgo-ing the massive economic and social bene½tsof higher education. Some of the forgonebene½ts are the unrealized productivity andearnings of those who don’t make it to college.A study by labor economist Enrico Moretti,and another study that I conducted withHenry Rosovsky and Matt Hartley, foundthat workers who are surrounded by collegegraduates earn more, whether or not they ac-tually attended college. In other words, eventhe earnings of high-school dropouts or justhigh-school graduates are higher if they’reworking in a labor market with a higher pro-portion of college graduates, after takinginto consideration numerous other factorsthat are commonly believed to affect earnings.

In another study, we analyzed the G.I. Bill inthe United States and found that enrollmentrates are very responsive to public subsidies.Taken together, these two ½ndings indicatethat by boosting enrollment rates public sub-sidies for higher education bene½t society atlarge because they promote earnings growthfor both graduates and the rest of the work-force.

Another piece of the puzzle relates to thequality of education. Enrollment statisticsaren’t everything. Enrollment doesn’t neces-sarily mean attendance. Attendance doesn’t

In 2000, one-sixth of theworld’s children of primary-school age, 97 million in all,were not enrolled in school;and more than half of those97 million were girls.


necessarily mean receiving an education.Receiving an education doesn’t necessarilymean receiving a good education. In manydeveloping countries, educational experiencesat all levels–primary, secondary, and tertiary–are characterized by outdated curricula andlearning materials and by uninspiring, under-quali½ed teachers.

Let me focus for a moment on India. Most ofus think of India as a real powerhouse in therealms of math and science, but the founda-tion for that perception, at least at the primaryand secondary level, seems to be rather shaky,on the basis of a recent study of students in142 of the top private schools in the ½ve metroareas in India. According to that study, ashocking proportion of Indian studentscouldn’t demonstrate anything beyond thecapacity for memorization. For example,

three-quarters of the students in the fourthgrade were unable to use a ruler to determinethe length of a pencil, if the starting point forthe pencil was not zero but rather one cen-timeter. They weren’t able to ½gure out thatyou had to take the total amount and subtractone to get the answer. Among sixth-grade stu-dents, only one in six recognized that steamis nothing more than gaseous water, and halfof the students in grades four and six showedvery little understanding of even the simplestuse of decimal points. Now from this study,recently published in India’s version of Timemagazine, it would be fair to conclude thatIndia has become a math, science, and engi-neering powerhouse in spite of, and not be-cause of, the quality of its education system.

The various educational de½cits to which I’vedrawn attention, both those relating to accessand those relating to quality, are consequen-tial problems from a multitude of perspec-tives. But they are also rather pathetic because

in a sense they’re absolutely surmountable.So what’s to be done? One major action in-volves, not surprisingly, devoting greaterresources to education. The World Bank,unesco, and unicef have estimated thatit would cost between $6.5 and $35 billion an-nually to get 97 million children who are cur-rently not in school into primary school. Inone chapter of our book, Melissa Binder, aneconomist in New Mexico, estimates that anadditional $27 to $34 billion would make itpossible to achieve universal secondary edu-cation. The numbers are higher here becausesecondary education is more expensive perpupil than primary education and becausethere are more kids who would need to betaken into school. At any rate, the totals hereat the primary and the secondary level basi-cally amount to somewhere between $34 and$69 billion annually.

I will be the ½rst to acknowledge that this is agreat deal of money, but I also believe that it’swithin our capacity to generate that funding.Even the upper end of that range, $69 billion,is just two-thirds of annual U.S. outlays inAfghanistan and Iraq. If the poor countriesof the world, the developing countries, wereto cover that $69 billion, it would take be-tween 0.5 and 1 percent of their national in-comes. But if the rich countries paid for it, itwould take about 0.25 percent of their in-comes. That amount would effectively dou-ble the amount of overseas development as-sistance coming from the wealthy industrialcities, but it would still leave them well belowthe 0.7 percent standard that all these coun-tries agreed to in writing just a couple of yearsago. Britain has actually taken a major step inthat direction. It’s committed to spending$15 billion on education between 2005 and2015.

These needs are by no means trivial, but thereare a number of creative mechanisms for de-velopment ½nancing. In particular, GordonBrown, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer,(now Prime Minister), has proposed some-thing known as the International Finance Fa-cility. This plan is a very simple and straight-forward, but quite imaginative, merger ofclassic development ½nance, which is doneon a year-by-year basis by bilateral and mul-tilateral organizations, with principles of com-mercial ½nance. It has the potential to help½nance the investments that are needed, butultimately–and I think this is important–

the kinds of investments we’re speaking aboutwill pay for themselves through the returnsthey yield. Therefore, it’s really just a questionof ½nding a way to ½nance the necessary in-vestments. If we do that, we will realize thebene½ts in the future.

In thinking about these investments, we alsohave to keep in mind the various argumentsthat we have for undertaking them. Let mesketch them briefly. The ½rst set of argumentsis moral, ethical, and humanitarian. Devotingresources to education is the right thing todo; it’s a good thing to do; it’s a fair thing todo; it’s the just thing to do. The second argu-ment is that education is a fundamental hu-man right. The opportunity to be educated isa legally just claim to which all human beingsare entitled by virtue of the fact that they arehuman beings. I’ve mentioned the Conven-tion on the Rights of the Child, which embod-ies this principle; the Universal Declarationof Human Rights, which was signed and is-sued in December 1948, also very much es-pouses this principle.

Argument number three is economic. Educa-tion improves the productivity and the eco-nomic well-being of individuals and also ad-vances the technological and institutional in-novation and the economic performance ofsocieties, capturing not just the earnings gainsof the people who are educated but also thespillovers that I mentioned before. Some ofthe spillovers take the form of higher earningsfor people who don’t get educated, higherrates of entrepreneurial activity, better gov-ernments, and the like.

A fourth argument involves the social bene½tsof education. The idea here is that educationpromotes the building of cohesive, equitable,

Educational access is not expanding fast enough tokeep pace with the increasein school-aged population,and the shortfall in primaryeducation is only the tip ofthe iceberg.

The totals for primary andsecondary education amountto somewhere between $34and $69 billion annually . . .Even the upper end of thatrange, $69 billion, is just two-thirds of annual U.S. outlaysin Afghanistan and Iraq.


Academy Meetings

and strong societies. Finally, we have the po-litical bene½ts of education. Educational pro-gress mitigates inequality both within andbetween nations, and in that way supportspolitical stability and global security. There’salso the idea that democracies function bet-ter when people have more access to informa-tion and the ability to process it as well as tocommunicate more readily.

I’ve painted a picture that’s a bit of doom andgloom, but we have some promising news.Many global leaders with both political andeconomic muscle, ranging from GordonBrown to Bill Gates, recognize that globaleducation isn’t what it could be or what itshould be. They understand that we’re notdoing that well in the race against catastro-phe, and they’re starting to view the issuenot as whether to act but rather as what to do.The focus is starting to shift to identifyingand comparing the options we have for edu-cational development. In other words, shouldwe focus our attention on better curricula,teacher training, or incentivizing teachers?Should we be building more schools or equip-ping the schools that we have with comput-ers and libraries? Latrines are another aspectof the educational infrastructure that is espe-cially important for girls at the secondary-school level. Julia Chandler, a Harvard un-dergraduate, is completing her senior thesison the extent to which the inadequacy of la-trines at schools is responsible for the muchsharper fall-off in enrollment rates of girls atthe secondary level than those of boys.

We must also ask whether we should be look-ing outside the bounds of education in orderto improve education. Maybe we should bebuilding roads so that kids can get to schoolmore easily, or maybe we should be workingin the area of health, in particular children’shealth, so kids will miss less time in schooland get more out of each day that they spendin school. Then, of course, we must also lookat what combinations of interventions are par-ticularly effective. In any case, we’ve reachedthe stage where we’re being asked to addressthe questions that relate to just how wide anddeep the information base is for taking actionin this area. I’m very heartened by this shiftin the focus of our inquiries. I think it holdsthe best hope for human history to keep up inthe race against catastrophe.

Michael R. Kremer

Michael R. Kremer is Gates Professor of DevelopingSocieties and Professor of Economics at HarvardUniversity and Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution. He has been a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy since 2003.

David considered the challenge of increas-ing the quantity of education. I’d like to focuson the quality of education. Before I do that,though, let me say a few words on the topicof quantity. As David pointed out, almost 100million children of primary age are not inschool.1 But we have some grounds for hopeon the quantity front. In fact, if you look at

the number of years of education that peoplein the developing world have attained, it hasconsistently risen at approximately the samerate as in the developed world.2 This is notprimarily because of what rich countries aredoing, but because of factors internal to de-veloping countries themselves. India andother countries are growing rapidly and havemade tremendous progress. Africa is laggingbehind, but even there we have seen some im-

provement, in part because many countrieshave abolished school fees. The proliferationof conditional cash-transfer programs likeprogressa in Mexico, in which parentsearn rewards for keeping their children inschool, have also positively contributed toschool enrollment.

What more can be done in this area? Let mejust mention one very cost-effective measure.The Jameel Poverty Action Lab at mit hascompiled a short document that comparesthe cost-effectiveness of various approachesto ensuring children are in school.3 One high-ly cost-effective measure is school healthprograms to treat students for worms. Thisprogram costs pennies per dose, and for every$3.50 such a program spends, it keeps an ad-ditional child in school for a year.

Raising the quality of education is increasing-ly going to be the challenge. Children in manydeveloping countries are more and more fre-quently in school, but their performance onstandardized tests and other measures oflearning remains abysmal.

Some insights on educational quality can begleaned from international tests such astimss (Third International Mathematicsand Science Study), pirls (Progress in Inter-national Reading Literacy Study), and pisa

(Programme for International Student As-sessment). Unfortunately, most poor devel-oping countries do not participate in inter-national testing, although a few, mostly mid-dle-income countries, have begun to do so.On the 2003 pisa, 26.0 percent of childrenin Indonesia scored below level 1 (the lowestlevel) on the reading test, 26.9 percent inBrazil, 24.9 percent in Mexico, 6.5 percent inthe United States, 6.3 percent in France, and1.1 percent in Finland.

On a survey of rural children aged 11 and overin Bangladesh, 58 percent of children failed toidentify at least seven of eight letters that werepresented to them.4 In Brazil, 78 percent ofchildren cannot answer simple math prob-

1unesco, EFA Global Monitoring Report 2006:

Education for All: Literacy for Life (Paris: unesco

Publishing, 2006).

2 Robert Barro and Jong Wha Lee, “Internation-al Measures of Schooling Years and SchoolingQuality,” The American Economic Review 86 (2)(1996): 218–223.

3 Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, “Fight-ing Poverty: What Works?” (Cambridge: mit,2005).

4 Vincent Greaney, Shahidur R. Khandker, andMahmudul Alam, Bangladesh: Assessing BasicLearning Skills (Washington, D.C.: World Bank,1999).

Raising the quality of edu-cation is increasingly goingto be the challenge.


lems.5 In India, when given the sentence,“The dog is black with a white spot on hisback and one white leg,” 28 percent of sixthgraders could not correctly answer if the colorof the dog was mostly black, brown, or gray.6

The reasons for these low levels of learningare numerous, but an important factor isteacher absence. A recent survey by NazmulChaudhury et al. investigated teacher atten-dance at schools in a variety of developingcountries. In Bangladesh, 16 percent of teach-ers were absent; in Ecuador, 14 percent; inPeru, 11 percent; in Indonesia, 19 percent; inIndia, 25 percent; and in Uganda, 27 percent.7

This means that on any given day a child mightgo to school, a quarter of the teachers mightnot be present.

Teacher attendance does not necessarily en-tail teaching, however. In India, for example,only about half of the teachers in the class-room were actually teaching.8 The other halfwere on tea break, sitting in the classroomreading a newspaper, or otherwise occupied.Advancing past rote learning is certainly animportant issue, but in some ways even get-ting to rote learning in some schools wouldbe progress.

Many people believe that teachers will notimprove their attendance records until theyare paid well. Certainly some countries under-pay their teachers, or of½cially give them rea-sonable salaries but pay them late or neglectto pay them entirely. But many other countriespay teachers much more than the typical work-er receives or much more than is necessaryto attract people to the position. In oecd

countries, the typical teacher makes about

1.3 times the per-capita gdp; in sub-SaharanAfrica the ratio is 6.7.9 There are some verylegitimate reasons for that level of salary.Teachers with a secondary or postsecondaryeducation have much more education thanthe average person in a developing countrydoes; thus they should be paid more relativeto the average worker.

However, this is not the full story. In India, forexample, a recent study found that salaries ofteachers in rural private schools are about one-½fth the salaries of teachers in public schools.10

And while these rural private schools are notparagons of virtue, absence rates in theseschools are actually somewhat lower than inpublic schools, despite the much lower sala-ries. This suggests that there is more to theteacher-absence problem than just lowsalaries.

By focusing on studies with randomized eval-uations, one can see the effectiveness of dif-ferent approaches to addressing this problemof teacher absences. In these types of studies,a government or an ngo introduces a pro-gram in such a way that it randomly assignssome schools or regions to be a treatmentgroup and others to be a comparison group;alternatively, it phases in the program overtime and the order of the phase-in is random.Randomizing makes it possible to isolate theimpact of the program in a rigorous way.

One approach to the problem of teacher ab-sences is to enact some sort of formal incen-tive system for teachers. A second approachinvolves local control or local teachers. Anda third approach involves school choice orcompetition among schools.

Given the way incentive systems typicallywork, it seems the simplest step would be toreward teachers only if they show up at school.However, a Kenyan program that attemptedto do this was a failure. A study of this pro-gram found that the headmasters who werecharged with monitoring teacher attendancewere reluctant to penalize teachers for notshowing up, even if the school was able tokeep the money that was not paid as bonusesto the teachers.11

Esther Duflo and Rema Hanna have evaluat-ed a different kind of incentive program inIndia in which teachers in informal schoolsrun by an ngo were asked to take picturesof themselves with their students in school.Each picture has a time and date stamp. Un-like the program in Kenya, this measure ac-tually had a major effect on teacher absence.Teachers started showing up so that theywould receive bonuses. Moreover, it led to asigni½cant increase in test scores as well as a43 percent increase in the number of childrenwho went on to regular primary schools.12

In this program, the incentives were linked toshowing up. But economists often argue thatincentives should not be graded by their in-puts but by their output–what one reallycares about. What is the impact of these in-centives linked to student test scores? Anobvious danger is teaching to the test. Onthe other hand, it could be argued that oneshould not worry about teaching to the testwhen one cannot even get teachers to showup to school. In effect, teaching to the test is a second-order problem. On theoreticalgrounds, it is possible to argue either way.

Analysis of a program in Kenya, which re-warded teachers based on student test scores,

5 Deon Filmer, Amer Hasan, and Lant Pritchett,“A Millennium Learning Goal: Measuring RealProgress in Education,” Center for Global De-velopment Working Paper No. 97, August 2006.

6 Marlaine E. Lockheed and Adriaan M. Ver-spoor, Improving Primary Education in DevelopingCountries (Washington, D.C.: Oxford UniversityPress, 1991).

7 Nazmul Chaudhury, Jeffrey Hammer, MichaelKremer, Karthik Muralidharan, and F. HalseyRogers, “Missing in Action: Teacher and HealthWorker Absence in Developing Countries,”Journal of Economic Perspectives 20 (1) (2006):91–116.

8 Ibid.

9 J. Eicher, “Educational Costing and Financingin Developing Countries: With Special Referenceto Sub Saharan Africa,” World Bank Staff Work-ing Paper No. 665, 1984.

10 Karthik Marlidharan and Michael Kremer,“Public and Private Schools in Rural India,”forthcoming in Paul Peterson and RajashriChakrabarti, eds., School Choice International,mit Press.

11 Michael Kremer and Daniel Chen, “An InterimReport on a Teacher Attendance Incentive Pro-gram in Kenya,” Mimeo, Harvard University,2001.

12 Esther Duflo and Rema Hanna, “MonitoringWorks: Getting Teachers to Come to School,”nber Working Paper No. 11880, May 2006.

The reasons for these lowlevels of learning are numer-ous, but an important factoris teacher absence . . . on anygiven day a child might go toschool, a quarter of the teach-ers might not be present.


Academy Meetings

suggests teacher attendance did not improve,nor did other indicators of teacher behavior,such as assigning homework or otherwisechanging pedagogical techniques. What wasfound was an increase in test preparation ses-sions.13 Kenya, like many other developingcountries, has a national exam system. Theseexams are very important, and schools holdtest preparation sessions called “preps” toget students ready. Teachers held these ses-sions more often. Thus, teachers were respond-ing to the incentive, but not necessarily onthe dimensions that one would have hoped,suggesting that the problem of teaching tothe test is real even in developing countries.

What happened to test scores under this pro-gram? Generally, scores increased while theprogram was in place, but after the programwas over, test scores for the same studentsdeclined. Thus it does not appear that theprogram was that successful.

Karthik Muralidharan and Venkatesh Sun-daramanan have examined a similar pro-gram in India and interpret the results in amuch more positive light.14 Their assess-ment is based on the increase in test scoreson conceptual questions as well as on whatthey call mechanical questions. But, as inKenya, the incentive did not result in an in-crease in teacher attendance, and it remainsto be seen whether the effect on test scoreswill be permanent.

Another approach involves providing infor-mation to local decision-making bodies andlocal teachers. Many have argued that onceparents and communities are informed ofwhat is going on in the schools, they will de-mand reform. One program in India tookthis approach. Tentatively, the outcomes in-dicate that information, by itself, does notmake a big difference. Another program inKenya showed that teachers who were trained

13 Paul Glewwe, Nauman Ilias, and MichaelKremer, “Teacher Incentives,” Mimeo, HarvardUniversity, 2004.

14 Karthik Muralidharan and Venkatesh Sun-dararaman, “Teacher Incentives in DevelopingCountries: Experimental Evidence from India,”Harvard University Department of Economics,Unpublished Paper, November 2006.

and monitored by parent committees weremore likely to be in class and teaching.15

Another related avenue is to hire teachersfrom the local community. These local teach-ers might not have as much formal training,but because they are from the area, they pre-sumably feel more loyalty to, or social pres-sure from, the community to perform theirjob well. In the same Kenyan program, theparent committees were empowered andfunded to hire credentialed, local teachers toaccommodate increased enrollment. Theseteachers, whether for reasons of local famil-iarity or because they were hired on a renew-

able contract, had better attendance recordsthan their counterpart civil service teachersand their students performed better on tests.16

Yet another approach worth considering isusing school-choice programs as a way toimprove student achievement. Colombia’ssecondary-school voucher program is aprime example of this. In order to receive avoucher, a student had to attend a public pri-mary school and come from one of the poor-est neighborhoods. The voucher paid forthese students to go to private schools–notelite private schools but private schools forrelatively poor people. Because the programwas oversubscribed, Colombia’s leaders de-

cided to lottery the vouchers. This, in turn,set the scene for a randomized evaluation.

A study of this program followed both thewinners and losers of the lottery and foundthat the winners scored higher on exams andwere less likely to repeat grades. In fact, a fewyears into the program, they were scoringabout 20 percent of a standard deviation high-er than those who lost the lottery.17 This isequivalent to the difference between the ½f-tieth percentile and the ½fty-eighth percentilein a distribution. The effect seems to havebeen somewhat greater for girls. Joshua An-grist et al. then looked at the long-run effectsof this program–for example, on high-schoolcompletion. About 32 percent of the losers ofthe lottery ½nished secondary school. Thecompletion rate for the winners of the lotterywas about ½ve to seven percentage pointshigher.

Some very important questions arise fromthese results. One involves generalizability.The school-choice program appears to haveworked well in Colombia. The results onvouchers in the United States are not quite so promising. Perhaps this is because in U.S.public schools, despite all the complaintsabout them, teachers are generally not ab-sent a quarter of the time. It remains to beseen if the results can be generalized fromColombia to other developing countries.

Another issue relevant to school choice is itsimpact on the system as a whole. The Colom-bia study suggests that the students who wereable to participate in the voucher programbene½ted. But, of course, an important ques-tion is the effect of the program on both stu-dents who stayed in the public-school systemand on students who started out in the pri-vate-school system.

Given the terrible quality of education in manydeveloping countries, it is worth experiment-ing with a range of different initiatives, fromhiring local teachers to involving the privatesector to a greater degree. If we can build up

If we can build up a base of evidence and rigorouslyevaluate a variety of ap-proaches, then policymakerscan help ensure not only thatchildren are in school butthat they are actually learn-ing something.

15 Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, and MichaelKremer, “Peer Effects, Class Size and TeacherIncentives: Evidence from a Randomized Experi-ment in Kenya,” Unpublished Paper, May 2007.

16 Ibid.

17 Joshua Angrist, Eric Bettinger, Erik Bloom,Beth King, and Michael Kremer, “Vouchers forPrivate Schooling in Colombia: Evidence from aRandomized Natural Experiment,” AmericanEconomic Review 92 (5) (2002): 1535–1558.


a base of evidence and rigorously evaluate avariety of approaches, then policymakers canhelp ensure not only that children are inschool but that they are actually learningsomething.

Gene B. Sperling

Gene B. Sperling is Director of the Center for Uni-versal Education at the Council on Foreign Rela-tions and serves as U.S. Chair of the Global Cam-paign for Education.

Universal primary education is simultane-ously the world’s most important, ambitious,and pathetic goal. An overwhelming weightof evidence suggests that education, particu-larly girls’ education, has an impact acrossthe board. For example, education has a fun-damental influence on the size and health offamilies. David mentioned a study in Brazilthat examined girls who went to secondaryschool versus girls who never went to school:the difference was 2.5 versus 6 offspring.Whether or not a girl is in school when she’s16 or 17 years old can also have dramatic ef-fects on the likelihood of her contractinghiv/aids. Thus education is vital to wo-men’s empowerment in developing coun-tries and within their family structures.

People may not grasp the crises of poor edu-cation in developing nations because theymay never turn on cnn and see someonedying from a lack of education. But make nomistake about it: when you look at the effectof education on family structure, health, in-fant mortality, and maternal mortality, thereis no question that every day thousands ofchildren die from a lack of education.

The goal of achieving universal primary edu-cation is ambitious. As David and Joel demon-strate in Educating All Children, 250 to 400 mil-lion kids do not attend secondary school, and80 to 100 million are out of primary school.Michael provided a slightly dark view, butmany positive projects are out there, too, aswell as examples of people who are doinggreat things to get kids learning in school.

Finally, universal primary education is theworld’s most pathetic goal. Every once in awhile I speak to sixth graders. The ½rst ques-tions they ask every single time are: why areyou only trying to get kids to elementaryschool, and why are you waiting until 2015?Those seem like very good questions to me.The Millennium Development Goal of hav-ing every child go to school through ½fth orsixth grade is in some ways pathetic. One ofthe great things about this new book fromthe ubase project is that it is willing to takea leap and say, even when we have so far to goto achieve universal primary education, thatshouldn’t be our aspiration. At minimum, ouraspiration should be universal basic education,which most people think of as at least eightyears, at least part of a secondary education,and at least on its way to the more ambitiousvision of universal secondary education.

I have written a lot on the notion of a globalcompact. All major national education plans,of course, have to be consistent with the no-tion that the most sustainable initiatives haveto come from the ground up. But those of uswho live here have to ask ourselves, “What’sour responsibility? What’s our role?” Whenpeople like me talk about development assis-tance, it’s not to ignore in any way the im-portance of what happens on the ground, orthe incentives or social pressures that maketeachers or students show up for school. It’ssimply to say that this is where we are, and toask what our role is in ful½lling some of thehuman rights charters that we’ve signed.When I think of a global compact, I don’tmean a compact in a simplistic sense. I meanit in a dynamic sense. What incentives canwe provide to empower education reformersand champions in developing nations, andwhat must they establish to win the con½denceof donor partners to step up to the plate?

Let me discuss ½ve points we need to under-stand to reach universal primary education,or the even more ambitious goal of universal

basic or secondary education. The ½rst point,which both speakers touched upon, is schoolchoice. In the United States, the school-choicedebate is about private schools and vouchers.In the developing world, school choice meanswhether or not parents can send their childto school at all, particularly their daughters.

It is clear that education is good for childrenand for countries. What is at times less clearis whether sending a child to school is per-ceived as good for the parents–the ones whoare the ultimate decision makers in most cas-es. For parents who live in extreme povertyand believe they need the help of their chil-dren to manage day-to-day chores or to helpsupport their family, they may believe thatschool is not always the best choice. So a lotof what sound policy tries to do is alignwhat’s best for the parents with what’s bestfor the child and what’s best for the country.

These incentives address three broad cate-gories of costs. The ½rst is direct fees. Whenparents have to pay fees, which make up ahigh percentage of their income, they usuallyend up sending only their oldest son to school.If you want to discourage poor people fromsending their kids–especially their twoyoungest daughters–to school, then chargea fee per child. Eliminating fees has indis-putably had a dramatic impact. When Kenyaeliminated fees, it went in one year from hav-ing 5.9 million to 7.2 million children inschool. In Uganda, the number went from3.4 million to 6.5 million, and in Tanzania,from 1.5 to 3 million.

We also have to consider the indirect costs of education. Michael did a study on schooluniforms, transportation fees, and commut-ing hours. These are all examples of indirect

What incentives can we pro-vide to empower educationreformers and champions in developing nations, andwhat must they establish towin the con½dence of donorpartners to step up to theplate?


Academy Meetings

costs, which also discourage parents fromsending their children to school.

Finally, we have to take into account oppor-tunity costs. Parents who must weigh the op-portunity costs of educating their childrenare not simply those who rely on the incometheir children receive from working for some-body else. In situations of extreme poverty,children often help their families directly bygathering water or wood and taking care ofyoung children.

In Brazil, Bolsa Escola, now called Bolsa Fa-milia, conditions their version of the earnedincome tax credit on sending one’s kids toschool and the kids having 90 percent atten-dance. Policies and programs like Bolsa Fa-milia’s, which align incentives for the parentwith what is best for the child, have provensuccessful–even in the face of cultural or re-ligious barriers. Let me be anecdotal here. Ihave spoken to many people in the ½eld whosay, “The religious leaders in this communitywere against sending the girls to school, butwhen we built the school there, when webuilt a well nearby, when it was easier to edu-cate their children, when the costs of doingit decreased, the resistance tended to fade.”When you reduce the cost in the cost-bene½tanalysis, parents will often choose what’sbest for their child’s future.

Second, how do we avoid trade-offs betweenaccess and quality? Uganda is everybody’sfavorite success and failure story. It attainedtremendous success in getting kids intoschool, but it failed a bit on the quality side.What you see in many places is that as kidscome to school, class sizes explode andteacher-student ratios go up dramatically.I visited a school in Tanzania with 140 kidsfor one teacher. I’ve been in a school in Ethio-pia with 170 kids for one teacher. In the Tan-zanian class that I saw, all but 10 or 15 studentswere sitting on the floor.

Now, many people would propose solvingthis problem by not scaling up as fast. In oth-er words, don’t try to accomplish these am-bitious goals. I always feel that people wouldonly recommend that solution for childrenthey don’t love or see every day. If I told thesuperintendent of the Washington, D.C.,schools that I have an excellent idea for howto improve the quality of education for 60percent of the children in the schools as longas we deny the other 40 percent the ability to

attend school, I don’t think my idea wouldgo very far. So for moral as well as other rea-sons, the idea of improving quality by slow-ing the matriculation of children into schoolshould not even be on the table.

On the topic of development assistance, overthe last four or ½ve years, I have seen educa-tion ministers lay out their “education forall” plans. Yet, since ½nance ministers havenot seen proof that donor nations will providesigni½cant long-term and predictable fund-ing, they are usually unwilling to approveplans to do what they often most need: hirenew teachers. Why? They use the money forbuilding schools or other one-time costs, butwhat they do not do–take Kenya, for exam-ple–is hire the teachers they need to keep

class sizes from exploding because they donot trust that the money will last long enoughto bear the recurrent costs of their salaries.This is a huge issue in the ½nancing of qualitybasic education. As one who had to work oneight U.S. budgets, I understand their concern:you are not supposed to try to pay for a recur-rent cost like salaries with a one-time sale. Ican’t tell you how many times somebody inone of our departments, a cabinet member,has called me and said, “I have a great idea.We can do the spectrum sale and use themoney to fund Head Start.” I always reply:“You know that money for Head Start has togo on forever, whereas you can only sell thatpark or asset once.” That’s the situation a lotof developing countries confront. If you wereto ask the minister of education from Kenyawhy they don’t even try to penetrate theirmost nomadic region, where only 17 to 18percent of the kids are in school, he wouldtell you that by the time he ½gured out a wayto give teachers an incentive to move thereand then trained them, the three-year WorldBank funding cycle would be up.

In contrast, the Gordon Brown approach isnot just to give $1.5 billion to a developingcountry next year, which is a huge jump infunding for a G8 country. His message hasbeen that if a developing nation provides aten-year plan, we should try to assure thatcountry that the money will be there over thelong haul, so that it can plan a scaling-up ofteachers, textbooks, and other factors thataffect quality without fearing that the sup-port will suddenly come up dry. There aremany problems in implementation, but thebasic understanding is that with teacherscomprising 75 percent of the cost of educationvirtually everywhere, and with that being anongoing cost, you cannot expect to get thisother half of kids into school unless you havea plan that gives ½nance ministers the con½-dence that they can have the funding goingforward. Rwanda’s minister of educationonce told me, “We have an expression for it.We call it ‘aid shock.’ I will never use devel-opment assistance money for teachers be-cause if it runs out they’ll be outside my win-dow throwing rocks. They won’t be outsidethe World Bank’s or usaid’s windows.”

A third issue is how to build mutual trust ifyou have this compact. I already describedthe trust we need to build from the develop-ing country’s perspective–the trust that theresources will be there in a signi½cant andlong enough way to expand educational ac-cess. But there’s something else. Everybodyin this room will tell you that really high-quality universal preschool in the UnitedStates has high rewards. There’s very littledispute that if we spent enough money anddid it right, it would work. Yet we don’t evencome close to doing it. Meanwhile, everyyear, mysteriously, there’s enough money forthe transportation budget. There’s enoughmoney for that extra project for a member ofCongress to name. The point is, in the Unit-ed States, a rich country, people focus muchmore on things they can do immediately andget immediate credit for, such as creatingjobs or naming that bridge.

When you go to a developing country and saythe goals for your presidency, for your momentin history, should be to try to get all your 5-year-olds in school, you are asking that leaderto do something that is going to help the econ-omy of his successor, and his successor’s suc-cessor, and so on. When heads of state de-cide that they want to make their legacy uni-

It is clear that education isgood for children and forcountries. What is at timesless clear is whether sendinga child to school is perceivedas good for the parents.


versal primary education, the one thing therest of the world should not do is make themlook like they stepped up to the plate and noone supported them. If that happens, thenother nations’ presidential advisors are go-ing to tell the next president not to try to ac-complish universal education: “Don’t do it.Look what happened. Everybody was excitedfor two years. The development assistanceflowed; it raised expectations; and now peo-ple aren’t happy.”

From a donor nation’s perspective, the mostimportant issue for establishing mutual trustis the assurance that the dollars are going tothe right place, that the money won’t go toteachers who don’t show up or to cronies.From the donor country’s perspective, a de-veloping country has to understand that ac-countability and transparency matter. Kenyaworked out an agreement with dfid, inwhich the money went directly to local banks.Headmasters picked up the money by bring-ing a voucher. That kind of creative measuregives people the con½dence that the dollarsare, at least, going to where they are criticallyneeded and designed to go.

In development assistance, we look at twomodels. One is the global compact: there aresome governments that are making sure thattheir kids are in school, that there is a nation-ally owned plan, and that donor countriesare supporting them. This is the model be-hind the Monterey Consensus, the Millenni-um Challenge account, and the EducationFast Track Initiative.

The other model, which David talked about,focuses on the rights of a child. We have toacknowledge a basic tension here. Under theMillennium Challenge idea, you don’t givemoney to a country if you don’t trust its gov-ernment. You don’t give money if you don’tbelieve there is a trustworthy compact. But ifyou believe that every child has a right to goto school, then why would you do less for achild who has the double or triple misfortuneto be in a poor developing country and to bea refugee or to be internally displaced and liv-ing in a fragile state? If we’re really seriousabout the rights of children, we have to ½g-ure out how to get money to children in situ-ations where either we do not trust the gov-ernment, as in Zimbabwe, or we think theleader is wonderful but we question his ca-pacity, as in Liberia.

In nations affected by conflict, we need tobuild trust that funds will not be wasted ordiverted to war or used to promote ethnictension. We must reduce the trust gap. Wehave to try to distribute aid in a way that em-powers the state the most, but if you have aTaliban situation and you have to go throughngos, then you do the best you can and ½gureout a plan to reinstate the state’s authorityover time as the political situation improves.Of 80 to 90 million kids not in school, 20 to25 million are in places of conflict and inrefugee camps. These children have beenthrough the greatest hardship in the world,and education could make a dramatic differ-ence in turning their lives around.

I’ll just mention the fourth point very briefly.When you’re calculating the cost of univer-sal primary education, one view holds that½guring out the cost of just ½ve or six years isenough. Even if you thought that was theright goal, which I don’t, it is absolutely in-sane to price out 100 percent completion ofsixth graders and not factor in the additionalcost that a lot of those sixth graders will nowwant to go to seventh, eighth, and ninthgrades. That may seem obvious, but I havebeen to a place in Egypt where our govern-ment helped get 95 percent of rural girlsthrough sixth grade only to neglect to pro-vide a dollar for them to go to seventh grade.

Finally, I want to explain why this issue is nowreceiving a little bit more attention in D.C.:people are starting to see a connection be-tween education and the ½ght against globalterror. There are certainly some fundamen-talists–not a huge number but some–thatteach hate and terrorism and violence. Someof the children that attend those schoolswould not go if they had a better alternative.

But the notion that the right way to do this isto have a targeted Muslim education initia-tive from the United States is counterpro-

ductive. I say this based on conversations Ihave had repeatedly. In Bahrain, three womenwho sought to improve science educationthere said they were reluctant to take anykind of assistance from the United States be-cause people have now started to ask whetherthey are tools of the U.S. government. WhenI was asked to speak at the U.S. Muslim Con-ference on Universal Education, the numberone comment I heard was, “You never caredabout our kids before 9/11, why do you careabout them now?”

Here is my bottom line: If you want to winhearts and minds, you don’t do that by show-ing people that you care about their childrenonly to the extent that they don’t grow up toblow up your children. If you want to showpeople that you care about their children, thesimple answer is that you should care abouttheir children regardless of where they live.The best way for the United States to winhearts and minds anywhere is to be the worldleader that seeks to get all children into schooleverywhere. In other words, we need to showthe world not a calculated foreign policy mindbut a big U.S. heart. I believe that if people ina Muslim country saw that we were expend-ing the same effort in Rwanda or places thatwere not important to us strategically, theywould interpret the actions we take in theircountry as more genuine.

The last sentence in my contribution to Edu-cating All Children is something PresidentClinton said when he was trying, in the ½nalmonths of his administration, to achievepeace in the Middle East. His team told himthat the chances of peace looked pretty low,to which he responded, “Well, this is so im-portant that there are really only two options.One, we have to succeed, or two, we have tobe caught trying.” So I honor this Academyproject because I think that you’ve certainlybeen caught trying. I believe it will make areal difference in the lives of a lot of poorchildren who have many of the same aspira-tions and dreams that our children do.

© 2007 by David E. Bloom, Michael R. Kremer,and Gene B. Sperling, respectively.

The best way for the UnitedStates to win hearts andminds anywhere is to be the world leader that seeks to get all children into schooleverywhere.


Academy Meetings

Henry Rosovsky (Harvard University) and Rose Frisch (Harvard University)

Visiting Scholars Taylor Fravel, Anthony Mora, and Anne Stiles

Robert A. LeVine (Harvard University) and Howard Gardner (HarvardUniversity)

Bruno Coppi (MIT), Laszlo Tisza (MIT), and Academy President EmilioBizzi (MIT)


Francis Bator (Harvard University) and Louis W. Cabot (Cabot-Wellington,LLC)

Rosanna Warren

Rosanna Warren is Emma MacLachlan MetcalfProfessor in the Humanities at Boston University.She has been a Fellow of the American Academysince 1997.

Introduction

You can see a portrait of Galway Kinnell inhis poem “The Past”:

“A chair under one arm,a desktop under the other,the same Smith-Coronaon my back I even now batterwords into visibility with . . .”

Battering words into visibility: that is whathe has been doing now through eleven booksof poems. Did you think you knew the Eng-lish language? Think again. Some of thewords Kinnell batters into sight are not evenin the oed–or if they are, only under “ob-solete,” or “origin unknown.” Like shinicle,clart, hirple, drouk, scummage, and dunch,all from just two poems in the blazing newbook, Strong Is Your Hold.

Kinnell has never shied away from the sub-lime, or the elemental. In his earlier days hisambition took an almost psalmodic form:

“. . . the oath broken,the oath sworn between earth and water,

flesh and spirit, broken,to be sworn again,over and over, in the clouds, and to be

broken again,over and over, on earth.”(“Under the Maud Moon,” The Book ofNightmares, 1971).

He inhabited animals as a shaman–the bear,famously; the sow; the gray heron; he priedinto birth, into dying, grandly, kabbalistical-ly: “I thought suddenly / I could read thecosmos spelling itself.”(“The Hen Flower,” The Book of Nightmares).

And as a side effect of this visionary exuber-ance, Kinnell’s Selected Poems won both thePulitzer Prize and the National Book Awardin 1982, compounded by a MacArthur Fellow-ship and his Erich Maria Remarque Professor-ship at nyu. But prizes are by the by. He hasalways been out for the big prize, the prize ofvision, which humbles us over and over.

What began happening in his next book, ThePast, in 1985, is a tougher story, the story whereart compresses itself, endangers itself in newways, exposes itself to greater psychic risk, and½nds new form and tone in that risk. Here isanother self-portrait from that period:

“What about the man splitting wood in the daybreak,

who looked strong? That was years ago. Thatwas me.”

(“The Man Splitting Wood in the Daybreak,”The Past).

Academy Meetings

A Poetry Reading by Galway KinnellIntroduction by Rosanna Warren

This presentation was given at the 1913th Stated Meeting of the Academy and Joint Meeting with the Boston Athenaeum, heldat the House of the Academy in Cambridge on March 27, 2007. Two of the poems that Galway Kinnell read that evening arereprinted below.

For subtlety, for economy of means, for asublimity by implication, listen to this three-line poem from The Past, all torqued on itssyntax, which is a form of knowledge in ac-tion, a kind of Lord’s Prayer:

“Prayer”

“Whatever happens. Whateverwhat is is is whatI want. Only that. But that.”

Kinnell is now an artist so fully a master ofhis means, he can reinvent the sublime, inlarge or small format, in basso profondo orin a whisper. Watch him do it here, in “Oat-meal,” from the book When One Has Lived aLong Time Alone (1990):

“Maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion’s tatters.”

His new book, Strong Is Your Hold, is a triumphof unflinching matter of fact, the erotic, themortal, the generous, in which spit and spiritmingle as they did in the book of Genesis andas they do again in Kinnell the snake shamanwho inadvertently burns a snake in a brush-½re and pulls it out, “. . . a small blackenedsnake, the rear half / burnt away, the forepartalive . . . .” This unbearable, important poembrings life out of death, brings live words outof a language sleeping if not dead, and pro-vides us with an ars poetica for this poet seerof the real.

© 2007 by Rosanna Warren

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Academy Meetings

“The Room”

The door closes on pain and confusion.The candle flame wavers from side to sideas though trying to break itself in halfto color the shadows too with living light.The andante movement plays over and overits many triplets, like farm dogs yapping at a melody made of the stylized grati½cation-cries of cocks. I will not stay long.Nothing in experience led me to imaginehaving. Having is destroying, said my version of the vow of impoverishment.But here, in this brief, waxen light,I have, and nothing is destroyed. The flutethat guttered those owl’s notes into the waste hoursof childhood joins with the pianoand they play, Being is having. Havingmay be nothing but the grace of the shellmoving without hesitation, with lively pride,down the stubborn river of woe. At the far end,a door no one dares open begins opening.To go through it will awaken such regretas only closing it behind can obliterate.The candle flame’s staggering makes the roomwobble and shift – matter itself, laughing.I can’t come back. I won’t change.I have the usual capacity for wanting what may not exist. Don’t worry.That is the dew wetting my face.You see? Nothing that enters the roomcan have only its own meaning ever again.

Reprinted by permission of Galway Kinnell. The poem appears inWhen One Has Lived a Long Time Alone, published by Alfred A. Knopf.© 1990 by Galway Kinnell.

Galway Kinnell

Galway Kinnell, a Fellow of the American Academy since 1997, has beena MacArthur Fellow and the state poet of Vermont. For many years he wasthe Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New YorkUniversity. He is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Reading

“Everyone Was in Love”

One day, when they were little, Maud and Fergus appeared in the doorway naked and mirthful,with a dozen long garter snakes draped overeach of them like brand-new clothes. Snake tails dangled down their backs, and snake foreparts in various lengths fell over their fronts. With heads raised and swaying, alert as cobras, the snakes writhed their dry skins upon each other, as snakes like doing in lovemaking, with the added novelty this timeof caressing soft, smooth, moist human skin. Maud and Fergus were deliciously pleased with themselves. The snakes seemed to be tickled, too.We were enchanted. Everyone was in love.Then Maud drew down off Fergus’s shoulder,as off a tie rack, a peculiarly lumpy snake and told me to look inside.Inside the double-hinged jaw, a frog’s greenwebbed hind feet were being drawn,like a diver’s, very slowly as if into deepest waters.Perhaps thinking I might be considering rescue,Maud said, “Don’t. Frog is already elsewhere.”

Reprinted by permission of Galway Kinnell. The poem appears in Strong Is Your Hold, published by Houghton Mifflin Company.© 2006 by Galway Kinnell.

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Musical Program

Pleyel: Trio for Violin, Viola, and Cello Opus 10 No 2I. AllegroII. Rondo, Allegretto

John Corigliano: Fancy on a Bach Air for Solo Cello(1996)

William Bolcom: Graceful Ghost Rag for Solo Piano(1970)

Brahms: Quartet for Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello in g minor Opus 25

I. AllegroII. Intermezzo, Allegro ma non troppoIII. Andante con motoIV. Rondo alla Zingarese, Presto.

Academy Meetings

Members of the Arron Chamber Ensemble: Abraham Appleman, violin; Jeewon Park, piano; Edward Arron, cello;and Ronald Arron, viola

Members and guests were treated to an Evening of Chamber Music at the Academy’s 226th Annual Meeting and 1914thStated Meeting, held on May 9, 2007, at the House in Cambridge. The Arron Chamber Ensemble performed works byFellows John Corigliano and William Bolcom as well as pieces by Pleyel and Brahms.

Sharl Heller and Eric Heller (Harvard University)

An Evening of Chamber Music


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Academy Meetings

Presentations by AcademyFellows at NorthwesternUniversityDarlene Clark Hine and Barbara Newman

In this study of the Black Professional Classduring the Jim Crow era, I examine the con-sequences of white separatism and the legaldenial to African Americans of equal accessto employment and educational opportuni-ties. In order to survive and progress, AfricanAmericans had to create a class of profession-al men and women, speci½cally nurses, physi-cians, and lawyers. This ½rst, or emergent,generation of professionals acted individual-ly and collectively to found the essential in-stitutions–medical schools, hospitals andclinics, nursing schools, and law schools–required to facilitate professional reproduc-tion. In order to advance itself and to betterserve impoverished and exploited black com-munities while developing and honing theirskills, the emergent generation founded anarray of black professional organizations thatwere analogous to white-only organizations:physicians founded the National Medical As-sociation (1895), nurses launched the Nation-al Association for Colored Graduate Nurses(1909), and lawyers established the NationalBar Association (1925).

have completed it by now. Well, I am nearingthe end, but at the moment I am in a conun-drum. I invite you to share your thoughts asto possible resolutions.

I begin with a quote from Booker T. Washing-ton, the head of Tuskegee Institute, knownprimarily for his staunch advocacy of indus-trial and agricultural education for black peo-ple. In 1905, Washington, in an apparent de-parture from his insistence on the primacy ofagricultural and industrial education, de-clared, “No one understanding the real needof the race would advocate that industrialeducation should be given to every Negro tothe exclusion of the professions and otherbranches of learning. It is evident that a raceas largely segregated as the Negro is musthave an increasing number of its own profes-sional men and women.” On this point blackconservatives and radicals shared commonground at the dawn of the twentieth century.Writing in 1908, T. Thomas Fortune, editorof The New York Age, echoed Washington’scall for more professional men and women,deeming them to be “vital forces in the workof racial redemption.”

Darlene Clark Hine

Darlene Clark Hine is Board of Trustees Professorof African American Studies and Professor of History at Northwestern University. She was elected to the American Academy in 2006.

The Black Professional Class

The Black Professional Class” is the work-ing title of a project that I have been engagedin for about twenty-½ve years. Given thatlength of time, you would think that I would

Students outside University Hall on the Northwestern Evanston campus

This presentation was given at an Academy meeting heldon the Northwestern University campus on May 7, 2007.Northwestern University President Henry Bienen andAcademy ceo Leslie Berlowitz welcomed Fellows andguests to the meeting. At this meeting, J. Larry Jameson,Irving S. Cutter Professor of Medicine, Vice Presidentfor Medical Affairs, and Dean of the Feinberg School ofMedicine, also spoke. His remarks will appear in a forth-coming issue of the Bulletin.

‘‘

ses, newspapers, drug stores, funeral homes,and transportation services. They frequentlymediated between the white and black com-munities. This work within their respectivecommunities enhanced their social status,and their economic autonomy freed themfrom dependence on white people. The blackprofessional class laid the ideological founda-tion for racial solidarity and self-suf½ciency.

Black professionals balanced precariously onthe thin line separating oppositional activismthat challenged the separate but unequal sys-tem of racial apartheid and the militant em-brace of Black Nationalist thought–that is,advocacy of the creation and maintenance ofa “nation within a nation.” While physiciansand nurses focused attention on the medicaland health-care needs of black communitiesduring the Great Depression decade and theresultant migrations of hundreds of thousands

of dispossessed farm workers to urban areas,African American lawyers began a concerted,decades-long assault against the legal founda-tions of Jim Crow segregation and discrimi-nation. Their efforts helped to shape the mod-ern civil rights movement. Indeed, in 1993,U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Mar-shall insisted that “long before the Civil RightsMovement ever crystallized the plight ofAfrican-Americans, Negro lawyers had iden-ti½ed the inequities in the legal order and be-gun to lay the foundation for social change.”

Black lawyers inhabited a different profes-sional universe. Those able to become ap-prentices by either reading or working in thelaw of½ces of a practicing attorney or secur-ing admission into law schools were allowedto practice in the court system. Actually, mostblack lawyers had to augment their work withother jobs if they were to secure enough mon-


One of the preeminent physicians of the emer-gent generation was Dr. Daniel Hale Williams,Northwestern University’s ½rst black med-ical graduate. In 1891, Dr. Williams foundedProvident Hospital and Nursing TrainingSchool in Chicago–the ½rst black hospitaloperated solely by African Americans. In 1894,he went to Washington, D.C., to help estab-lish a Hospital and Nursing Training School,later af½liated with Howard University. By1900, Dr. Williams–already renowned for hissurgical skills–acquired a national reputa-tion as a forceful proponent of autonomousblack health-care and training facilities. Hewas a revered member of the National Med-ical Association. Its charter pledged that thenma would “effect a strong organizationamong Negro physicians, dentists and phar-macists . . . in order that they may have avoice in matters of public health and medicallegislation in general, and in such matters asmay affect the Negro race in particular. . . .”It is this ½nal charge that upon ½rst readinggave me pause: “. . . and to develop a pro-found race consciousness.” What is a “pro-found race consciousness?”

A tireless lecturer, Williams enjoined blackcommunities to create their own hospitalsand nursing training schools. He explainedwhy black institutions were necessary, declar-ing, “In view of the cruel ostracism, affectingso vitally the race, our duty seems plain. Insti-tute Hospitals and Training Schools. Let usno longer sit idly and inanely deploring exist-ing conditions. Let us not waste time tryingto effect changes or modi½cations in the in-stitutions unfriendly to us, but rather let usseek to promote the doctrine of helping andstimulating our race.” By 1912, there were 63black hospitals. By 1920, the number haddoubled to 118. By 1929, there were 300 blackhospitals and nursing training schools.

In order to survive andprogress, African Americanshad to create a class of pro-fessional men and women,speci½cally nurses, physi-cians, and lawyers.

Black professionals helpedto spur the establishmentof real estate businesses,newspapers, drug stores,funeral homes, and trans-portation services.

Many of the proprietary hospitals and schoolsdid not survive the economic devastation ofthe Great Depression. While hospital bedsfor African Americans remained in shortsupply, the opportunities for medical educa-tion were limited to the two black medicalschools: Howard University School of Medi-cine (founded in 1868) in Washington, D.C.,and Meharry Medical School (founded in1876) in Nashville, Tennessee. None of thewhite medical schools in the south acceptedblack students and most of the northern in-stitutions restricted their admission.

Several black medical schools, such as theLeonard Medical School at Shaw Universityin Raleigh, North Carolina, had become ca-sualties of the 1910 Flexner Report. Its author,Abraham Flexner, had concluded that of theten or so black medical schools founded inthe closing decades of the nineteenth century,only “Meharry at Nashville and Howard atWashington are worth developing and untilconsiderably increased benefactors are avail-able, efforts will wisely concentrate uponthem.” He elaborated further: “The Negroneeds good schools rather than many schools.Schools in which the more promising of therace can be sent to receive a substantial edu-cation in which hygiene rather than surgeryfor example is strongly accentuated.” Whitephilanthropic foundations, including theGeneral Education Board and the RosenwaldFund, heeded Flexner’s recommendations.Foundation support was essential to the sur-vival of Meharry and Howard. From 1919 tothe advent of the modern civil rights move-ment, Howard and Meharry produced ap-proximately 90 percent of all black physi-cians in the country.

The second generation of black professionalsconcentrated efforts on alleviating or ameli-orating the devastating social costs of educa-tional segregation, economic discrimination,and political disfranchisement that AfricanAmerican communities collectively paid. In-dividual professionals provided leadership inthe community-building process that includ-ed their service as of½cers of improvementassociations and mutual aid societies. Theyalso helped by raising funds and investingtheir own resources in community centersand schools. Black professionals helped tospur the establishment of real estate busines-


Academy Meetings

ey to make a living by practicing law. By 1910,there were approximately 700 black lawyers–only a dozen of whom were women. By the1940s, the number of black lawyers had morethan doubled to approximately 1,700. Therewere approximately 3,500 black physiciansand 7,000 black nurses attending to a blackpopulation of over 11 million.

Clearly, I am talking about a very small num-ber of professionals. Many of the prominentblack lawyers who would become engaged insocial justice and civil rights struggles, in as-sociation with the National Association forthe Advancement of Colored People, were,ironically, educated at elite white institutionsin the north. Charles Hamilton Houston andWilliam H. Hastie were both graduates ofHarvard Law School; James A. Nabrit, a futurepresident of Howard University, was a gradu-ate of Northwestern University Law School.These men spearheaded the revitalizationand transformation of Howard UniversityLaw School during the 1930s, and they wereresponsible for training a special cadre of civilrights lawyers, of which Thurgood Marshallwould become the most renowned and rep-resentative.

Beginning in 1938, black physicians, nurses,and lawyers entered the last premodern civilrights movement phase, one of class consoli-dation. naacp lawyers Charles H. Houston,William H. Hastie, and Thurgood Marshall,along with members of the National Bar As-sociation and faculty at Howard Law School,masterminded the legal assault against JimCrow segregation and discrimination. Blacklawyers won four important United StatesSupreme Court cases. One was the 1938 Gainesdecision, which essentially set in motion theprocess of desegregating professional schools.A second was the 1944 Smith v. Allwright Su-preme Court decision, which declared theDemocratic white primary unconstitutionaland opened up the arena for African Ameri-cans to retrieve the right to vote. The thirdwas the 1948 Supreme Court ruling that hous-ing discrimination or restrictive covenants

were unconstitutional. The fourth was the1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Thecivil rights lawyers worked together on thesecases. Indeed, Brown was a composite of re-gional cases. That was the legal triumph.

As far as physicians were concerned, theirmajor triumph occurred during World WarII, when, collectively, the nurses and the doc-tors mobilized to force the desegregation ofthe Medical Corps and laid the foundationfor Harry S. Truman’s Executive Order thatwould desegregate the United States military.These professional black men and women,working through medicine, law, and nursing,essentially, helped to lay a foundation for themodern civil rights movement.

Let me conclude by saying something aboutthe conundrum that I ½nd myself in. A mem-ber of the ½rst President Bush cabinet, LouisW. Sullivan served as Secretary of Health andHuman Services. From 1970–1975 he wasDean of the Morehouse School of Medicine.In 1985, the school became a four-year, fullyaccredited medical school. Dr. Sullivan con-½ded that he worked to establish this schoolbecause “The idea of starting a medical schoolto increase the number of black physiciansnot only in Georgia but elsewhere in Ameri-ca” was something that intrigued him. Theestablishment of the school makes me won-der how far have we progressed in terms ofmaking opportunities available to all Ameri-cans on a fair and judicious basis if in 1985Dr. Sullivan–one of the preeminent blackphysicians of our generation– successfullycreates a new black medical school.

To be sure, Morehouse School of Medicine isnot a Jim Crow school. But it makes me askwhether the predominantly white medicalschools have failed to recruit and train blackphysicians in the past half century. There arenow four black medical schools, and they havethe great responsibility for training black phy-

sicians in this country. Is this the model weshould revisit and embrace–that is, the es-tablishment of an array of black professionalschools as the answer to the dire need for sig-ni½cantly more black nurses, physicians, andlawyers? What are the lessons to be derivedfrom this study of the history of the blackprofessional class? Did integration as socialpolicy fail? Is a variant of nationalism, in thesense of Black Nationalism creating au-tonomous separate institutions, still a viableideology and strategy for acquiring parityand facilitating greater entry into main-stream American society? It is hard to knowwhere to come down on these questions. Ianticipate that readers of my book, whenev-er it is published, will think about new waysto improve training and expand professionaleducational opportunities for African Ameri-cans by evaluating the methods that workedmost effectively during the era of Jim Crowwhen black survival and progress dependedon Howard and Meharry and other black in-stitutions that produced the black profession-al class. We need to reason together.

Barbara Newman

Barbara Newman is Professor of English, Religionand Classics and John Evans Professor of LatinLanguage and Literature at Northwestern University.She was elected to the American Academy in 2005.

Frauenlob’s Song of Songs:Translating a Medieval Performance

For a period of three or four years beginningaround 2001, I found myself spending myleisure time in a rather unexpected way. Todivert myself from stacks of ungraded papers

The black professional classlaid the ideological founda-tion for racial solidarityand self-suf½ciency.

Professional black men andwomen, working throughmedicine, law, and nursing,essentially, helped to lay afoundation for the moderncivil rights movement.

ings to the sepulchre with loud lamentationand great mourning, on account of the in½nitepraises that he heaped on the whole femininesex in his poems. Moreover, such copious liba-tions of wine were poured on his tomb that itoverflowed through the whole cloister of thechurch. He composed the Cantica canticorum[or Song of Songs] in German, known in thevernacular as Unser Frowen laich, and manyother good things.”

Frauenlob is the most famous of a neglectedgroup of poets who ½ll a key place in medievalGerman literature. Traditionally called Spruch-dichter–an umbrella term for “lyric poetswho were not minnesingers”– these itiner-ant artists composed and performed songson a wide variety of subjects: religious, polit-ical, and moral. Unlike minnesingers or lovepoets, who were for the most part noble am-ateurs, the Spruchdichter were professionaltraveling minstrels, usually of bourgeois ori-gin, who embraced the arts of poetry andsong as a vocation rather than as a polite ac-complishment. Since they made their livingby their art, contemporaries called them sing-ers who “took guot for êre,” that is, receivedpayment in money and in kind for the praiseof their patrons. The willingness of nobles tosupport such traveling artists shows how high-ly they valued them for both the prestige andthe entertainment they could offer.

Unlike such court poets as Geoffrey Chaucer,Frauenlob and his German contemporariescould not expect stable long-term patronage,but moved frequently, settling for a time atany court where they found a warm welcomeand a solvent prince. This itinerant lifestylewas a mixed blessing. On the one hand, itrendered poet-singers marginal and highlysuspect to the arbiters of morality. Like go-liards or wandering students, they traveledtoo much to be trusted, for they seldom stayedin one place long enough to become perma-nent members of parishes, households, orother stabilizing institutions. If accused ofany crime, they lacked family connectionsand long-term acquaintances to vouch forthem. On the other hand, the minstrel’swandering ways enhanced his value to hispatrons. Court records and account booksshow that, when they were not performing,poet-minstrels ½lled a variety of useful andremunerative roles as messengers, heralds,watchmen, interpreters, and spies. Well-traveled, versed in a range of dialects, and

welcomed by all social strata, such perform-ers could be skilled information gatherers.Finally, at important festivals such as knight-ings, weddings, and coronations, a seasonedentertainer would be given the role of “min-strel king,” responsible for devising ensem-ble performances and serving as master ofceremonies.

It may be in such a role that Frauenlob appearsin the illuminated Manesse codex from around1340. Or perhaps his author portrait showshim at the “singing school” he is said to havefounded in the town of Mainz. In either case,the artist depicts Frauenlob presiding from alofty chair at an outdoor music lesson or per-formance. Over his striped tunic he wears acloak of ermine and a coronet trimmed withthe same fur, usually reserved for high nobil-ity but here representing the gift of a particu-larly lavish patron. With his right hand raisedin a stylized teaching gesture, the singer-poetholds in his left hand what looks–anachro-nistically–like a conductor’s baton. On a car-pet below, stretched out by a piper on the rightand a drummer on the left, a ½ddler performswhile other musicians listen, holding a vari-ety of instruments including flute, psaltery,and shawm. The meister’s identity is con½rmedby a symbolic coat of arms representing hisLady, the crowned Virgin, who extends hermantle over his shield in a gesture of protec-tion and favor. The poem I have translatedwas probably meant for the kind of lavishmusical performance illustrated in the Man-esse miniature.

Celebrated during his lifetime and for cen-turies afterward, Frauenlob’s fame suffered arapid eclipse around 1700. Although a few ofthe Romantics appreciated him, most mod-ern critics had little use for his hermetic andimmensely learned poems, which in theirview savored too much of the intellect andtoo little of the heart. Protestants tended to


and to pass the long hours of insomniac nightsand transatlantic flights, I took to singing duetswith a poet who had been dead for seven hun-dred years. This is the way I see the art of versetranslation, for unlike prose, a poetic transla-tion can never attain transparency. In otherwords, the translator’s voice cannot modest-ly lose itself within the author’s, to be citedonly by unusually scrupulous bibliographers.No, the art of verse is at once so playful, sodemanding, and so irreducibly personal thatthe best one can hope for is a duet of compat-ible voices. In the brief time that we have to-day, I’d like to tell you why I decided to trans-late the German minstrel Frauenlob, and letyou hear a little of both the translation andthe original. Frauenlob’s long poem, knownas the “Song of Songs,” is not just a text but acomplex musical piece, its melody composedby the minstrel himself.

A contemporary of Meister Eckhart andDante, Frauenlob enjoyed a public careerspanning four decades. Admired equally forhis gifts as musician and poet, he became theacknowledged master of the so-called geblümterStil or “flowery style.” Like other performersof his age or, for that matter, like rappers to-day, he adopted a stage name. Born Heinrichvon Meissen, our minstrel chose a sobriquetthat can mean either “praise of ladies” (as incourtly love) or “praise of Our Lady” (mean-ing the Virgin Mary). The ambiguity is in-tended. From the mid-1270s until his deathin 1318, Frauenlob traveled through the courtsof northern and central Europe, composingand performing topical poems, religious verse,and the occasional love song for patrons rang-ing from the kings of Bohemia and Denmarkto the archbishops of Bremen and Mainz.By the time of his death, he was a highly acclaimed and much imitated though con-troversial ½gure, whose talents and connec-tions merited the privilege of burial in MainzCathedral. According to the chronicler Al-brecht von Strassburg, “on the vigil of St.Andrew in the year 1318, Heinrich, calledFrauenlob, was buried in Mainz, in the cathe-dral cloister near the school, with exception-al honors. Women carried him from his lodg-

I took to singing duets with apoet who had been dead forseven hundred years.

Frauenlob traveled throughthe courts of northern andcentral Europe, composingand performing topical po-ems, religious verse, and theoccasional love song.

you knew his greeting, you felt his touch. How much, fair maid, did you dally? We do not envy the wine of bliss you drank there with sweet, sweet milk.

I know well his own tongue should tell youthe toll—

why the watchmen took your cloak, asking what do you seek, fair maid, so latein these alleys? “Never cease, we must seize the beloved!” Deep in your wounds he’s branded his threefold mark.

Strophe 9

I am the great and chosen Lady, my will is ripe, my desire is mighty. For fervent love I must unbarthe lattice of my cloister door—my love all passionate drew near.His hand caressed me, wet with dew—O taste of honey through and through! I ate the comb and drank the foam then came back home. My God, such bliss! What’s the harm in this?

I the weasel bore the ermine that bit the snake. With morning dewI split the hard rock of the curse.My divining rod, unforked, crushed the heads of hell’s black vermin.When the palm tree of the Cross saw me, it reddened without dye. Speak, wise Adam, noble friend, and tell how I have come to end your ancient blight—I the Maid, by a mother’s right.

Translations from Barbara Newman, Frauenlob’s Song of Songs: A Medieval Poet and His Masterpiece (Penn State UniversityPress, 2007).

© 2007 by Darlene Clark Hine and BarbaraNewman, respectively.


½nd his fervent Marian piety blasphemous,and rationalist scholars even questioned hissanity. In 1913, the ½rst editor of his Song ofSongs, Ludwig Pfannmüller, lavished tremen-dous erudition on Frauenlob’s text, but hewas hardly an admirer of the poet. In fact, hedevoted much of his introduction to diagnos-ing “inadequacies of the style and the man,”whom he branded a Strudelkopf (“noodle-head”). Thus ill-served by his editor, Frauen-lob continued to languish in obscurity until1972, when Karl Stackmann paved the way fora new critical edition with an essay arguingthe radical thesis that Frauenlob’s poemswere, and were meant to be, comprehensible:neither the ravings of a madman, nor emptyrhetoric composed merely “to please the earand intoxicate the senses,” nor oracles whoseinterpretive key is lost beyond recovery.

Having begun my career by studying Hilde-gard of Bingen–another quirky, brilliant,esoteric poet-composer in the same religioustradition, but a century and a half earlier–Irecognized a kindred spirit in Frauenlob.

Drawn to the intricate beauty of his verse aswell as the challenge of his thought, I juggledrhyme schemes and prowled through MiddleHigh German dictionaries in my off-hoursuntil I had a passable translation of twentydouble strophes in just over ½ve hundred lines.But whatever was I going to do with them?Much to my consternation, I realized that Iwould have to write a whole book aboutFrauenlob to accompany the translation,since the sum total of Anglophone scholar-ship on my author amounted to less than½fteen pages. Happily, though, my book pro-vided an occasion for the North Americanrelease of a cd by the premier early musicensemble, Sequentia, which had recordedFrauenlob’s masterpiece some years earlier.I hope that the Gesamtwerk will now makethis hitherto obscure but magni½cent poetnot only available to scholars, but teachablein the classroom, whether of medieval litera-ture, religion, or early music.

The Song of Songs takes the form of a vision-ary dialogue between the poet-speaker and aLady who is conventionally identi½ed as theVirgin Mary. But she is also much more–notonly the mother of Jesus but also a celestialgoddess, the eternal partner of the Trinity,identical with divine Wisdom as well as thegoddess of Love, Frau Minne–a kind of Chris-tianized Venus. In celebrating this composite½gure, “Frauenlob” fully earns his sobriquet.His hallmark is the unique blend of learning,Biblical allusion, dense wordplay, and lushsensuality he offers as homage to his Ladyand places in her mouth. I will end by citingthree strophes of the poem, the ½rst two inthe seer’s voice, the third in the Lady’s.

Strophe 3

Fertile maid and favored lady,your meadow wet with heaven’s dewflowers in resplendent show. Hear the turtledoves singing their song,

loud-ringing, a song of longingfor sweet May’s treasure.Winter’s ordeal is over: your vineyards blossom with fruit so wholesome.

Your beloved calls from the vineyard, fromthe garden

where hallowed grapes ripen:“Come, love, come!” He is waiting on the mountain of myrrh where lions stalk. Your way cannot errshould he wish to talkamong roses. Listen with lovemost tender, daughter, mother, maid, you must go!

Strophe 4

Tell no lie, never try to deny: you alone were meeting with the king in his cellar—

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Frauenlob’s hallmark is theunique blend of learning,Biblical allusion, dense word-play, and lush sensuality. . . .

The Lady is not only themother of Jesus but also a ce-lestial goddess, the eternalpartner of the Trinity.


Northwestern University President Henry Bienen and Robert A. Lamb(Northwestern University)

J. Larry Jameson, David Austen-Smith, Lauren Pachman, Robert Porter, and Mark A. Satterthwaite (all, NorthwesternUniversity)

Xenia Semenova and Yuri I. Manin (NorthwesternUniversity) Former Visiting Scholar Jay Gross-

man (Northwestern University)


Academy Meetings

Academy Fellow Bernard Agranoff organized a meeting and re-ception on the University of Michigan campus on May 14, 2007.Recently elected Fellows of the Academy were recognized, andTeresa A. Sullivan, Provost and Executive Vice President forAcademic Affairs and Professor of Sociology at the Universityof Michigan, led a discussion about “Debt as Metaphor.” Anauthority on consumer debt, she explored the history of per-sonal bankruptcy, noting the important role it played in thelives of immigrants in nineteenth-century America. She alsoconsidered the effect of debt, or potential debt, on the educa-tional plans of many segments of the U.S. population today.

University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman (far left) with recently elected Academy Fellows from the University: RobertL. Greiss, Jr., Judith Temkin Irvine, Richard Charles Murray Janko, Robert K. Lazarsfeld, Rosina Bierbaum, Rowena Green Matthews,Arthur Lupia, and David Ginsburg, with speaker Teresa Sullivan and Academy host Bernard W. Agranoff

Fellows Arlene Saxonhouse and Joseph Vining(both, University of Michigan)

Gathering at the University of Michigan


disciplinary discussion than stem cell research–a subject that involves issues not only inscience but also in ethics and politics. Stan-ford University is committed to being a leaderin stem cell research. Our speaker today, IrvWeissman, and his colleague Paul Berg haveconvinced me of the importance of this re-search, and I ½rmly believe that universitiesshould take a stand and support work in thisarea.

Irv, of course, has been a pioneer in the studyof stem cell biology and cancer research. Hecame to us from the remote and underrepre-sented state of Montana. As a boy, Irv becameinterested in science by reading about thework of Ehrlich and Pasteur in Paul De Kruif’sMicrobe Hunters. From an early age, he knewthat science was something he wanted to do.In high school he began working in a lab, andas an undergraduate at Montana State Uni-versity he began publishing. Irv has been atStanford since 1960, ½rst as a medical studentand then as a member of the faculty. In 1987,he succeeded in isolating the ½rst blood-form-

ing stem cells; the following year, he report-ed the results in Science, informing research-ers of this highly signi½cant breakthrough.

In 2002, he was named California Scientist ofthe Year. He has received numerous honors:our own Linus Pauling Medal for Outstand-ing Contributions to Science, the Alan Cran-ston Award from the Alliance for Aging Re-search, the Medal for Distinguished Contri-butions to Biomedical Research from theNew York Academy of Science, and the BassAward from the Society of Neurological Sur-geons. He also holds numerous membershipsin key academies.

Irv has several appointments at Stanford. Heis professor of pathology and of developmen-tal biology, but by courtesy he is also in theneurosurgery and biological sciences depart-ments. The Weissman laboratory has a groupof researchers at Stanford’s Hopkins MarineStation in Paci½c Grove, and Irv has alsomanaged to ½nd time to be an entrepreneurin two different companies.

John L. Hennessy

John L. Hennessy is President of Stanford University.He was elected to the American Academy in 1995.

Introduction

One of the remarkable characteristics ofthe American Academy is its ability to reachacross disciplinary boundaries, and there isperhaps no topic more appropriate for a cross-

Academy Meetings

Stem Cells: Politics and PromiseIrving L. WeissmanIntroduction by John L. Hennessy

This presentation was given at the 1911th Stated Meeting, held atStanford University on February 26, 2007. Stanford UniversityPresident John Hennessy and Academy ceo Leslie Berlowitzwelcomed over one hundred Fellows and guests to the meeting.

Microphotograph of an early mouse embryo derived from 4 different coloredembryonic stem cells (green, blue, red, and uncolored). The colored cells camefrom injected mouse embryonic stem cells, while the uncolored cells came fromthe mouse blastocyst (pre-embryo) into which the colored cells were injected.One can see the earliest stages of formation of the primitive cell layers that willlater form tissues and organs. Above the embryo proper (bottom portion of theimage) are a few colored cells migrating into an uncolored tissue. The migratingcells include the first blood-forming stem cells and also blood vessel–formingstem cells; they will make blood islands in the yolk sac. Photo and experimentsby Hiroo Ueno and Irv Weissman.

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This discovery spurred scientists to try to lo-cate that cell rather than just be aware of itsexistence. That’s where we came in, begin-ning in the early 1980s. We discovered a wayto isolate these cells, a general approach thatallows one to isolate stem cells in the brain,in other tissues, and from cancers. Theseblood-forming stem cells are rare cells, aboutone in twenty thousand, in the bone marrow.

In mice we found that we could isolate thesecells as a pure population of cells, free of allother marrow cells, and that by transplantingthese cells we could save mice, even geneti-cally unrelated mice, from radiation damage.Those stem cells regenerated the bone mar-row, the blood-forming organ, and replacedthemselves, all in a different host. So, for ex-ample, if both John and I were mice, and ifmy stem cells were growing in his body, theywould produce my blood-forming system andmy immune system in him. We eventually½gured out that the donor stem cells, grow-ing up in the host’s body, would tolerate thehost. The cells of the immune system wouldnot react against him because, as they grewup from the primitive cell, they would accepthim as self. But because they came from megenetically, they would express all of mygenes and tolerate me as self, too.

So, in 1986, I did this experiment in which Iirradiated a mouse and transplanted our can-didate blood stem cells from another mouse.I actually did this experiment for the ½rst timein 1957 when I was in high school in GreatFalls, Montana. I found that I could trans-plant skin from the donor into the bone mar-row–transplanted host without any furthertreatment, indicating that skin transplantscould be accepted. I went home and told mymom at lunch that in a matter of just three orfour years, people would be transplantingbone marrow and hearts and skin and lungs.

Irving L. Weissman

Irving L. Weissman is Virginia and D. K. LudwigProfessor for Clinical Investigation in Cancer Re-search; Director of the Comprehensive CancerCenter; Director of the Institute for Stem Cell Biol-ogy and Regenerative Medicine; and Director ofthe Ludwig Center for Cancer Stem Cell Researchand Medicine at the Stanford University School ofMedicine. He has been a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy since 1990.

Presentation

I put the beginnings of stem cell research atthe bombing of civilian populations in Hiro-shima and Nagasaki. The people who perishedat the lowest lethal dose of radiation diedabout ½fteen days after their exposure. Whenexperiments were done on mice and dogs toreplicate that effect, the animals died becauseradiation destroyed their blood-forming sys-tems–a result that intrigued hematologistsand experimental biologists. At higher doses,the victims died much faster and the radiationaffected other body systems. So a communi-ty of scientists began to try to ½gure out whythe bone marrow–the blood-forming organ –was destroyed at lower radiation levels.

One of the key experiments was done in 1961in Toronto, where, indirectly, James Till andErnest McCulloch showed that a certain typeof cell likely existed in the bone marrow. Whenthis cell divided into two daughter cells, itgave rise to one cell just like itself–a stemcell–and another cell that started to formblood. We now know that a single mouseblood-forming stem cell can end up makingover thirty thousand stem cells in the body.It does this for the life of the animal, afterwhich we can transfer a stem cell to anotheranimal for its life, and so on.

Since 2003, Irv has also been serving in lead-ership roles in the university. One of the re-markable things about him is his capacity totake on these administrative positions whilecontinuing to spend considerable time in thelab pursuing basic science. Irv directs the In-stitute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenera-tive Medicine here at Stanford. He is also theDirector of the Comprehensive Cancer Cen-ter and the Director of the Ludwig Center forCancer Stem Cell Research and Medicine, awonderful new institute that probes the fas-cinating interaction between cancer andstem cells. Irv has helped pilot this researchhere and, equally importantly, has built anincredible faculty.

Stem cell research is a critical topic not onlybecause it holds great potential for medicinebut also because it has become so politicized.Of course, we live in a state that is far moreprogressive in its support than are many oth-er parts of the country. In 2004, Californiavoters approved Proposition 71, authorizing$3 billion in bonds for stem cell research. Butas you may know, repeated attempts to repealit or delay it have largely stymied its imple-mentation. The ½rst grants were just made,and Stanford led California’s universities inreceiving awards.

Irv’s work–from the identi½cation of blood-forming stem cells in mice to debating thefederal government’s position on embryonicstem cell research and championing the Cali-fornia State Ballot Initiative–demonstrateshis vision and boldness. To quote one of hisformer students: “One thing you can say aboutIrv is that he’s fearless. If it’s important, hewants to work on it.” Please join me in wel-coming our colleague Irv Weissman.

If we gave blood-formingstem cells from a nondiabet-ic parent or sibling mouse tothe mouse that was gettingdiabetes, we could stop thatreaction forever and cure the disease.


As we know, that kind of transplant is justbarely getting started now. I learned a big les-son in how long it takes to translate a discov-ery into medicine. Now, hopefully, thingswill go a lot faster, but then again, I was sureof my prediction in 1957 and my mom is stillwaiting for it to happen. She’d actually likesome bone-forming stem cells right now.

At the time we were able to isolate those cells,I was working with a Stanford medical stu-dent, Judy Shizuru, who was interested in di-abetes. In the 1970s, Stanford’s Hugh McDe-vitt had shown that diabetes was neither adisease of the pancreas nor a disease of in-sulin-producing cells. It was a disease of theimmune system. The genetic predilection ofthe diabetic mouse or diabetic human meantthat instead of censoring the kinds of immunecells that would react against self, the systemallowed them to escape, proliferate, and ma-ture. So juvenile diabetes, or Type One dia-betes, turned out to be an autoimmune dis-ease–a disease where the body destroys itsown insulin-producing cells. Using the mousemodel of the disease, Judy and I went on toshow that if we gave blood-forming stem cellsfrom a nondiabetic parent or sibling mouseto the mouse that was getting diabetes, wecould stop that reaction forever and cure thedisease. However, if we waited until the dia-betes had killed off all of the insulin-produc-ing cells, then we needed to give both blood-forming and insulin-producing stem cellsfrom the donor.

That’s where we ran into dif½culty. We didnot have a lot of extra insulin-producing cells.When it ½nally became known that there wasa class of cells–embryonic stem cells–thatcould make any tissue in the body, we thoughtwe could ½nd such things as pancreatic pre-cursors, or pancreatic stem cells, which couldbe grown from these very primitive embryon-ic stem cells. These ideas led us to the kind ofinvestigations that began to get us into trou-ble with the public, because we were workingwith cells in a way that some people consid-ered immoral.

The blood-forming stem cell experiment wasa way forward for us: we knew that at leastpancreatic tissues could be regenerated fromstem cells. Later, we went on to ½nd brain-forming stem cells and to show that thosecells, unlike blood-forming cells, could actu-ally be propagated outside of the body.

That concept, tested at a company I cofound-ed in 1998 (StemCells, Inc.), involved trans-planting human brain stem cells into childrenwith Batten disease, a genetic disease that isalways fatal. The brains of children with thisdisease build up a toxic substance that theycan’t degrade because they lack one enzymeand the one part of a gene that would makethat enzyme. Kids with Batten disease arenormal until ages one to ½ve, when cells inthe eye and the optic cortex build up a fattyprotein deposit that pops the cells and causesthem to die. This process continues in thecerebellum, which governs balance and coor-dination. So the kids have what’s called cerebel-lar ataxia. They start losing iq because the pro-cess begins working on the part of the brainthat involves learning, namely, the hippo-campus. Finally, they go into a coma and die.

Brain stem cells isolated by Nobuko Uchidathat had been taken from a human and putinto the brain of an immunode½cient mousewith this genetic mutation stopped the dis-ease in its tracks–by making the missing en-zyme. The stem cells transport the enzymeout into the fluid that bathes the brain, wherethe cells that are missing the enzyme take itup and break down this potentially toxicproduct.

I’m detailing this process because we weretransplanting human brain cells into thebrains of mice. This excited a lot of peoplebut not all in a good way. All sorts of imagesfrom the book Metamorphosis come to mind,including the idea of a human brain stuck inthe body of a mouse. We accomplished theengraftment of maybe 1 percent of the neu-rons and the supporting cells, with the othergreater than 99 percent of brain cells comingfrom the mouse. Senator Sam Brownback inKansas introduced legislation to criminalizethis research. If it had passed, a scientist would

be ½ned $1 million and sentenced to ten yearsin jail for conducting this type of experiment.

We have used these brain stem cells to studynot only neurodegenerative diseases but alsosome cases of spinal-cord injury, like Christo-pher Reeve’s. In these cases, the cells that arelocated in the part of the body that’s crusheddie from lack of blood supply. The cells in thebrain, however, do not die nor do the cellsbelow the crushed part, which send pain sig-nals to the brain. But because the cells die inthe crushed area, people with these injuriesdon’t have the cellular insulator (myelin)that allows the quick electrical transmissionof pain or motor-control impulses. WhenNobuko Uchida and Aileen Anderson puthuman brain stem cells just above and belowthat lesion in mice, they remyelinated thenerve cells in that area, which enabled theanimals to walk.

During a Senate committee meeting, SenatorBrownback questioned the morality of usingsuch cells, and I asked him which of thesediseases should not be worked on as hard aswe can. His question demonstrated the dis-connect between M.D.s who pledge to giveour utmost to cure these diseases and peoplewho have different points of view. Of course,everyone is allowed a point of view. A yearago, President Bush, in the State of the Unionaddress, called this kind of transplantationof human brain cells into a mouse’s brain themost egregious kind of experiment a scien-tist could do.

Now, the research we were doing on normalblood-, brain-, lung-, and breast-cell devel-opment–all of these tissues that have stemcells to regenerate them–led us to think aboutwhat goes wrong when someone gets a can-cer or a leukemia or a lymphoma. About sev-en years ago, my colleague Mike Clarke, for-merly of Michigan and now at Stanford (withSean Morrison and Tannishta Reya), and Ihypothesized that, in the development of acancer, a couple of genetic changes take placein a normal stem cell. Because the only cell ina tissue that makes more of itself and stays atthat stage of differentiation is the stem cell,it’s the only cell that can accumulate the ge-netic and other changes that lead to cancer.So we proposed that cancers would be likenormal tissues generated by their own can-cer stem cells, each one speci½c to the cancer.

The blood-forming stem cell experiment was a wayforward for us: we knew that at least pancreatic tis-sues could be regeneratedfrom stem cells.


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from mainly white, mainly well-to-do, andalways infertile people. So if we were goingto learn something about development fromthose cells, we’d be learning from a limitedsource in our society. It is possible that thosecells could encompass the genes of all thediseases–sickle cell disease or Mediterraneananemia or other kinds of genetic disorders–that we would like to understand and treat,but it is unlikely.

So it was with some excitement when severalscientists, including Rudy Jaenisch at theWhitehead Institute at mit and others inHawaii and in Japan, found that, in mice, onecould take a skin-cell nucleus–a cell that’sdetermined to be skin–from one mouse andput it into an egg of another mouse, remov-ing the chromosomes from that mouse egg½rst so that the only genetic information

comes from the adult skin cell. In a low butsigni½cant fraction, the nucleus was repro-grammed back to the earlier time point, andit was the egg’s rna components and pro-tein components that did it. This is callednucleus transfer pluripotent (several poten-cies) stem cells.

We don’t know yet how that process works,but it meant that we could get an embryonicstem cell line from a prede½ned donor mousethrough that reprogramming process. Rudydid a terri½c experiment. He took skin cellsfrom a mouse with a genetic immunode½cien-cy so that it had no immunity lymphocytes.He put the nucleus in and got out a cell line: itmade brain cells, skin cells, hair cells, but itcould not make the cells of the immune sys-tem. So the genetics of the skin-cell donor readtrue in the cell line: the pluripotent stem cellline had a disease that recapitulated itself.When George Daley and Rudy got the blood-forming skin cells from that line and put them

And that has turned out to be the case. We’vedemonstrated it in human leukemias, inbreast, brain, and head and neck cancers.Now we’re moving as fast as we can becauseonce we discovered that each of those cancersself-renews–like a normal cell does, but outof control–it meant we could go after thosetiny, rare cells within a cancer and ask whatwent wrong. It doesn’t do any good to look atthe daughter cells they make because the genesthat the daughter cells express have nothingto do with the rare cancer stem cells.

In a report just published in the New EnglandJournal of Medicine, Clarke shows that by look-ing at a patient’s breast-cancer stem cells andthe genes they express, one can predict thepatient’s outcome with high accuracy, regard-less of the therapy he or she gets. This predic-tive capacity extends to lung and prostate can-cer as well as some other cancers. We knowthat it happens in brain cancer, and (againcountering the Brownback Bill) we foundthat human brain-cancer cells, glioblastomasand medulloblastomas, are the only cells thattransfer the disease from the human brain tothe mouse brain. They require something inthat brain environment to keep them grow-ing. Because we can get those cells out andlook at the genes they express and at the ab-normalities that occur, we think we can be-gin to attack brain cancer. As an immunolo-gist, I believe we can ½nd new ways to diag-nose or treat it. I know this sounds like a lotof hope and hype, but that’s where stem-cellthinking is taking us.

Earlier I mentioned a class of cells called em-bryonic stem cells. That’s actually a misnomer.The embryologists of the nineteenth centuryand most of the twentieth century didn’t la-bel a fertilized egg in the ½rst stages of devel-opment an “embryo.” After the egg pops outof the ovary, a sperm fertilizes it. As it travelsdown the Fallopian tube, it divides seven,eight, nine times until it forms an entity wecall a blastocyst. On the outside of the blas-tocyst there are about one hundred to one

The research we were doingon normal blood-, brain-,lung-, and breast-cell devel-opment . . . led us to thinkabout what goes wrong whensomeone gets a cancer or aleukemia or a lymphoma.

We have used these brainstem cells to study not onlyneurodegenerative diseasesbut also some cases ofspinal-cord injury.

hundred ½fty cells that help implant it in theuterus and start to form the placenta. Insideare twenty or so cells that eventually form theembryo and then the fetus, but it has not yetbeen determined what tissue each of thosecells will make. It’s only after implantationthat differentiation begins.

Before this political era, most of the embry-ologists called the blastocyst after implanta-tion an embryo, and the blastocyst beforeimplantation a pre-embryo. Nevertheless,it’s common parlance to call a blastocyst be-fore implantation an embryo, and if I tried to say in Congress that it’s not an embryo,they’d say you’re just trying to fool us bychanging the word. So we say what peoplecommonly use.

The cells in the very middle of the blastocystcan be removed and cultured. Gail Martin atucsf and Martin Evans in Wales did it ½rstin mice in the 1980s. Their work proved to beextremely important for the study of mousedevelopment and of genetic diseases–at leastthe ones we could study in mice. In 1998, JamesThompson at the University of Wisconsinmodi½ed the technique and did it for the ½rsttime with human cells–a very importanttechnical advance.

Now we can have these cell lines growing tovery large numbers, starting with this undif-ferentiated cell. The important thing to re-member, though, is that these cells remain atthat early stage of development. If you removethe factors that make them grow so rapidly,then they start turning on their own, willy-nilly, into different cell types of the body–some blood cells, some teeth cells, some hair-follicle cells that some of us could use. It’s soimportant to study these kinds of cells be-cause they have the genetic instructions,somehow, to make every known cell type inthe body. Studying development, therefore,with human embryonic stem cells would bestraightforward.

Human embryonic stem cells come mainlyfrom in vitro fertilization clinics. The spermand the egg are put together in a test tube,development occurs, and then a few blasto-cysts–usually two or three at most–are putin the mother. About eight to ten blastocystsare made, and the remainder are frozen. Upuntil 2001, scientists who wanted to work onthose cell lines started with the in vitro fertili-zation clinic. The cells from these clinics come


back in the mouse, they retained that disease-genetic immunode½ciency. Then they did an-other beautiful experiment. They ½xed thegene in the stem cell line; although it wasn’ta perfect experiment, they ½xed the diseaseby transplanting the “½xed” blood progenitorsfrom the line into the immunode½cient mice.

Now, that is what you hear when people talkabout therapeutic cloning: a therapeutic at-tempt to change a person’s genetic de½cien-cy in which somatic cells are used to make apluripotent stem cell line in which scientists½x the gene, which is then transplanted backinto their own cells. If that’s all it were, itwould be terri½c, but, in fact, I think it’s muchmore important. If we had the genetics of LouGehrig’s disease, or Parkinson’s disease, orHuntington’s disease–or any of a large num-ber of genetic disorders in cell lines that re-capitulated the developmental defect, or thepathogenesis, of the disease–the biomedicalcommunity could begin to understand thesediseases.

In biomedical research universities, we reallywant to begin to understand how these dis-eases work. The sequencing of the humangenome has led us to many of the genes thatwe knew had to be inherited to cause thesediseases. But the disconnect is between know-ing what the gene is and how a combinationof genes leads to a particular disease. LouGehrig’s disease involves motor-neuron de-generation. Even today we don’t know if thegenetic defect is in the motor neurons, or inthe cells that nourish them, or in the connec-tions to the muscle, or in something else wehaven’t even thought of yet. In order to un-derstand disease development, we need to ½xone of the three or four or ½ve genes in a cellline and say, ‘OK, what does that do?’ That’swhy understanding how genetic defects leadto disease is interesting, not only for us in thebiomedical research industry but also, andthat’s a long time coming, for the pharma-ceutical and biotech industries.

Now, you may have thought that this wouldbe the kind of triumph that everybody wouldapplaud. I was the head of a National Acade-my of Sciences/National Academy of Engi-neering panel, at the National Research Coun-cil and the Institute of Medicine, on humanreproductive cloning and nuclear transfer tomake stem cells. (Bruce Alberts, the presidentof the National Academy of Sciences, perhaps

½guring I was the only person who hadn’tmade up his mind at that time, asked me tohead the panel.) We examined all of the ani-mal experiments that involved taking the nu-cleus, let’s say, from a skin cell and putting itinto the egg. When the egg got to that blasto-cyst stage and was actually implanted in theuterus of an animal of the same species, it wasfound that 99.2 percent of those fetuses died.They didn’t die as they do in a regular miscar-riage. They didn’t die just a few days to a fewweeks after they were implanted; those thatdidn’t die right away died in mid- and latepregnancy. And in cows, mice, and other ani-mals, they would quite often kill the mother.

My panel was made up of scientists, includinga medical ethicist and a reproductive biologist,who had all agreed before we met that we’d½nd out the facts about this ½eld before wemade a judgment–and we’d keep our mouthsshut until we had argued the facts. So we couldsay, unanimously, on the basis of these facts,that reproductive cloning was not ready forprime time. Even if you had no objection tocloning humans, nobody after the NurembergTrials would submit a person to that kind ofmedical experimentation, where the fetuscould die and over half the mothers that takeit beyond mid-gestation could die. We askedfor a legally enforceable ban on human re-productive cloning, but said we would comeback in ½ve, six, seven years to see if thingshad improved in the animal experiments tothe same safety level as in vitro fertilization,so that we could contemplate it–withoutgiving our own particular judgments aboutwhether we liked or didn’t like the outcomeof reproductive cloning. From the experimentsof Jaenisch and others, it was clear that it wasa different thing to make a cell line by nuclear

transfer so that we could learn about humandiseases and treat them.

Unanimously we asked for this kind of stemcell research to go forward, but because itimpacted so many aspects of society, we saidthere should be a panel of experts in law,ethics, and medicine to help advise leaders inCongress, the medical ½eld, and elsewhereabout whether this would be a good thing todo. We didn’t presume that we knew the an-swer to that.

But in the middle of our deliberations, andright after we had a public workshop on theissues, President Bush, on August 9, 2001,said that we should go forward with humanembryonic stem cell research using cell linesmade before that date but not afterward–and that we should not undertake nucleartransfer at all. Of course, as President, hecould and did issue an executive order relat-ed to federal funding. This research was notcriminalized. Congressman David Weldon of Florida then introduced a criminalizationbill in the House (with Senator Brownbackin the Senate), proposing a $1 million ½neand ten years in jail if a scientist did this re-search. It passed after two hours of debate inthe House, but it got stuck in the Senate, large-ly through the bipartisan efforts of OrrinHatch, Arlen Specter, Ted Kennedy, DianeFeinstein, and Tom Harkin. They blockedthis legislation after holding hearings withus, whereas the House did not have hearings.

The political debate came to California next.A group of people, mainly in Hollywood,mainly parents of diabetic children, wantedto see whether this research could help theirchildren. I have never seen anything like par-ents of kids with juvenile diabetes; unlikerelatives of people with other diseases, theyare the most aggressive, most committed in-dividuals. Eventually, Robert Klein, now Chairof the Independent Citizens Oversight Com-mittee of the California Institute of Regener-ative Medicine, became involved with thisnascent group. He asked scientists to helpwrite the legislation, which we did, to assurethat if we received funding from the state,the reviews of the science would be expert.We also included the proviso that nobody onthe review panel could be from California orhave a close connection or receive funds.Then we suggested that the reviewers get atleast enough money to do their work.

Now we’re moving as fast aswe can because once we dis-covered that each of thosecancers self-renews–like anormal cell does, but out ofcontrol–it meant we couldgo after those tiny, rare cellswithin a cancer and askwhat went wrong.


So the campaign began and ended with 59percent of Californians voting in favor of set-ting aside $3 billion to be spent over ten tothirteen years. One of the key events tookplace a few weeks before the 2004 electionwhen George Schultz met with and advisedGovernor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, in-stead of staying out of the debate, came outin favor of Proposition 71–further evidencethat this was not a partisan issue. It was an is-sue about the right of people in California toenjoy the best that could come from this verylong-term research in terms of the diagnosisand treatment of diseases. The propositionwas immediately held up to question by law-suits on constitutional grounds, but the ma-jor opposition was from a well-known reli-gious organization.

The basis of the debate is whether a nuclear-transfer blastocyst is a person. Is it a personwith the same rights as an individual that isborn? The President is very clear: he believesit is a person and that nuclear transfer would,therefore, be a form of research intended tokill a person. He came out in favor of theBrownback Bill, which states that this re-search should not go forward.

When Congress started looking at these is-sues again, the tide had turned dramatically,perhaps as a result of the California vote. Now,the majority in the House and in the Senateare in favor of funding at least expanded em-bryonic stem cell research, if not nuclear-transfer research. But this support was notenough to overcome a veto: last year, theCastle-DeGette Bill was passed in Congressbut vetoed by President Bush. Later that day,Governor Schwarzenegger loaned $150 mil-lion from the state budget to the CaliforniaInstitute of Regenerative Medicine: it is be-cause of that loan that the funding has be-gun. Now, ½nally, we can move at least Cali-fornia forward in all aspects of stem cell re-search. Hopefully, it will eventually be per-mitted and funded throughout the UnitedStates.

© 2007 by John L. Hennessy and Irving L.Weissman, respectively.

John Brauman (Stanford University) and Leslie Berlowitz (AmericanAcademy)

David Kennedy (Stanford University) and Gordon Moore (Intel Corpo-ration)

George P. Shultz (Stanford University) and Gerhard Casper (StanfordUniversity)


Academy Meetings


Remembrances

John R. Hogness

John R. Hogness, who passed away in Seattleon July 2, 2007, was a statesman of thoughtand action in the world of medicine. As a Fel-low for over thirty years, he was an admiredmentor and dedicated colleague who workedto advance the Academy as a national institu-tion committed to serving scholarship andsociety.

Educated at Haverford College and the Uni-versity of Chicago, he began his career with aprivate medical practice in Seattle beforejoining the faculty at the newly establishedUniversity of Washington School of Medi-cine in 1950. Throughout a long career at theUniversity, he served as Dean of the Schoolof Medicine from 1964–1969, as Universityof Washington Executive Vice President andVice President of the University of Washing-ton Health Sciences from 1969–1971, and asPresident of the University from 1974 to 1979.In the 1980s, he returned to the University ofWashington as professor of health sciences.His more than seventy papers and publica-

tions reflect his wide-ranging interests, in-cluding his early work in chemistry and en-docrinology, a year at Los Alamos preparingreports on tracer techniques and beta-rayburns at Eniwetok, and his involvement inmedical education, administration, and healthpolicy, particularly the relationship betweengovernment and medicine and the social andethical aspects of medicine.

In the midst of his university service, Hognesswas appointed the ½rst President of the In-stitute of Medicine. The iom was not borneasily, but he recognized that if this new or-ganization were to become a major presencein the medical world, it would have to bemore than an honorary society. It would haveto stake its reputation on marshalling the ex-pertise of its members to produce impartial,authoritative studies. It would have to speakout on matters of national policy and bringemerging health issues to public attentionwell before they reached a crisis stage. Hog-ness stepped up to this daunting responsibil-ity and, in his own words, promised “one hellof a show.”

To those who worked with Hogness at theAcademy, this institutional commitment hasparticular meaning. In the late 1980s, theAcademy set out to create a new blueprintfor its future; Hogness was one of the principalarchitects of the strategic plan that emergedfrom a series of discussions involving overeighty Fellows. Recognizing that it was criti-cal for the Academy to strengthen and expandits research program, he saw its honorarymembership as an invaluable intellectual re-source. In his view, the Academy’s conven-ing power–its ability to draw on membersrepresenting diverse ½elds and perspectives –was the key to developing long-term analy-ses of important social and scholarly issuesthat would inform policymakers and thebroader intellectual community.

Greater communication within the member-ship was also one of Hogness’s goals. Aschair of the Western Center and a member ofthe Council, he guided us in developing amodel for Fellows’ gatherings in other partsof the country. During the past year, we heldover forty meetings and workshops, includ-ing a joint meeting of the Academy and theAmerican Philosophical Society in Washing-ton, D.C., focusing on several of the mostpressing issues facing the nation–from theindependence of the courts to energy choicesand global warming.

He is survived by his wife, Margaret; ninechildren and stepchildren; ten grandchildren;and his brother, David S. Hogness, also a Fel-low of the Academy. His contributions to themedical community and to the Academyrepresent a living legacy for those who willalways value his innovative spirit, his extra-ordinary insight, and his abiding good humor.

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Daniel E. Koshland, Jr.

As this issue of the Bulletin went to press,we learned of the death of Daniel Koshland,Jr. Visionary biochemist, skilled administra-tor, brilliant editor, and noted philanthropist,he was widely recognized as a preeminentleader of the scienti½c community. Koshland’sresearch led to major advances in the under-standing of enzymes and protein chemistry.Always searching for scienti½c insights thatwould bene½t society, he later focused on thechemical reactions involved in Alzheimer’sdisease and on the emerging ½eld of bioener-gy, with its potential for using cyanobacteriato produce methane as an alternative energysource. He received many honors through-out his career: the National Medal of Sciencein 1990, the Albert Lasker Award for SpecialAchievement in Medical Science in 1998, andthe Welch Award in Chemistry in 2006,among others.

A professor in the University of California,Berkeley’s Department of Molecular and CellBiology since 1965, Koshland never con½nedhimself to bench science. In the 1980s, he re-organized the biological sciences programon campus, consolidating eleven small de-partments into three–plant biology, integra-tive biology, and molecular and cellular biol-ogy–that reflected the changing nature of re-search. While continuing his work at Berke-ley, he accepted another responsibility thatwould establish him as an eloquent spokes-man for science. From 1985–1995, he servedas editor of Science, improving the peer-reviewprocess, upholding the highest standards forthe publication of pioneering research,strengthening the editorial board to includemore scientists with the background neededto evaluate content, and introducing tech-nology-based production processes. Underhis creative leadership, the journal began toexert a major influence on public policy andbecame the voice of science in the nation.

A Fellow of the American Academy for fortyyears, Koshland served as a Councilor in the1970s when he provided advice and guidanceon a number of issues that continue to con-cern us today–from questions of nuclear pro-liferation to the future of the humanities.Both Dan and his late wife, the distinguishedimmunologist Marion Koshland, were mem-bers of the Council and strong advocates ofthe interdisciplinary research that is at thecenter of the Academy’s work. In the late1980s, Koshland participated in a strategicplanning effort that set the future directionof the Academy’s work; with his insight andexperience as an editor, he helped to trans-form Dædalus into a more effective publica-tion that communicates with Academy mem-bers and the broader intellectual community.

He is survived by his wife, Yvonne; threedaughters; two sons, including Douglas Kosh-land, a Fellow of the Academy; and an ex-tended family. In his scienti½c work and hisservice to the Academy, he was always opento discussion and debate. His integrity, gen-erosity, and sense of purpose inspired allthose he touched.

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Remembrances


NoteworthySelect Prizes and Awards

National Medals of Science,2005

Biological SciencesAnthony S. Fauci (National Insti-tutes of Health)

Torsten N. Wiesel (The Rockefel-ler University)

ChemistryTobin J. Marks (NorthwesternUniversity)

EngineeringJan D. Achenbach (NorthwesternUniversity)

Physical SciencesRalph A. Alpher (The DudleyObservatory)

National Medals of Science,2006

Biological SciencesRita R. Colwell (Canon U.S. LifeSciences, Inc.)

Nina V. Fedoroff (PennsylvaniaState University)

Lubert Stryer (Stanford Univer-sity)

ChemistryMarvin H. Caruthers (Universityof Colorado, Boulder)

Peter B. Dervan (California Insti-tute of Technology)

Robert S. Langer (MassachusettsInstitute of Technology)

Mathematics/Computer ScienceHyman Bass (University ofMichigan)

Physical SciencesDaniel Kleppner (MassachusettsInstitute of Technology)

National Medal of Technology,2006

Charles M. Vest (National Acad-emy of Engineering)

Theda Skocpol (Harvard Univer-sity) has been awarded the 2007Johan Skytte Prize in PoliticalScience.

Gabor Somorjai (University ofCalifornia, Berkeley) was award-ed the 2008 Priestley Medal.

Charles P. Thacker (MicrosoftCorporation) received the Johnvon Neumann Medal for Out-standing Achievements in Com-puter-related Science and Technol-ogy, given by the Institute of Elec-trical and Electronics Engineers.

New Appointments

Ernest Beutler (Scripps ResearchInstitute) has been appointed tothe Scienti½c Advisory Board ofProtalix BioTherapeutics, Inc.

Mary Schmidt Campbell (NewYork University) has been nomi-nated to serve as Chair and mem-ber of the Board of the New YorkState Council on the Arts.

Thomas Carew (University ofCalifornia, Irvine) was electedPresident of the Society for Neu-roscience.

Carol T. Christ (Smith College)has been elected to the Board ofDirectors of Merrill Lynch & Co.,Inc.

Ching-Wu Paul Chu (Universityof Houston) has been named tothe Advisory Board of Aurora Im-aging Technology, Inc.

Nina V. Fedoroff (PennsylvaniaState University) has been namedScience and Technology Advisorto U.S. Secretary of State Condo-leezza Rice.

Frances Daly Fergusson (VassarCollege) has been elected to theBoard of Trustees of the J. PaulGetty Trust.

Jeffrey S. Flier (Beth Israel Dea-coness Medical Center) has beennamed Dean of Harvard MedicalSchool.

M. Judah Folkman (HarvardMedical School) has been ap-pointed to the Scienti½c AdvisoryBoard of Predictive Biosciences.

Shaw Prize, 2007

Peter Goldreich (Institute for Ad-vanced Study)

Robert P. Langlands (Institute forAdvanced Study)

Robert J. Lefkowitz (Duke Univer-sity)

Kiel Prize, 2007

Helmut Schmidt (Die Zeit)

Amartya Sen (Harvard University)

Other Awards

James Roger Prior Angel (Univer-sity of Arizona) was awarded the2007 Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize by theOptical Society of America.

Norman E. Borlaug (Dallas, TX)was awarded the CongressionalGold Medal, America’s highestcivilian honor.

John Groves (Princeton Universi-ty) is the recipient of the merit

award from the National Insti-tutes of Health.

Thomas Kailath (Stanford Univer-sity) is the recipient of the 2007ieee Medal of Honor, awardedby the Institute of Electrical andElectronics Engineers.

Toni Morrison (Princeton Univer-sity) was awarded the 2007 Rad-cliffe Institute Medal, given by theRadcliffe Institute for AdvancedStudy.

Maynard Olson (University ofWashington) is the winner of the2007 Gruber Prize in Genetics.

Saul Perlmutter (University ofCalifornia, Berkeley) is amongthe recipients of the 2007 GruberPrize in Cosmology.

Condoleezza Rice (United StatesDepartment of State) is the recip-ient of the 2007 wnba Inspira-tion Award.

Joseph L. Sax (University of Cali-fornia, Berkeley) was awardedthe 2007 Blue Planet Prize.

Paul L. Joskow (MassachusettsInstitute of Technology) has beenelected President of the Alfred P.Sloan Foundation.

Paul LeClerc (New York PublicLibrary) has been elected to theBoard of Trustees of the J. PaulGetty Trust.

Mary Patterson McPherson (An-drew W. Mellon Foundation) hasbeen named Executive Of½cer ofthe American Philosophical Soci-ety.

Richard A. Meserve (CarnegieInstitution) has been elected tothe Board of Overseers of Har-vard University.

Robert Pozen (mfs InvestmentManagement) will chair a newSecurities and Exchange Com-mission advisory committee tostudy how to make the U.S.½nancial reporting system lesscomplex and costly.

Neil L. Rudenstine (ARTstor)has been elected to the Board ofTrustees of the J. Paul GettyTrust.

Virginia Sapiro (Boston Univer-sity) has been named Dean ofBoston University’s College andGraduate School of Arts and Sci-ences.

S. Shankar Sastry (University ofCalifornia, Berkeley) has beennamed Dean of the College ofEngineering at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley.

Kay Kaufman Shelemay (HarvardUniversity) has been appointedChair of Modern Culture in theJohn W. Kluge Center at the Li-brary of Congress.

Subra Suresh (Massachusetts In-stitute of Technology) has beenappointed Dean of the School ofEngineering at the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology.

Lewis T. Williams (FivePrime)has been appointed to the Boardof Directors of Juvaris BioThera-peutics, Inc.

Noteworthy

Thomas Bender (New York Uni-versity) and Wilson Smith (Uni-versity of California, Davis), eds.American Higher Education Trans-formed, 1940–2005: Documentingthe National Discourse. Johns Hop-kins University Press, September2007

Floyd E. Bloom (Scripps ResearchInstitute), ed. Best of the Brain fromScienti½c American. Dana Press,June 2007

Leon Botstein (Bard College). TheHistory of Listening. Basic Books,July 2007

Tom Brokaw (nbc News).BOOM! Random House, Novem-ber 2007

William J. Clinton (New York,NY). Giving: How Each of Us CanChange the World. Knopf, Septem-ber 2007

Sheldon H. Danziger (Universityof Michigan) and Cecilia ElenaRouse (Princeton University), eds.The Price of Independence: The Eco-nomics of Early Adulthood. RussellSage Foundation, December 2007

Denis Donoghue (New York Uni-versity). On Eloquence. Yale Uni-versity Press, January 2008

Freeman J. Dyson (Institute forAdvanced Study). A Many-ColoredGlass: Reflections on the Place ofLife in the Universe. University ofVirginia Press, August 2007

Martin Filler (New York, NY).Makers of Modern Architecture.New York Review Books, July 2007

Joel L. Fleishman (Duke Univer-sity). The Foundation: A GreatAmerican Secret–How PrivateWealth is Changing the World. Pub-lic Affairs Books, January 2007

Saul Friedlander (University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles). The Yearsof Extermination: Nazi Germanyand the Jews, 1939–1945. Harper-Collins, April 2007

Frank F. Furstenberg (Universityof Pennsylvania). Destinies of theDisadvantaged: The Politics of Teen-age Childbearing. Russell SageFoundation, November 2007

Al Gore (Nashville, Tennessee).The Assault on Reason. PenguinPress, May 2007

Select Publications

Poetry

Geoffrey Hill (Boston University).A Treatise of Civil Power. Yale Uni-versity Press, January 2008

Fiction

Woody Allen (New York, NY).Mere Anarchy. Random House,June 2007

Ha Jin (Boston University). A FreeLife. Pantheon, November 2007

Garrison Keillor (Prairie HomeCompanion). Pontoon: A LakeWobegon Novel. Viking, Septem-ber 2007

Jim Lehrer (Public BroadcastingSystem). Eureka. Random House,October 2007

Alan Lightman (mit). Ghost.Pantheon, October 2007

Ian McEwan (Oxford, UnitedKingdom). On Chesil Beach. Dou-bleday, June 2007

Philip Roth (New York, NY). Exit Ghost. Houghton Mifflin, October 2007

William Trevor (London, UnitedKingdom). Cheating at Canasta.Viking, October 2007

Non½ction

Rolena Adorno (Yale University).The Polemics of Possession in Span-ish American Narrative. Yale Uni-versity Press, December 2007

Alan Alda (New York, NY). ThingsI Overheard while Talking to Myself.Random House, September 2007

Francisco J. Ayala (University ofCalifornia, Irvine). Darwin’s Giftto Science and Religion. JosephHenry Press, June 2007

Thomas Bender (New York Uni-versity). The Un½nished City: NewYork and the Metropolitan Idea.nyu Press, September 2007

Michael J. Graetz (Yale LawSchool). 100 Million UnnecessaryReturns: A Simple, Fair, and Compet-itive Tax Plan for the United States.Yale University Press, January 2008

Gertrude Himmelfarb (Washing-ton, D.C.), ed. The Spirit of the Age:Victorian Essays. Yale UniversityPress, November 2007

Robert Hollander (Princeton Uni-versity) and Jean Hollander, trans.Paradiso by Dante. Doubleday,August 2007

Jerome Kagan (Harvard Univer-sity). What is Emotion?: History,Measures, and Meanings. Yale Uni-versity Press, November 2007

Nikki Keddie (University of Cali-fornia, Los Angeles). Roots andResults of Revolution. Yale Univer-sity Press, August 2006

Anthony T. Kronman (Yale LawSchool). Education’s End: Why OurColleges and Universities Have Giv-en Up on the Meaning of Life. YaleUniversity Press, September 2007

Paul MacAvoy (Yale University).The Unsustainable Costs of PartialDeregulation. Yale UniversityPress, July 2007

Guillermo O’Donnell (Universi-ty of Notre Dame). Dissonances:Democratic Critiques of Democracy.University of Notre Dame Press,September 2007

Stanley G. Payne (University ofWisconsin-Madison). Franco andHitler: Spain, Germany, and WorldWar II. Yale University Press, Jan-uary 2008

James Peacock (University ofNorth Carolina, Chapel Hill).Grounded Globalism: How the U.S.South Embraces the World. Univer-sity of Georgia Press, July 2007

Norman Pearlstine (The CarlyleGroup). Off the Record: The Press,the Government, and the War overAnonymous Sources. Farrar, Straus& Giroux, August 2007

Steven Pinker (Harvard Universi-ty). The Stuff of Thought: Languageas a Window into Human Nature.Viking, September 2007

Diane Ravitch (New York Uni-versity) and Chester E. Finn, Jr.(Thomas B. Fordham Institute),eds. Beyond the Basics: Achieving aLiberal Education for All Children.Thomas B. Fordham Foundation,July 2007

Jeffrey D. Sachs (Columbia Uni-versity). Common Wealth: Econom-ics for a Crowded Planet. PenguinPress, August 2007

Jeffrey D. Sachs (Columbia Uni-versity), Macartan Humphreys(Columbia University), and JosephE. Stigliz (Columbia University),eds. Escaping the Resource Curse.Columbia University Press, June2007

Oliver Sacks (New York, NY).Musicophilia: Tales of Music andthe Brain. Knopf, October 2007

Frederick A. O. Schwarz, Jr.(Brennan Center for Justice) andAziz Z. Huq (Brennan Center forJustice). Unchecked and Unbalanced:Presidential Power in a Time of Ter-ror. New Press, March 2007

Jonathan D. Spence (Yale Univer-sity). Return to Dragon Mountain:Memories of a Late Ming Man.Viking, September 2007

Peter Stansky (Stanford Universi-ty). The First Day of the Blitz. YaleUniversity Press, November 2007

Yi-Fu Tuan (University of Wis-consin-Madison). Coming Hometo China. University of MinnesotaPress, April 2007

John Updike (Boston, Massachu-setts). Due Consideration: Essaysand Criticism. Knopf, October 2007

Helen Vendler (Harvard Univer-sity). Our Secret Discipline: Yeatsand Lyric Form. Harvard Universi-ty Press, October 2007

J. Craig Venter (J. Craig VenterInstitute). A Life Decoded: MyGenome, My Life. Viking, Septem-ber 2007

Alice Waters (Chez PanisseFoundation). The Art of SimpleFood: Notes and Recipes from a Deli-cious Revolution. Clarkson Potter,October 2007


Theodore Ziolkowski (PrincetonUniversity). Modes of Faith: Secu-lar Surrogates for Lost Religious Be-lief. University of Chicago Press,June 2007

Exhibitions, Performances,and Commissions

John Baldessari (University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles). “Waysof Seeing” at the Hirshhorn Mu-seum and Sculpture Garden,Smithsonian Institution, July 26–September 20, 2007.

Eric Fischl (New York, NY). Four-teen new, previously undisplayedbronze sculptures as well as large-scale drawings, at the Kestnerge-sellschaft, Germany, November30, 2007–February 3, 2008.

Frank Gehry (Frank O. Gehry &Associates) is designing a play-ground in New York, in BatteryPark on the southern tip of Man-hattan.

Jasper Johns (Sharon, CT). “Gray”at the Metropolitan Museum ofArt, New York, February 5–May 4,2008.

Brice Marden (New York, NY).“12 Views for Caroline Tatyana”at the San Jose Museum of Art,June 9–October 14, 2007.

Bruce Nauman (Galisteo, NM).“One Hundred Fish Fountain” atthe Kestnergesellschaft, Ger-many, September 27–November4, 2007.

We invite all Fellows and For eign Honorary Membersto send notices about their recent and forthcoming pub -lications, scienti½c ½ndings,exhibitions and performances,and honors and prizes tobulletin@ama cad.org.


Billie Tsien (Tod Williams BillieTsien Architects) and Tod Wil-liams (Tod Williams Billie TsienArchitects) will design the Revaand David Logan Center for Cre-ative and Performing Arts at theUniversity of Chicago.

Bill Viola (Bill Viola Studio).“Ocean Without A Shore” at theSan Gallo Church, San Marco,Venice, Italy, June 10–November24, 2007.


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Since 1780, the Academy’s sponsorship of exploration and innovation has made it a natural place for both Fellows and members ofthe public to present, discuss, and publish new ideas in science and technology. The Academy’s archives hold many communications,both practical and philosophical, some of which were published in the Memoirs or Proceedings.

H. Strait of Rensselaer County, New York, in a letter to the Academy dated December 10, 1832, submitted his plan for the constructionand motion of wings for human flight. Mr. Strait was not a member of the Academy.

Having given considerable attention to the study of Aeronauticks and discovered a principle, which I deem will be emi-nently useful and applicable; if put in practice, to that noble and neglected Branch of rational Science, and being myselfunable from want of suf½cient money and mechanical skill to give it a complete investigation by Experiment I am con-strained either to solicit assistance or drop it where it is. Having therefore examined its Reasons with Care and Attention,I chose what I deemed to be the most advisable alternative and resolved immediately to send you my plan with the Rea-sons in its support in order to solicit your assistance. The importance of the Object, if it shall prove to be universally ap-plicable, the eminent utility it will be to the Geographer, the Traveller, the Philosopher, and to Posterity: the Sublimity itwill present to the inspired Poet and Observer of the Beauties of Nature; nay more a sincere desire to advance and pro-mote the Happiness of the whole human Family, and to make them at once alive to the noblest feelings of the Heart andconscious of the high Powers with which they are intrusted to improve and control for the most exalted purposes. . . . Isnow high time that the Reasons of Flying which have as yet stood unrefuted and uninvestigated, should receive a rationaldemonstration of their solidity or fallacy by the established laws of natural Philosophy.

H. Strait’s eight-page letter to the American Academy describing his design for wings for humanflight included two illustrations, this one for “The round Representation.” The Aeronaut was to placehimself in Car C, “take hold of the handles H,H,” and “raise them up and down as fast as he can.”

american academy

of arts & sciences

Norton’s Woods, 136 Irving Street, Cambridge, ma 02138telephone 617-576-5000, facsimile 617-576-5050,

email [email protected], website www.amacad.org

academy officers

Emilio Bizzi, President

Leslie Cohen Berlowitz, Chief Executive Of½cer

Louis W. Cabot, Chair of the Academy Trust and Vice President

John S. Reed, Treasurer

Jerrold Meinwald, Secretary

Steven Marcus, Editor

John Katzenellenbogen, Vice President, Midwest

Gordon N. Gill, Vice President, West

Robert C. Post, Librarian

publications advisory board

Jesse H. Choper, Denis Donoghue, Jerome Kagan, Steven Marcus,Jerrold Meinwald, Emilio Bizzi

editorial staff

Alexandra Oleson, Editor

Phyllis S. Bendell, Director of Publications

Esther Y. Chen, Assistant Editor

Scott Eaton Wilder, Layout & Design

Initial design by Joe Moore of Moore + Associates

Bulletin Summer 2007Issued as Volume lx, Number 4© 2007 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

The Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (issn 0002–712x)is published quarterly by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.Periodi cals rate postage paid at Boston, ma, and at additional mailingof½ces. Post master: Send address changes to Bulletin, American Acad-emy of Arts & Sciences, 136 Irving Street, Cambridge, ma 02138.

The views expressed in the Bulletin are those held by each contribu-tor and are not necessarily those of the Of½cers and Fellows of theAmerican Acad emy of Arts & Sciences.

photo credits

Steve Rosenthal inside front cover

Martha Stewart pages 6–7, 12, 13, 16, 19, 22, 25

Jennifer Girard pages 26, 28, 31

University of Michigan Photo Services page 32

Rod Searcey pages 33, 34, 38

american academy of arts & sciences

Norton’s Woods136 Irving StreetCambridge, ma 02138-1996 usa

telephone 617-576-5000

facsimile 617-576-5050

email [email protected] www.amacad.org

A M E R I C A N A C A D E M YO F A RT S & S C I E N C E S

Documents

american academy of arts & sciences Bulletin · summer 2007 Bulletin Page 23 A Poetry Reading by Galway Kinnell Page 13 Education in the Developing World David E. Bloom, Michael R