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american academy of arts & sciences

summer 2012

vol. lxv, no. 4

Dealing with North Korea’s Nuclear ProgramStephen W. Bosworth, Steven E. Miller, and Siegfried S. Hecker

Commission Meeting Focuses on the Humanities and Social Sciences in International Relations

Internet Pioneers Discuss the Future of the Web

Nuclear Nonproliferation Diplomats Gather in Vienna

Remembering H.M.Robert Desimone, Suzanne Corkin, Elizabeth Kensinger, and John D. E. Gabrieli

The Getty Center: Research, Conservation, and CollectionsThomas W. Gaehtgens and James Cuno

Upcoming Events

For updates to the calendar, visit http://www.amacad.org/event.aspx.

Induction Weekend–Cambridge

October 5–Celebrating the Arts and the Humanities

October 6–Induction Ceremony

October 7–Symposium: Cherishing America

Contents

Features

12 Dealing with North Korea’s Nuclear ProgramLeading North Korea experts–Steven E. Miller (Harvard KennedySchool), Stephen W. Bosworth (Tufts University), and Siegfried S.Hecker (Stanford University)–discuss the geopolitical and non-proliferation implications of North Korea’s nuclear program.

18 Remembering H.M.Four neuroscientists–Robert Desimone (mit), Suzanne Corkin(mit), John D. E. Gabrieli (mit), and Elizabeth Kensinger(Boston College)–explore the important contributions that H.M.made to our understanding of memory, learning, and identity.

27 The Getty Center: Research, Conservation, and CollectionsJames Cuno, President and ceo of the J. Paul Getty Trust, andThomas W. Gaehtgens, Director of the Getty Research Institute,describe the Getty Center’s exhibitions and collections, art restora-tion and conservation efforts, and research program.

Departments

2 Academy NewsCommission Focuses on the Importance of the Humanities

and Social Sciences to America’s National Security

Internet Pioneers Discuss the Future of the Web


New Publications

10 Around the Country

34 Noteworthy

36 Remembrance

Clockwise from top left: Jim Leach (National Endowmentfor the Humanities), Danielle Allen (Institute for AdvancedStudy), Sir Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web Consortium;mit), Siegfried S. Hecker (Stanford University), RobertDesimone (mit), James Cuno (J. Paul Getty Trust)

2

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18 12

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2 Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Summer 2012

academy news

Knowing Ourselves and Others: Commission MeetingFocuses on the Humanities and Social Sciences in International Relations

At its April 26–27, 2012, meeting inWashington, D.C., the Academy’s Com-

mission on the Humanities and Social Sci-ences examined the importance of theliberal arts to America’s national security, tomaintaining an effective foreign policy, andto continued U.S. leadership in the globaleconomy.

“Tomorrow’s leaders will require a nu-anced understanding of the world beyondour borders and a cosmopolitan approach tocultural difference,” said Academy PresidentLeslie C. Berlowitz. “The Commission isconsidering a range of issues, including theimportance of the humanities and social sci-ences to international, intercultural commu-nication.”

During the two-day meeting, several cur-rent and former high-ranking governmentof½cials presented compelling arguments

for the importance of international educa-tion, suggesting that skills acquired throughstudy abroad programs, foreign languagetraining, and area studies programs are vitalto national interests.

Retired Army Lieutenant General and for-mer U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan KarlEikenberry told Commission members thatthe humanities and the social sciences “areabsolutely critical if our nation is to main-tain its leading position globally.” Eiken-berry noted that America has three kinds ofpower at its disposal in pursuing its nationalsecurity goals–coercive, remunerative, andpersuasive–and that deep knowledge andexpertise in foreign languages and culturesis critical for all three. He cited the 1958 Na-tional Defense Education Act as a model forthe kind of investment in foreign languagelearning and regional studies that couldbene½t the nation today.

National Endowment for the HumanitiesChairman Jim Leach also addressed thegroup. The former senior member of theHouse Committee on International Rela-tions stated that the humanities–especiallyhistory–will be critical if the United Statesis to succeed as a global power. “As a society,we must know ourselves and how we think,and learn to consider how other cultures andsocieties think,” he said.

In his keynote remarks to the Commis-sion, then U.S. Secretary of Commerce JohnBryson linked future economic growth tothe vitality of liberal arts education. “Thereis an important and greatly underappreci-ated connection between the humanitiesand social sciences and the creative, entre-preneurial spirit that drives the Americaneconomy,” Bryson said. “We will need notonly specialists who can generalize, but thegeneralists who can specialize.”

Philip Bredesen (Nashville, Tenn., former Governor of Tennessee)and George Lucas (Lucasfilm Ltd.)

Jim Leach (National Endowment for the Humanities) and Karl Eiken-berry (Stanford University)

Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Summer 2012 3

The Commission also discussed the futureof cultural diplomacy with former U.S.Ambassador to the Netherlands CynthiaSchneider and the evolution of a common,k-12 curriculum with Richard Laine, Direc-tor of the National Governors Association’seducation division.

Four members of Congress called on theAcademy to form the blue-ribbon Commis-sion to recommend speci½c steps to bol-ster the humanities and social sciences inschools, universities, and public life. Threeof the four members–Sen. Lamar Alexan-der (R-Tennessee), Rep. David Price (D-North Carolina), and Rep. Tom Petri(R-Wisconsin)–also addressed the groupduring the Washington meeting. The fourthof½cial to call for the Commission is Sen.Mark Warner (D-Virginia).

Commission members include nationalleaders from higher education, business,

journalism, the arts and humanities, andpublic affairs. The Commission is cochairedby Duke University President Richard H.Brodhead and Exelon Corporation Chair-man Emeritus John Rowe.

“To sustain our domestic and interna-tional security, the strength of our insti-tutions, and even our scienti½c and tech-nological enterprise, the nation needs toproduce citizens broadly literate in the hu-manities and social sciences as well as in thenatural sciences, technology, and engineer-ing,” Berlowitz said.

Commission members are now planninga series of regional forums around the coun-try, to take place before the Commission is-sues its initial recommendations next year.These gatherings will provide Commissionmembers with new perspectives, engage keystakeholders, and catalyze public interest inthe Commission’s work.

To learn more about the Commission,visit www.humanitiescommission.org.

Kwame Anthony Appiah (Princeton University), Pauline Yu (AmericanCouncil of Learned Societies), and Gerald Early (Washington University inSt. Louis)

Tom Campbell (Chapman University School of Law, former Member of Congressfrom California) and Richard H. Brodhead (Duke University)

John Rowe (Exelon Corporation)


Berners-Lee, Director of the World WideWeb Consortium and 3com Founders Pro-fessor of Engineering at mit, and David D.Clark, Senior Research Scientist at the mit

Computer Science and Arti½cial IntelligenceLaboratory.

Academy President Leslie Berlowitz andBritish Consul General to New England PhilBudden welcomed more than 250 guests tothe event, which was the ½rst in a series onGREAT Science organized by the U.K. gov-ernment’s Science and Innovation Network.“Fellows of the American Academy–fromCharles Babbage to Tim Berners-Lee–havebeen instrumental in the creation of the Dig-ital Age,” Berlowitz said. “Many of them havealso been members of the Royal Society, so itis ½tting that we begin our GREAT Science

collaboration with a conversation about thefuture of the Internet.”

“The Internet, the World Wide Web, andBig Data are . . . fundamental to our sharedprosperity and, indeed, our security goingforward,” Budden said in his openingremarks.

Tom Leighton began the discussion by ad-dressing the consequences for governanceand science in particular. “Making vastamounts of data freely available on theWeb,” he noted, “could have fundamentalimplications for government transparencyas well as for how scienti½c research is ad-vanced in such areas as drug discovery, cli-mate research, Web analytics, and manyother ½elds.”

academy news

The Internet has revolutionized how weuse, access, and share information. As the

technology becomes faster and more afford-able, its bene½ts are reaching even more peo-ple and places. Yet as its user base broadens,the global Internet is increasingly fracturedalong national, linguistic, and cultural lines.

This was just one of several issues dis-cussed at a recent Academy meeting on “TheEvolution of the Internet: Challenges andOpportunities.” The meeting, held June 6,2012, was presented in collaboration withthe Royal Society and the British Consulate-General; it was moderated by Tom Leighton,Chief Scientist at Akamai Technologies andProfessor of Applied Mathematics at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (mit).The program featured talks by Sir Tim

From left: David D. Clark (MIT), Tom Leighton (Akamai Technologies; MIT), and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web Consortium; MIT)

Internet Pioneers Discuss the Future of the WebAmerican Academy and Royal Society Launch Joint Lecture Series on GREAT Science


The panelists then discussed new oppor-tunities and challenges for consumer access,as Web-based information proliferates. TimBerners-Lee, who invented the World WideWeb in 1989, talked about increasing accessthrough technologies such as mobile de-vices. “In developing countries, [mobiletechnology] is all they’ve got,” he said. “Soif you can make the Web work on mobile de-vices, then you can get it to people who don’thave Internet connections by wire.” Whenone member of a village saves up to buy asmartphone, for example, the entire villagegains access to information and communi-cation capabilities that would not otherwisebe available. The challenge, according toBerners-Lee, is for users to “make a connec-tion to somebody who is on the other side ofa boundary,” whether national, cultural, orgeographic.

David Clark, who served as Chief ProtocolArchitect in the development of the Inter-net, examined the issues that develop in tan-

Academy President Leslie Berlowitz and British Consul General to New England Phil Buddenoffer opening remarks at the American Academy and Royal Society inaugural program onGREAT Science.

American Academy and the Royal Society Launch GREAT Science Lecture Series

On June 6, 2012, the AmericanAcademy and the Royal Societylaunched a nationwide lectureseries to celebrate scienti½c tiesbetween the United States and theUnited Kingdom. The joint lec-ture series on GREAT Sciencewas organized by the U.K. govern-ment’s Science and InnovationNetwork to pro½le internationalscience excellence. The U.S. lec-ture series will feature Fellows ofthe American Academy and theRoyal Society who will discussscienti½c topics of signi½cance tosociety. Future lectures are sched-uled for Chicago, Atlanta, Hous-ton, Los Angeles, San Francisco,Washington, New York, Ottawa,and Vancouver.

dem with increased access and cross-borderconnections. “At the international level,”Clark noted, “we have a lot of disagreementabout what the Internet should be.” Althoughthe Internet has the technical capacity tocarry information between machines any-where in the world, the user experience dif-fers from country to country–what Clarkcalls “the local character of the Internet.”Websites and content are tailored to localcultural and linguistic preferences: “If youlook up something in a different country, it’snot just that it’s in a different language; youget a different answer,” he explained.

The meeting touched on a range of topics–government control, censorship, copyrightlaw, and open data –including many thatwere explored in the Fall 2011 issue of Dæ-dalus, “Protecting the Internet as a PublicCommons,” which was guest edited by DavidClark. To view or listen to the presentations,visit http://www.amacad.org/events/EvolutionOfTheInternet.aspx.


the gnf Initiative. In that paper, StevenMiller outlines the main points of conten-tion within the npt regime and prescribes½ve ways to manage, minimize, or evenovercome these divergences. “The Academysymposium in Vienna was a tremendous op-portunity to share our work and ½ndingswith practitioners who are involved in theregular management of the npt regime,”said Miller.

Participants also heard brief opening re-marks from Ambassador Susan Burk (Spe-cial Representative of the U.S. Presidentfor Nuclear Nonproliferation, U.S. Depart-ment of State), William Potter (Directorof the James Martin Center for Nonprolif-eration Studies at the Monterey Instituteof International Studies), CHIN Siew Fei(Counselor and Deputy Resident Represen-tative of Singapore to the InternationalAtomic Energy Agency), and AmbassadorCHO Hyun (Embassy of the Republic ofKorea to Austria and Permanent Mission ofthe Republic of Korea to the InternationalOrganizations in Vienna).

Scott Sagan remarked after the Viennasymposium that “these off-the-record meet-ings have become a valuable forum for sharingideas about potential ‘win-win compro-mises’ between groups of states that havenot previously seen common interests inspeci½c npt reform proposals. Steven Mil-ler’s paper on Nuclear Collisions usefully out-lines principles that could encourage furtherdiplomatic and technical measures tostrengthen the regime. Many of the diplo-mats at our meetings have said that the frankdiscussions of these kinds of proposals havehelped them identify areas of potential com-mon interest.”

The gnf Initiative is a comprehensiveinterdisciplinary, multi-institutional, andmulti-national project; it is distinct in bring-ing together diverse communities to developpragmatic approaches to limit the safety, se-curity, and nonproliferation concerns asso-ciated with the global spread of nuclearenergy. The work of the Initiative had an

academy news


Every ½ve years, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (npt)comes up for review by member states. The next Review Conference will not take

place until 2015, but delegates recently gathered in Vienna, Austria, for the ½rst of threepreparatory sessions. From April 30 to May 11, 2012, delegates discussed ways to ensurefull implementation of the treaty and to promote its universality. They also consideredwhat progress has been made to strengthen the npt regime since the 2010 Review Con-ference.

With 190 member states, the npt is notoriously dif½cult to manage and reform. Eachstate has different perceptions of the npt’s adequacy and fairness, as well as its flawsand weaknesses. Learning how to bridge these differences will be crucial to the futuresuccess of the treaty. Over the last four years, the Academy’s Global Nuclear Future(gnf) Initiative has become a leader in this effort, publishing new ideas for npt regimeimprovement in our occasional paper series and bringing together scholars and policy-makers for debate and collaboration.

On May 4, 2012, the Academy convened more than ½fty of the senior-level govern-ment representatives gathered for the Preparatory Committee meeting to address chal-lenges facing the npt regime. Organized in collaboration with the Vienna Center forDisarmament and Nonproliferation and the James Martin Center for NonproliferationStudies, the symposium was chaired by leaders of the gnf Initiative: Steven E. Miller,codirector (Harvard University); Scott D. Sagan, codirector (Stanford University); andRobert Rosner, senior advisor (University of Chicago). More than twenty-½ve countrieswere represented at the meeting.

The off-the-record conversation explored many of the ideas set forth in NuclearCollisions: Discord, Reform & the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime, a recent publication from

William Potter (Monterey Institute of International Studies), Steven E. Miller (HarvardUniversity), and Scott D. Sagan (Stanford University)


impact on the outcome of the 2010 npt

Review Conference and has informed theU.S. President’s Blue Ribbon Commissionon America’s Nuclear Future as well as the2010 and 2012 Nuclear Security Summits.The Initiative is working with nuclear new-comers to identify paths that permit thepeaceful use of nuclear power while mini-mizing the potential adverse consequencesof the spread of inherently risky nucleartechnologies. The leaders of the Initiativewill continue to inform international policy-makers as they weigh the pursuit of nuclearenergy programs alongside safety, security,and economic concerns.

The gnf Initiative is supported by Carne-gie Corporation of New York; The Williamand Flora Hewlett Foundation; The John D.and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation;the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; the FloraFamily Foundation; and Fred Kavli and theKavli Foundation. The Academy is gratefulto these foundations for advancing the workof the Initiative.

Susan Burk (Special Representative of theU.S. President for Nuclear Nonproliferation,U.S. Department of State)

Recent Publications from the Global NuclearFuture Initiative

Nuclear Collisions: Discord, Reform & the Nuclear Nonproliferation RegimeSteven E. Miller, Wael Al-Assad, Jayantha Dhanapala, C. Raja Mohan, and Ta Minh Tuan

Lessons Learned from “Lessons Learned”: The Evolution ofNuclear Power Safety after Accidents and Near-AccidentsEdward D. Blandford and Michael M. May

The Back-End of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle: An Innovative Storage ConceptStephen M. Goldberg, Robert Rosner, and James P. Malone

Game Changers for Nuclear EnergyKate Marvel and Michael May

Nuclear Reactors: Generation to GenerationStephen M. Goldberg and Robert Rosner

Shared Responsibilities for Nuclear Disarmament: A Global DebateScott D. Sagan, James M. Acton, Jayantha Dhanapala,Mustafa Kibaroglu, Harald Müller, Yukio Satoh, Mohamed I. Shaker, and Achilles Zaluar

Multinational Approaches to the Nuclear Fuel CycleCharles McCombie and Thomas Isaacs, Noramly Bin Muslim, Tariq Rauf, Atsuyuki Suzuki, Frank von Hippel, and Ellen Tauscher

“On the Global Nuclear Future,” vols. 1–2, Dædalus(Fall 2009; Winter 2010)

For electronic copies of gnf publications, visit http://www.amacad.org/projects/globalnuclearbooks.aspx.


academy news

How Does the Nuclear Industry Learn and Adapt?

Invaluable lessons can be learned from serious nuclearaccidents, such as those at Fukushima, Three Mile Island,and Chernobyl. Yet minor incidents and near-accidentsprovide important lessons as well. These experiencesoften reveal not only how to decrease the likelihood thatthe same mistakes will occur, but also how to avoid largeraccidents that may be foreshadowed in earlier, smallerincidents.

In Lessons Learned from “Lessons Learned”: The Evolution of NuclearPower Safety after Accidents and Near-Accidents, Edward D. Blandfordand Michael M. May enumerate the lessons from nuclear accidentsand incidents, asking whether the nuclear energy community hasindeed learned from those lessons. The authors argue that stake-holders must commit to ongoing improvement of their protocolsand standards. Each nuclear incident–no matter its size–under-lines the importance of pursuing high standards of safety, security,and proliferation resistance.

Blandford and May also emphasize the need for coordinationamong nuclear states. “Mechanisms to facilitate and, where needed,enforce mutual learning have not always been adequate,” they write.“Information-sharing, import/export agreements based on safetystandards, agreements to facilitate cooperation among regulatoryauthorities, and the participation of ½nancial interests such as in-vestors and insurers all have a role to play in improving mutuallearning among different states.”

May is Professor Emeritus (Research) in the School of Engineer-ing at Stanford University, where he is also a Senior Fellow in theFreeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is formerCodirector of Stanford’s Center for International Security andCooperation (cisac) and is Director Emeritus of the LawrenceLivermore National Laboratory. Blandford is a Stanton NuclearSecurity Postdoctoral Fellow at cisac; he also serves as an adjunctResearch Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical andNuclear Engineering at the University of New Mexico.

Lessons Learned is the latest publication from the Academy’sGlobal Nuclear Future (gnf) Initiative, which is working to iden-tify and promote measures that will limit the safety, security, andproliferation risks raised by the global expansion of nuclear energy.Through innovative scholarship and behind-the-scenes interactionswith international leaders and stakeholders, the Initiative is devel-

oping pragmatic recommendations for managing the emergingnuclear order. The Initiative is led by Steven Miller, codirector(Harvard University); Scott Sagan, codirector (Stanford Univer-sity); Robert Rosner, senior advisor (University of Chicago); andStephen M. Goldberg, research coordinator (Argonne NationalLaboratory).

The gnf Initiative is supported in part by grants from CarnegieCorporation of New York, The William and Flora Hewlett Founda-tion, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, theAlfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Flora Family Foundation, and FredKavli and the Kavli Foundation. The Academy is grateful to thesesupporters and to the project leaders for advancing the work of theInitiative.

To download Lessons Learned and other gnf publications, visithttp://www.amacad.org/projects/globalnuclearbooks.aspx.


Dædalus, Summer 2012 “Science in the 21st Century”

Jerrold Meinwald (Cornell Univer-sity), “Prelude”

James F. Bell III (University of Arizona),“The Search for Habitable Worlds: Plan-etary Exploration in the 21st Century”

Terence Tao (University of California,Los Angeles), “E pluribus unum: FromComplexity, Universality”

Paul L. McEuen (Cornell University),“Small Machines”

Daniel G. Nocera (Massachusetts Insti-tute of Technology), “Can We Progressfrom Solipsistic Science to Frugal Inno-vation?”

Nima Arkani-Hamed (Institute for Ad-vanced Study), “The Future of Funda-mental Physics”

Bonnie L. Bassler (Princeton Univer-sity), “Microbes as Menaces, Mates &Marvels”

Neil H. Shubin (University of Chicago),“Fossils Everywhere”

Chris Somerville (University of Cali-fornia, Berkeley), “Deciphering the PartsList for the Mechanical Plant”

Gregory A. Petsko (Weill CornellMedical College; Brandeis University),“The Coming Epidemic of NeurologicDisorders: What Science Is–and ShouldBe–Doing About It”

David Tilman (University of Min-nesota), “Biodiversity & EnvironmentalSustainability amid Human Dominationof Global Ecosystems”

May R. Berenbaum (University of Illi-nois at Urbana-Champaign), “Postlude”

In the Summer 2012 issue of Dædalus,“Science in the 21st Century,” leaders fromthe physical and biological sciences presentengaging, accessible snapshots of recentresearch in their ½elds. They explore thepractical applications of new discoveries andidentify questions for further inquiry. Guestedited by Jerrold Meinwald, the GoldwinSmith Professor of Chemistry Emeritus atCornell University, and May R. Berenbaum,Professor and Head of the Department ofEntomology at the University of Illinois atUrbana-Champaign, the volume covers areasof study from planetary science, physics,mathematics, and chemistry to biology,ecology, and evolutionary theory. While cel-ebrating the intellectual accomplishmentsof recent decades, the issue emphasizes thatthere is much left to learn.

The essays offer a view of where science isheaded in the coming decades–not an easytask, the editors maintain. In his preface tothe volume, Meinwald reflects on his own½eld of organic chemistry: “[M]ost of thework done by organic chemists in the year2000 and beyond has depended heavily onthe application of experimental techniquesand on theories that simply did not exist ahalf-century earlier,” he writes. “The lesson(well known, but easily forgotten) is that an-ticipating future events is dif½cult.” Beren-baum echoes this sentiment in her essay:

“The conduct of science depends on cold,hard, veri½able facts, and forecasting the fu-ture is necessarily rife with uncertainty.”

In looking to the future, the essays are fullof the sense of wonder that drives scienti½cinquiry. Robotic space exploration is hom-ing in on worlds within our solar system thatmay have the potential to support life. Math-ematical laws help us make predictionsabout the observable universe, from naturalprocesses to social phenomena such as pol-icy preferences. And new work in microbiol-ogy has revealed that bacteria communicatewith one another and even organize to actcollectively.

Many of the essays confront the most ur-gent threats to humankind and the planet:feeding a growing population as usable landand resources dwindle; using security, sus-tainability, and affordability as guideposts torethink energy systems; mitigating rapidspecies loss due to pollution, climate change,and land degradation; and promoting biodi-versity to restore the ecosystems that all liferelies on to survive.

Whether we succeed in bene½ting mate-rially from the enormous strides that scienceis now making will be determined largely byhow the public and particularly policy-mak-ers respond to the ever-increasing under-standing of where we and our world comefrom, and where the laws of nature willallow us to go.

Dædalus Explores New Directions for Science in the 21st Century

Recent scienti½c advances have fundamentally changed our understandingof the world. Many of these advances will have an enormous effect on societyand the natural environment. For instance, dna sequencing technologieshave implications that range from treating neurologic disorders to optimizingplant cultivation, while tiny machines operating at the nanoscale may some-day obscure the distinction between technology and life. Where will thesedevelopments take us next? How can they be applied to the most pressingchallenges that we face?


around the country

More than 150 Academy members and guests attended a reception in New York City in honor of New

York Area Fellows. Leslie C. Berlowitz (President of the Academy), Alan Alda (actor, writer, and

director), Roger W. Ferguson, Jr. (President and Chief Executive Of½cer, tiaa-cref), and Carol

Gluck (George Sansom Professor of History, Columbia University) spoke about the unique role that

the Academy plays as the nation’s oldest independent research center, addressing complex challenges

to our civil society and national competitiveness.

Carol Gluck (Columbia University), Roger W. Ferguson, Jr. (TIAA-CREF), Alan Alda (New York, New York), and Academy PresidentLeslie C. Berlowitz

James S. Tisch (Loews Corporation), Billie Tisch (Tisch Foundation),Helene Kaplan (Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP & Affiliates),and Joel Conarroe (John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation)

Carol Kekst (New York, New York), Gershon Kekst (Kekst and Com-pany), and Gerald Rosenfeld (Lazard Ltd.; New York University)

New York City May 14, 2012

The American Academy is one ofthe few institutions trusted to bringthe best of private sector thinking–academic thinking, business think-ing, creative thinking–to our mostimportant national problems.

–Roger W. Ferguson, Jr. President and Chief Executive Of½cer,

TIAA-CREF


Igor Klebanov (Princeton University), Leslie C. Berlowitz (AmericanAcademy), Cathleen Morawetz (New York University), and LauraEngelstein (Yale University)

Steven Siegelbaum (Columbia University College of Physicians andSurgeons), George Rupp (International Rescue Committee), and ShuChien (University of California, San Diego)

Don Michael Randel (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), Roger W.Ferguson, Jr. (TIAA-CREF), and Antonio M. Gotto Jr. (Weill CornellMedical College)

Daniel Mendelsohn (Bard College), Thomas Hines (University of Cal-ifornia, Los Angeles), and Richard Gardner (Columbia Law School)

The idea that you have been invited into this convening of intellect and concern,and that your talent can be combinedwith that of others in this organization,is an extraordinary idea.

–Alan Alda actor, writer, and director

The Academy is unusual because it is a nonpartisan place, where peopleof very different persuasions, whetherthey be intellectual or political, cometogether to address an issue.

–Carol Gluck George Sansom Professor of History,

Columbia University


Steven E. MillerSteven E. Miller is Director of the InternationalSecurity Program at the Belfer Center for Scienceand International Affairs at the Harvard KennedySchool. Elected a Fellow of the American Academyin 2006, he serves as Cochair of the Academy’sCommittee on International Security Studies andCodirector of the Academy’s Global Nuclear FutureInitiative.

The Academy has chosen a propitioustime to examine the implications of

North Korea’s nuclear program. We areexpecting that at any moment the countrywill launch a missile linked to a satellite–an act that the United States and much of

the world regard as provocative. The missilelaunch is conjoined to speculation thatNorth Korea may be in some stage of prepa-ration for another nuclear test. So the issueis now at a boil. But those of you who follownuclear affairs will know that this story hasat least a twenty-year history. Indeed, the½rst crescendo was reached in the early1990s, when a confrontation with the Clin-ton administration led to serious worriesabout war and to a last-minute diplomaticsolution, the Agreed Framework, underwhich North Korea agreed to freeze its nu-clear program in return for various kinds of U.S. assistance. Ambassador Bosworthplayed a major role in this process.

From that day to the present, NorthKorea’s nuclear program has never ceased tobe a source of concern, though the issue haswaxed and waned. Over the course of thelast decade, North Korea has all but left thereservation. In 2003, it withdrew from theNuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In 2006,it conducted its ½rst nuclear test (which wasnot entirely successful, but it did go “boom”).In 2009, it carried out a second test of a nu-clear device. Along the way, it has conducteda small number of missile tests. That mar-riage of missiles and weapons is particularlydisturbing to those who are within range ofthe missiles.

The present is an acute moment in a verylong story. Fortunately, we have two excep-tionally quali½ed people to help us under-stand and decode what is going on. Am-bassador Stephen Bosworth is Dean of TheFletcher School of Law and Diplomacy atTufts University. He has a long and distin-guished past in American diplomacy, serv-

ing from 1995 to 1997 as the head of the Ko-rean Peninsula Energy Development Organ-ization, the institution created to helpimplement the Agreed Framework that wasachieved in 1994. He was also Ambassador tothe Republic of Korea from 1997 to 2001 andSpecial Representative for North Korea Pol-icy in the Obama administration from 2009to 2011.

Siegfried “Sig” Hecker is Research Profes-sor of Management Science and Engineer-ing at Stanford University, where he is alsoCodirector of the Center for InternationalSecurity and Cooperation. Sig has also had along and distinguished career in the Ameri-can nuclear weapons complex. A metallur-gist by training, he served from 1986 to 1997as Director of the Los Alamos National Lab-oratory. He has also been a valued memberof the Academy’s Global Nuclear FutureInitiative. Among other distinctions, Sig hashad extensive exposure to North Korea’snuclear facilities, visiting North Korea seventimes. Along with one or two other individ-uals, he has seen more of North Korea’s fa-cilities than anyone outside of the Inter-national Atomic Energy Agency. He is unri-valed as a decoder of the technical dimen-sions of the North Korean program, bothwhere it is today and where it is headed.

On April 12, 2012, North Korea unsuccessfully launched a long-range missile that was intended to carry an Earth observation satellite into space. North Korea ½red the long-range test rocket in de½ance of un Security Council resolutions and an agreement with the United States. On the eve of the launch, the Academy convened leading NorthKorea experts to discuss the broader geopolitical and nonproliferation implications of North Korea’s nuclear program.The following is an edited transcript of the discussion, which served as the Academy’s 1984th Stated Meeting.

Dealing with North Korea’s Nuclear Program


Stephen W. BosworthStephen W. Bosworth is Dean of The FletcherSchool of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.From March 2009 to October 2011, he was theU.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policyin the Obama administration. He also served asU.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea from1997 to 2001, as U.S. Ambassador to the Philip-pines from 1984 to 1987, and as U.S. Ambassadorto Tunisia from 1979 to 1981. He has been a Fellowof the American Academy since 2010.

When I returned to the problems ofNorth Korea in Spring 2009, having

been away from them for almost ten yearsafter I left Seoul as Ambassador, I found anumber of fundamental differences. First,the strategic context within which theUnited States and our allies and partnerswere dealing with the threat of North Koreahad shifted dramatically. In the 1990s, in-cluding when I was Ambassador to SouthKorea, we treated the North Korea issuelargely as a matter for the United States tosettle. But in 2009, I found an entirely differ-ent regional context.

First, in the 1990s, months would pass inwhich I did not consider China’s views onthe North Korea issue because China, bychoice, was not actively engaged in thediplomacy of North Korea. Second, theSouth Korea I returned to in 2009 was differ-ent in many ways from the one that I hadknown in the 1990s. In particular, the pointof view of the South Korean administrationon how to deal with its neighbor was verydifferent from the view held by the Kim Dae-jung administration, which had been inpower when I was there previously. Third, inmy earlier experience, Japan had been aprincipal partner to the United States in try-ing to cope with the problems of NorthKorea. By 2009, Japan’s role was different, inpart because Japan had become much morepreoccupied with its own domestic condi-tion. Although Japan was still concernedabout nukes and missiles, its primary ex-pressed interest was the fate of the Japaneseabductees who had been taken by NorthKorea thirty years ago.

In the early 2000s, these three countries,together with the United States and Russia,formed what was called the six-party processto negotiate with North Korea. This multi-lateral context was quite different from theera of the early 1990s, when the UnitedStates had self-assuredly stepped forward todeal with the threat of North Korea. Somethings, however, were the same. And in thatsense, we were able to begin putting to-gether a program for dealing with NorthKorea in the 2000s. All ½ve nations continueto have a common interest in seeing thatNorth Korea does not become a permanentnuclear weapons state. However, in additionto that common goal, each country hasspeci½c national interests.

China, for example, does not want to havea nuclear North Korea, but neither does itwant to see North Korea collapse. NorthKorea plays the vital role of a buffer state be-tween China and U.S. military ally SouthKorea. China’s nightmare is to somedaywake up in a world where the Koreas have

reuni½ed and have a military relationshipwith the United States. From the Chineseperspective, that turn of events would be asharply negative shift in the correlation offorces in Northeast Asia.

As I mentioned, Japanese policy is drivenby strong public interest in the fate of theJapanese abductees. That is not to say thatJapan is not actively concerned about NorthKorea’s nuclear program. But Japan hastaken a somewhat less assertive role in re-gional diplomacy compared to the 1990s,when it was one of our key partners in deal-ing with North Korea under the AgreedFramework of Geneva.

The changes in South Korea’s role are per-haps the most interesting of all. As China’spreeminence in the region has risen, so hasSouth Korea’s importance, at least from theperspective of the United States. SouthKorea has become an even more importantU.S. ally and partner within the region thana decade ago. It is a flourishing democracy, aprospering economy, and a growing powerboth regionally and globally. The UnitedStates now looks to South Korea to offsetsomewhat the rise of China. The UnitedStates is very conscious of South Korea’s in-terests, especially with regard to NorthKorea. The result, from a U.S. policy-makingperspective, is that South Korea now hasmore sway in the formulation of a coordi-nated U.S.-South Korean approach to NorthKorea than was the case in the 1990s. I am notsaying that the United States failed to con-sider South Korea’s interests in the 1990s; butI can assure you that, based on my experiencein both periods, we give much more impor-tance today to what South Korea wants.

For the United States, given this mélangeof interests and activities, North Korea’s nu-clear program is an even more complicatedgeopolitical issue than it was in the 1990swhen we operated under the Agreed Frame-work. The threat from North Korea hasremained much the same. That threat istwofold. One component is the nuclearthreat, a strategic concern that has clearly


dealing with north korea’s nuclear program

deepened. The ½ssile material that NorthKorea had in the 1990s was estimated to besuf½cient for one or two nuclear devices.After breaking out of the Agreed Framework,the country was able to produce enough½ssile material for an estimated eight totwelve devices, assuming that it has not pro-duced any ½ssile material from the technol-ogy Sig Hecker glimpsed when he visited in2010: namely, uranium enrichment. In thepast, their ½ssile material was all plutoniumbased. But we believe that North Korea hasmade signi½cant progress in uranium enrich-ment–speci½cally, that it has enriched ura-nium to a level whereby it could potentiallybe used for producing more ½ssile materialand, eventually, nuclear weapons.

The second, and in some ways the greater,threat that North Korea presents within theregion is instability. It is essentially a failedstate in the heart of what is perhaps the mostimportant region in the world. Its neighborsare concerned that its instability could ex-plode at any time. That concern has, ofcourse, been exacerbated over the last fewmonths with the death of Kim Jong-il andthe coming to power (or at least coming intoof½ce) of Kim Jong-un. I am not among theobservers who believe that Kim Jong-un hasany great degree of authority over decision-making in North Korea. But he clearly has arole; he is the public face of the regime, andhe seems to be asserting himself in a fairlyvigorous way.

So it is not just the nuclear and missileprograms that are worrisome. It is thelonger-term problem of a potentially unsta-ble North Korea. Our options for dealingwith this second threat are, to say the least,not good. Some argue that our goal shouldbe somehow to prompt regime change inNorth Korea. Believe me, if I could see a wayto do that without putting several millionSouth Koreans at risk, I would be sorelytempted, because this is a despicable regime.But in addition to its nuclear capabilities,North Korea has the capacity to hold the tento twenty million South Koreans in metro-politan Seoul hostage to its conventionalforces–namely, rockets and artillery. TheU.S. military has estimated that North Koreacould put several hundred artillery shellsa minute into metropolitan Seoul. Such anattack would do horrendous damage toSouth Korea. So North Korea must be dealtwith very gingerly.

The other option is to try to engage withthe regime, to change its perception of itsself-interest. We have been trying to do thatfor nearly twenty years. The problem is thatNorth Korea is very dif½cult to engage.Moreover, it is very dif½cult for democraciesto sustain the kinds of policy necessary tomaintain engagement on an extended basis.Alexis de Tocqueville was right when he saidthat exercise of foreign policy is one of theweaknesses of democratic systems because(to paraphrase him) foreign policy successrequires the steady application of attentionand force over a protracted period of time.

In our system of government, where ourperception of interests and the worldchanges on a fairly frequent basis (or at leastwith our electoral cycle), that requirementis very hard for us to meet. And unfortu-nately, North Korea has become a con-tentious issue within our domestic bodypolitic. It is dif½cult to sustain the level ofcommitment and attention required to en-gage with North Korea over a long period oftime. Yet we do not have an alternative.Diplomatic engagement may be challeng-ing, but it is the only mechanism I see usbeing able to pursue in order to change grad-ually the environment of the Korean penin-sula.

To some extent, we need to reduce ourfocus on the nuclear and missile issues thathave constituted the heart of our NorthKorea agenda over the last twenty years. Wemust begin to address the longer-term issueof instability. As long as North Korea feelsthat it has leverage with us because of ourconcerns about its nuclear and missile pro-grams, it will use that leverage and will be-come even more dif½cult to deal with. Whilewe made some progress during my time asSpecial Representative for North Korea Pol-icy, that progress has proved not to be lasting.North Korea has now taken us back to wherewe were in Summer 2009 following its testsof a missile and another nuclear device.

We need to reduce our focus on the nuclear and

missile issues that have constituted the heart of

our North Korea agenda over the last twenty years.

As long as North Korea feels that it has leverage

with us because of our concerns about its nuclear

and missile programs, it will use that leverage and

will become even more difficult to deal with.


Siegfried S. HeckerSiegfried S. Hecker is Research Professor of Man-agement Science and Engineering at Stanford Uni-versity, where he is also a Senior Fellow at theFreeman Spogli Institute for International Studiesand Codirector of the Center for International Se-curity and Cooperation. He is Emeritus Directorof the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which heled from 1986 to 1997. He was elected a Fellow ofthe American Academy in 2002.

My role in the North Korea problem hasbeen a technical one. I am not a diplo-

mat and will leave the diplomacy to Ambas-sador Bosworth; but I will venture into thetechnical side of how to deal with the impos-sible situation that he described. First, I willgive you a breakdown of the nuclear pro-gram and the missile program, then I willdiscuss the threats we face and where westand.

I have been to North Korea seven times, somuch of what I will tell you I have seen inperson. In our Track II diplomacy interac-tions, the North Koreans have shown memuch of their nuclear program. On the basis

of what I have seen, my colleagues and I haveput together the best estimate of what theircapabilities are. We still have many ques-tions, but we are better off today than wewere seven years ago in terms of under-standing just what North Korea’s nuclearand missile programs entail.

I agree with Ambassador Bosworth thatthe North Korea problem is much more thana nuclear and missile issue. But in the UnitedStates, our glasses have nuclear colors; everytime we look at North Korea we see only nu-clear issues. Yet we cannot deal with theproblem by focusing on nuclear weaponsalone. North Korea has the bomb, but it doesnot have much of a nuclear arsenal. In myview, neither South Korea nor the continen-tal United States and our assets around theworld are currently in danger of being at-tacked by a North Korean nuclear weapon.However, North Korea indeed wants to putus at risk. It has continued to enhance its nu-clear program to give the impression that itcan do so, and the government has notveered from that objective over the lasttwenty years. The country has been develop-ing nuclear capability for more than ½ftyyears, but it is only in the last twenty that wehave become greatly concerned.

I would give North Korea credit for four toeight plutonium bombs. Because we knowthat a bomb requires about the amount ofplutonium that was in the Nagasaki bomb(approximately 6 kilograms), we can makean estimate based on what I saw in NorthKorea and on its production records. We cansee when its reactors operate. We know thatit has conducted two nuclear tests, thoughwe don’t know exactly how much pluto-nium was used in those tests. And we alsohave an idea of how many processing lossesit would have incurred. All this informationsuggests that North Korea has somewherebetween 24 and 42 kilograms of plutonium:that is, enough for four to eight bombs.Some observers estimate twelve; others saythat the number is lower.

At less than 1 kiloton, the ½rst test was notvery successful (in comparison, Nagasakiwas 21 kilotons, or the equivalent of 21,000tons of tnt). The second test was closer to5 kilotons; in my opinion, that test was suc-cessful. And if they can do 5 kilotons, theycan do 20. However, based on those, let’s sayone-and-a-half, tests, I do not believe thatNorth Korea has the requisite knowledge tominiaturize a nuclear bomb or warhead thatit could then mount on a missile. Considerthat the United States has conducted 1,054nuclear tests, and that Russia has conducted715. North Korea does not yet have that ca-pability, and certainly would not have thecon½dence to launch a nuclear warhead. Tominiaturize a nuclear warhead will be one ofthe strong drivers for North Korea to con-duct further tests.

There is very little question that NorthKorea is working on miniaturizing. I am surethey have designs and computer calcula-tions. But again, for comparison, the Na-gasaki bomb weighed ten thousand poundsand was delivered by a b-29 bomber. To puta bomb on a missile, depending on whetherit is short range or an icbm (intercontinen-tal ballistic missile), it has to be less than 500kilograms or so. That is a long way from theNagasaki bomb. Moreover, with a nuclearwarhead you not only have to make it go up,but you also have to bring it back down andput it through reentry. There are mechanicaland thermal stresses, and you have to do agreat deal of testing. North Korea is notthere yet.

As far as missiles are concerned, the NorthKoreans are not calling tonight’s launch amissile launch; they are calling it a spacelaunch. That is, they will attempt to launcha satellite into space. They have already con-ducted three long-range rocket tests. (Let’sjust call them rockets, whether they aremeant to have a satellite or a warhead ontop.) The ½rst test, which took place in 1998,scared the Japanese because it flew overJapan; but it was not fully successful. Thesecond one, in 2006, blew up at the gantry


dealing with north korea’s nuclear program

and was a total failure. In the third test, in2009, the ½rst two stages were successful,traveling quite far. In the third stage, therocket either blew up or did not disconnectright. North Korea never did get a satelliteinto orbit.

Why is North Korea trying another spacelaunch (or missile test) now? First, threeprevious tests are not very many. We knowthat they have been preparing to completethe next long-range rocket test for severalyears, and the centennial of Kim Il-sung’sbirth seems a good time for them to carryout the test. We have been expecting anotherlaunch attempt at some point, but also real-ize that North Korea’s nuclear program isactually quite slow.

The launch is predicted to take place at9:30 tonight. Whether or not it is successful,the North Korean public will surely be toldthat it was. The North Korean people believethat the previous satellite launches (fromtwo of the three long-range rocket tests)were successful, and that North Korea nowhas two satellites orbiting in space. I sawthem personally at the planetarium museumin Pyongyang–two little red dots goingaround in circles. The guide was telling visi-tors that those were the two satellites. So asfar as the North Korean public is concerned,the launch will be successful. [Note added inprint: The rocket launch occurred at 7:37 pmthat night and was a dismal failure; enoughso that Pyongyang for the ½rst time admitteda failure.]

North Korea maintains that it has a sover-eign right to launch a satellite. Iran has doneso, and, in fact, just recently launched its

third satellite since 2009. The United Statesdid not put up a terribly big fuss over Iran,but North Korea is regarded differently. Theargument is that the latest un SecurityCouncil Resolution, Resolution 1874, pro-hibits the country from conducting a missilelaunch of any kind, including a satellitelaunch. Certainly, North Korea is breakingthe rules of the resolution. Why does thismatter? Regardless of whether it is a spacelaunch or a missile launch, the ½rst twostages of this three-stage rocket pose a dual-use problem. Testing also presents an oppor-tunity to learn a great deal about long-rangemissiles. This fourth test will provide infor-mation that could eventually be used tobuild an icbm.

North Korea does not now have an icbm;its rockets take too long to fuel. If we sawNorth Korea fueling a missile with a war-head to send our way, we would have time toreact. The program also lacks the capacityfor reentry; our best intelligence indicatesthat the necessary flight tests have not beenconducted. So North Korea is still a long wayfrom launching a missile with a nuclear war-head. However, if they do launch a satellite,they will undoubtedly learn more about themissile.

What worries me the most is the road-mobile, one-stage missile system that wasbrought out at an October 2010 parade inPyongyang. Called the Musudan, this for-mer Soviet ss-n-6 submarine ballistic mis-sile system contained nuclear warheads. Thefact that it is road mobile makes the threateven greater because such a system is veryhard to ½nd. But there is no indication that

the Musudan has ever been tested. However,some of my colleagues have speculated thatthe second stage of the Unha-3 rocket that iscurrently sitting on the launch pad looks justlike the Musudan. So again, tonight’s launchmight provide information. But do we haveto worry about being attacked tomorrow?The answer is no.

As I mentioned, North Korea has 24 to 42kilograms of plutonium bomb fuel; we thinkit takes around 6 kilograms to make a bomb.North Korea has voluntarily not restartedthe Yongbyon nuclear reactor that was shutdown in 2007. Observers in the United Statessay that the reactor cannot be restarted be-cause it is decrepit, but I do not think this istrue. Again, having been there and havingtalked to the North Koreans, I believe thatthey could restart the reactor if they wantedto. Still, the best they could do would be tomake enough plutonium to power one bombper year. But they are not producing pluto-nium right now; all they have is a handful ofplutonium bombs.

When I visited in November 2010, theyshowed me not only uranium enrichmentbut also a light water reactor that they arebuilding. The reactor they had was a gas-graphite reactor (gas cooled, graphite mod-erated) that could be fueled with naturaluranium, so they did not have to enrich.They are now building a light water reactorbecause the Agreed Framework, which Am-bassador Bosworth helped put together withkedo (the Korean Energy DevelopmentOrganization), fell apart during the Bush ad-ministration in late 2002. The agreementhad stipulated that the United States wouldprovide North Korea with light water reac-tors. So North Korea is telling us, “Youdidn’t keep your promise; we’re going tobuild our own.” The reactor will also makeplutonium, but this fact does not concernme greatly: it will not make high-qualitybomb-grade plutonium.

What about uranium enrichment? NorthKorea took the plutonium path to the bomb,but like every other country that has the

North Korea indeed wants to put us at risk. It has

continued to enhance its nuclear program to give

the impression that it can do so, and the government

has not veered from that objective over the last

twenty years.


bomb, it also took the uranium path. Thedifference is that the North Koreans have de-nied it. They may have admitted to enrichinguranium in October 2002, depending onwhich side of the story you hear. Certainly,they denied it during the ½rst six of my sevenvisits, claiming they had neither the person-nel nor the equipment. But a number of sig-nals pointed to the fact that they haveuranium enrichment facilities. I once said toVice Minister Kim Kye-gwan, “I know, ofcourse, that you have uranium enrichment.”His response was, “You don’t understandour country, Dr. Hecker.”

But in November 2010, they showed methe smoking gun. My jaw dropped. Thereweren’t just a few dozen centrifuges; therewere two thousand of them, housed in anultra-modern facility. I and my two Stanfordcolleagues said, “My God! How did they getso many of them?” Our North Korean hostsclaimed that they had started enriching onlyafter my visit in 2009. But to amass such alarge number of centrifuges from April 2009to November 2010 would have been impos-sible. Indeed, they had been working on ura-nium enrichment for decades, and on thisparticular setup for a number of years. Eventhough they say that the facility was de-signed to make low-enriched uranium–which is reactor fuel, not bomb fuel–itturns out that you can replumb that type offacility to make bomb fuel. I do not thinkthat this facility is making bomb fuel, butthere must be another facility–one that isalso set up for low-enriched uranium but, inall likelihood, is being used for making high-enriched uranium as well.

The problem is that we do not know howmuch high-enriched uranium they havemade. The best we can do is estimate how

much of the key materials for centrifugesthey could have purchased through clandes-tine networks. These networks includegreedy European businessmen who hockedtheir wares to A.Q. Khan as well as connec-tions in Malaysia, South Africa, and Dubai.All the same materials and facilities thatA.Q. Khan, Libya, and Iran have acquired,North Korea has acquired, too. At present,North Korea might have some high-enricheduranium, but only a substantial increase inthat capacity would present a grave concern.

The threat of a nuclear attack is very low.Although miscalculations and accidents areworrisome, uranium enrichment does notchange the threat much, unless North Koreaindeed makes a lot more. What concerns methe most is export of nuclear technologies.North Korea built a reactor in Syria for pro-ducing plutonium, which Israel destroyed in2007. It also exported some of the precursorsfor uranium enrichment to Libya. This pro-cess of export is the main problem.

What should we do to deal with NorthKorea today? As Ambassador Bosworthnoted, there are no good options. However,what we ought not to do is the same thing wehave done during all previous crises and thenexpect different results. More un SecurityCouncil sanctions will not do any good;China will not let sanctions have an impact.Maybe what we ought to do is not say much.Instead, we should focus on the things thatwill not make the threat worse. I have beenpushing the U.S. government to pursuethreat reduction. Although domestic politicspresents some obstacles, we can go to Chinaand say, “Look, we must reduce the threat,and you don’t want matters to get worse.” Ihave been trying to relay to our governmentwhat I call the “three nos”: no more bombs,

no better bombs, and no export. For the timebeing, North Korea has nuclear weapons,and there is not much we can do about it.They are not going to give them up in theshort term.

But if we do not want North Korea tobuild more bombs, that means no high-enriched uranium, no plutonium, no betterbombs, and, most important, no nucleartests. We should also work to prevent NorthKorea from exporting sensitive materialsand technologies, though that objective ishard to enforce. Ultimately, our main focusshould be to ensure that North Korea doesnot conduct another nuclear test. In 2009,North Korea walked away from the six-partytalks, launched a long-range rocket, and fol-lowed that with a nuclear test. We do notwant to replay that event.

© 2012 by Steven E. Miller, Stephen W. Bos-worth, and Siegfried S. Hecker, respectively

If we do not want North Korea to build more bombs,

that means no high-enriched uranium, no plutonium,

no better bombs, and, most important, no nuclear

tests.

To view or listen to the presentations,visit http://www.amacad.org/events/statedmeetings/1984_NorthKorea.


Remembering H.M.

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The Academy’s 1981st Stated Meeting on February 15, 2012,featured members of the Catalyst Collaborative@mit per-forming a staged reading of Wesley Savick’s play Yesterday

Happened: Remembering H.M. At the age of twenty-seven, H.M. (as hewas known to the world) became frozen in time. After experimentalbrain surgery, he was unable to form new memories. His personaltragedy became neuroscience’s opportunity, contributing more to ourunderstanding of the brain than had been learned in the previous onehundred years. The staged reading was followed by a panel discussionabout memory and cognition. Four distinguished neuroscientists,including researchers who worked with H.M., explored the importantcontributions that this patient made to our understanding of memory,learning, and identity. An edited transcript of the discussion follows.(Image above: Barlow Adamson in Yesterday Happened: RememberingH.M., 2012, mri scan of H.M. by André van der Kouwe.)

of memory research. His memory impair-ments were initially reported by Brenda Mil-ner, who is arguably the mother of modernneuropsychology. Just a short time later, shemade another, perhaps equally amazing, dis-covery: that H.M. had not lost the ability toform all kinds of memories. She gave H.M.(who could not even remember meeting herthe day before) a test in which he had tolearn how to write by watching his hand ina mirror. It was a bit odd and required somepractice, but with time, he learned to do the

task. That observation initiated decades ofwork on trying to understand which forms ofmemory were dependent on the hippocam-pus, and which forms were dependent onother structures. Scoville had not just dis-sected out the function of memory from theother functions in the brain; his scalpel hadin fact begun to dissect memory itself.

All our panelists worked personally withH.M., except for me. My work in memory isat the micro level and involves animals. Myrole in the case of H.M. is a sort of inheritedinvolvement from my scienti½c mentor atthe National Institutes of Health, MortMishkin, who performed a critical experi-ment in animals. Until that time, scientiststrying to replicate H.M.’s amnesia in animalstudies had failed to ½nd any convincing ev-idence of the hippocampal damage causingthe profound amnesia from which H.M. suf-fered. But Mishkin discovered that if he in-


Robert DesimoneRobert Desimone is Director of the McGovernInstitute for Brain Research and the Doris andDon Berkey Professor in the Department ofBrain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachu-setts Institute of Technology. He was elected aFellow of the American Academy in 2001.

Statistics suggest that half the people inthis room will suffer from Alzheimer’s

disease by age eighty-½ve. This extraordi-nary ½gure is sometimes dismissed by peo-ple outside the ½eld because they believe itmust be hype, but it actually is true. The bestresearch shows a remarkable prevalence ofAlzheimer’s disease. And although hardly aweek goes by without some fantastic discov-ery about memory and Alzheimer’s diseasebeing reported in the news (and we all arehoping for a cure very soon), I am 100 per-cent con½dent that every person in this roomhas spent some time seriously contemplatingwhat the loss of their memory would be like.So it is with a combination of fascination anddread that we consider the case of H.M.

H.M. had his hippocampus removed bythe neurosurgeon William Scoville, who be-lieved that it would relieve H.M.’s otherwiseincurable epilepsy. The surgery resulted inthe complete loss of H.M.’s ability to formmost types of memory, which thereforelocalized memory to the hippocampus, astructure roughly the size of your thumb.Why was this discovery so amazing? It wasthe early 1950s, and the idea that any func-tions were localized in the brain was not uni-versally accepted until a few years before the

case of H.M. Recall that in the early 1800s,phrenologists who made claims about local-ized functions in the brain were ridiculedby the scienti½c establishment. In 1906,Camillo Golgi and Ramón y Cajal shared aNobel Prize for their work in neuroscience.In his acceptance speech, Golgi said thatbased on his observations of the brain, allbrain cells were part of the same cytoplasm.Therefore, Golgi maintained, localization offunction in the brain could not occur: eachpart was equal to any other part. Cajal pro-ceeded to counter his co-winner, stating thatbased on his observations, the brain is com-posed of discrete elements, which haveunique functions. Can you imagine this hap-pening today with two Nobel Prize recipi-ents reaching the opposite conclusion on thesame question?

What occurred was a very sad personaltragedy for H.M., but it opened up the ½eld

What occurred was a very sad personal tragedy for

H.M., but it opened up the field of memory research.

Brenda Milner discovered that H.M. had not lost the

ability to form all kinds of memories. That discovery

initiated decades of work on trying to understand

which forms of memory were dependent on the

hippocampus, and which forms were dependent

on other structures.


cluded a bit more of the temporal lobe, be-yond the hippocampus itself, then the mon-keys he used as subjects became similarlyamnesic. This ½nding meant that humans,long thought to be unique in the way theirmemories were organized, shared manybasic memory system properties with ani-mals. That raised all kinds of questionsabout how the hippocampus interacts withother systems in the brain, and that debatehas continued to this day.

Mishkin’s research also raised the ques-tion, what exactly was removed from H.M.’sbrain? And that turns out to be another fas-cinating detective story. The chief detectivein that story, Suzanne Corkin, will tell you abit about the work involved in trying to½gure out precisely what Scoville did. In fact,the surgical notes on the procedure are notquite accurate, and there have been a num-ber of surprises in H.M.’s case throughoutthe years. I hope the members of our panelwill also tell you a bit about their personal in-volvement with H.M. because I know thatevery one of them formed warm feelings forH.M. They felt a great deal of compassionfor H.M. from working with him over theyears. But the irony was that it was not recip-rocated. He did not recognize them from dayto day. It is interesting to imagine how youwould form a relationship with someonewho does not recognize you. Our panelistswill tell you their accounts of this fascinatingstory.

remembering h.m.

used to be. In sections A and B, you can seein the back of Henry’s brain that his cerebel-lum is badly atrophied. This loss is not an ef-fect of the operation; it is because he tooklarge doses of the anti-seizure medicationDilantin for many years. But more impor-tant, in sections C, D, E, and F, you can seeHenry’s lesion in both temporal lobes. Thedamage extended 5.4 centimeters back fromthe tip of the temporal lobe on the left side,and 5.1 centimeters on the right side. Scovilleestimated that the extent of the lesion waseight centimeters, so he greatly overesti-mated how much tissue he took out. Onlywith the advent of mri have we been able toobtain a more accurate idea of the true sizeof the lesion.

The night Henry died, a hearse broughthis body to the Martinos Center for Biomed-ical Imaging at the Massachusetts GeneralHospital, where we scanned him for ninehours in a 3 Tesla scanner. André van derKoewe put together a short movie of the im-ages from one particular scan. These coronalimages move from front to back as if you arelooking at the front of Henry’s brain andprogressing to the back. Starting in the front,the images show his eyes, nose, and frontallobes. Next, the black areas reveal his en-larged ventricles and medial temporal lobelesions, which are fluid-½lled spaces in hisbrain. The images reveal that his corpus cal-

losum is thin, and that, further back in thebrain, the ventricles are still large. Finally, inthe back, the images show the atrophiedcerebellum.

Suzanne CorkinSuzanne Corkin is Professor of Behavioral Neuro-science in the Department of Brain and CognitiveSciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology.

Iwill ½rst show you an mri scan ofHenry’s brain from 1992. Figure 1 is a hor-

izontal section, so imagine that the brain is

sliced from front to back. In this kind of im-aging, the bright white signal is cerebralspinal fluid. It shows where fluid is presentand brain tissue is absent. In many cases, thewhite patches indicate where brain areas

I worked with H.M. from 1962 until he died in 2008.

He didn’t really know who I was. He could pick my

name out of a list of names beginning with C, but he

didn’t know whether Corkin was a man or a woman,

and he didn’t know what I did. But in recent decades,

he always thought that I was a friend.


In photographs of H.M.’s actual brainfrom right after the autopsy, in a ventral view,you can see the olfactory bulb on one side,both olfactory tracts, and the optic chiasm.In the back is his shriveled cerebellum, whichwould normally extend out farther on eachside and also farther in back. The lesion be-gins just after the tip of the temporal lobe andprogresses back. We think that the surgeonmay have deliberately stopped just short of ablood vessel so that he did not cause moredamage by cutting it. Similarly, on the leftside, is the tip of the temporal lobe. The le-sion extends back from here to anotherblood vessel. A close-up image of the left sideof the front of the brain reveals the olfactorytract, the temporal lobe, and the lesion ex-tending back from the temporal lobe andstopping; it is the same on the right side.

One question I am often asked is whetherH.M. knew who I was. I worked with himfrom 1962 until he died in 2008. The answeris no, and yes. He didn’t really know who Iwas. He could pick my name out of a list ofnames beginning with C, but he didn’t knowwhether Corkin was a man or a woman, andhe didn’t know what I did. But in recentdecades, he always thought he knew mefrom high school. So when I asked him if wehad ever met before, he would say, “Yes, inhigh school.” When I approached him in hisroom, or in the nursing home where he wasliving, he always thought that I was a friend.

Figure 1. T-2 Weighted Axial Sections indicating the Extent of H.M.’s Anterior Temporal LobeResection Bilaterally. © Suzanne Corkin; used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.


John D. E. GabrieliJohn D. E. Gabrieli is Director of the AthinoulaA. Martinos Imaging Center at the McGovernInstitute for Brain Research at the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology and the Grover HermannProfessor in Health Sciences and Technology andCognitive Neuroscience in the Department ofBrain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.

As a graduate student, I had the remark-able privilege of working with Suzanne

Corkin and, for much of my Ph.D. thesis,with H.M. He was a wonderfully kind andcooperative participant, and he could nothave been a better research collaborator. Hedid everything he could to help the scientistsworking with him learn as much as possible.The dramatic feature of H.M.’s condition, asBob Desimone mentioned, was that the re-moval of a local section of tissue had resultedin a global amnesia; whether informationwas verbal or spatial, emotionally powerfulor trivial, he remembered no events and veryfew facts from the day of the surgery to the

day he died. There were some exceptions,but they were small compared to what is typ-ical of a memory.

The primary lesson was that a local injurycould have a global consequence for learningand memory. But the second lesson, whichBob also alluded to, was, in a way, the oppo-site: the short list of skills that H.M. couldlearn perfectly normally fueled another rev-olution. In modern understanding, the hu-man brain is like a symphony orchestra oflearning instruments. Between your ears arespecialized circuits, all learning their ownparts, typically collaborating, but operating

to some degree as islands unto themselves.For an example, we can look to the studies ofH.M. that Brenda Milner published in theearly 1960s. In one test, H.M. had to trace astar that he viewed in a mirror. The outlineof the star and his hand were blocked so thathe could only view his hand moving in themirror. Anyone asked to perform this task isslow at ½rst. You make many mistakes as youovercome robot-like assumptions abouthow you move your hand and what it lookslike when you move it. Like any other kindof skill, everyone gets faster and better withpractice. Remarkably, after learning the skill,H.M. would come back the next day havingretained it as well as anyone else–eventhough he had no idea that he had ever doneit. This shows a fundamental distinction be-tween, on the one hand, what is called declar-ative memory and, on the other, knowing aprocedure without being aware of how youknow it. It turns out that the basal ganglia,structures deep in our brains, support notonly motor skills but also perceptual skillsand cognitive skills. That ½nding provides

an important insight into another separate,independent instrument of memory that al-lows us to be powerful skill learners.

The second class of learning, repetitionpriming, reminds me of an experiment thatgave me the chance to work with H.M. Imag-ine that I ask you to name any weapons thatcome to mind. You might think of gun, knife,or maybe cannon. You probably would notlist bazooka in your top three. Now imaginethat before I ask the question, I give you a listof words to read, and on that list is the wordbazooka. With H.M., I would wait a few mo-ments, then ask him to tell me what the

words on the list were. He would not re-member them, or he would say, “What list?”Then I would say, “I’d like you to tell me the½rst three weapons you think of.” He wouldrespond, “Gun, knife”–wait a moment–“bazooka.” And then he would add, “It’sfunny, why did I think of ‘bazooka’?” His re-sponse was exciting because I knew that hehad made an unconscious memory. He readthe word bazooka, his brain changed, andwhen he had to produce the ½rst couple ofweapons he thought of spontaneously, oneof them was primed to be bazooka.

A number of similar experiments haveshown that individual words that are in-stantly forgotten leave another kind ofmemory trace in the brain that guides sub-sequent behavior. Psychologists have linkedthese ½ndings to the experimental study ofthe human cognitive unconscious. WhenH.M. responded with the word bazooka, hedid not know that he had seen the word, butwhen the moment came to behave and per-form in the world, he was influenced by thatrecent experience as much as you and I

remembering h.m.

We have learned from H.M., and from many research-

ers, that we have multiple memory systems between

our ears, each specialized for learning different kinds

of information.


would have been. Now, if you were the sub-ject in that experiment, your response mightbe, “Do you want me to say ‘bazooka’? Itwas on the list I just read.” But if people in apsychoanalytic experiment are asked not todo that–if they are asked simply to give the½rst one that comes to mind–they still comeup with bazooka. It happens just as often as itdid with H.M.–not more, not less. It’s per-fectly normal. In this way, he taught us thatour brains are symphony orchestras oflearning instruments.

We now know that the neocortex sup-ports this kind of learning, and that withinthe neocortex are parts that support lan-guage and the representation of words andtheir meanings. We have learned from H.M.,and from many researchers, that we havemultiple memory systems between our ears,each specialized for learning different kindsof information. Remarkably, as much as theyinteract in everyday life for most of us–sup-porting each other, interacting with eachother–they learn in isolation. They functionlike departments at a university or differentsections of a bookstore, each with differentkinds of knowledge and able to be indepen-dent. Without the examples that we discov-ered in H.M., as well as the large body ofresearch that was inspired by those exam-ples, we could have continued thinking thatmemory is a single entity. But this is not thecase: memory is a fantastic diversity of dif-ferent instruments geared to learn differentkinds of things. These various instrumentsoperate and send occasional messages toeach other, but they lead independent livesin our brains.

Elizabeth KensingerElizabeth Kensinger is Associate Professor in theDepartment of Psychology and Director of theCognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratoryat Boston College.

Like John, I also was a graduate studentwith Suzanne Corkin and, in that con-

text, had the opportunity to work with H.M.It is an honor to be here tonight to talk aboutboth my personal experiences with him andwhat we learned scienti½cally. I will beginwith an anecdote that highlights some of thepreserved motor learning and implicit mem-ory that John discussed, and that emphasizesthe type of kindhearted person that Henrywas. During my ½rst year of graduate school,Henry was spending the night in one of thehospital areas at mit. He often rode in awheelchair for longer distances, and Ineeded to transport him through a series ofindoor mazes to where we were doing thetesting. Along this route were a number ofplaces where, in order for the wheelchair to

½t through the double door, I had to opennot only the door on one side, but the dooron the other side as well; and there was acomplicated unlocking mechanism thatwent along with this task. Henry, who hadbeen to mit and traveled this path manytimes before, patiently waited as I openedthe ½rst door. As I struggled with the lock atthe bottom of the second door, he reacheddown from his chair and effortlessly undidthe lock. I don’t know if that showed sometype of implicit learning, given that he hadlikely seen it done many times before. Orperhaps he just had far better engineeringknow-how than I did. Regardless, his gestureshowed the spirit of generosity that waspresent in every interaction I had with him.

My primary research with Henry waslooking for evidence of any new type oflearning that was not of the implicit sort, towhich he did not have conscious access. Wewere interested in whether he could con-sciously tell us about things that had hap-pened after his operation in 1953. Many priorstudies had suggested that he had not beenable to acquire this kind of new information.A number of John’s studies showed thatHenry was largely unable to learn new vo-cabulary words. If you gave him a word suchas granola, for instance, he had no idea whatit meant. But we decided to give him whatseemed to be the easiest possible test, askinghim for information about people who hadbecome famous.

We absorb information about famousnames all the time. Most of us do it effort-lessly; we all probably know of Paris Hiltonand Kim Kardashian, even though thosenames would not have registered with us afew years ago. What if we asked Henry aboutnames of people who, prior to 1953, wouldnot have been on his radar, but whom mostof us came to know as household names after1953? In a test I devised with Gail O’Kane,another graduate student with SuzanneCorkin, we ½rst showed him two names, oneof a famous individual and another that we


remembering h.m.

had drawn at random from a Boston phonebook. We asked him to select the name ofthe famous person. And as he started tochoose these names, we were almost in dis-belief. Not surprisingly, he did very wellwhen presented with names of people thathad been famous prior to 1953, choosing thecorrect name in the pair about 92 percent ofthe time. But even for the individuals whohad become famous after 1953, he chose cor-rectly 88 percent of the time. This perfor-mance was not only well above chance, butit was very close to his performance for theindividuals that had been famous prior to hisoperation.

After he selected the name of the famousperson, we would ask him to tell us why thatperson was famous. Often, he wouldn’tknow, or he would be very wrong. One of hismost amusing errors was telling us that YokoOno was an important man in Japan. Clearly,there were some names that elicited a senseof familiarity, but he did not have any otherinformation to latch on to. However, foreleven of the forty or so people that heidenti½ed as famous, he was very good atproviding information about why they werefamous. For instance, he told us that jfk be-came president, that somebody shot himand he didn’t survive, and that he wasCatholic. He said that Lee Harvey Oswaldassassinated the president and that MikhailGorbachev was famous for making speechesand was the head of the Russian parliament.He wasn’t quite right about John Glenn, the½rst astronaut to orbit Earth; he said that

Glenn was the ½rst person to travel in spacein a rocket, and that he went to the moon,landed, stayed there for a while, and re-turned safely. Considering that in 1953 spacetravel had not yet occurred, his answer wasremarkable. He told us that Julie Andrewswas famous for singing on Broadway, thatLiza Minnelli was a movie star, an actress,and a dancer, too, and that Woody Allen wasa comic in movie pictures.

So he did have an amazing ability to ac-quire and consciously generate new infor-mation. Certainly, he did not do so in theway that you and I effortlessly absorb newfacts and new world knowledge into ourrepertoire. Nevertheless, it showed that evenwith the profound amnesia that made himunable to remember any single event after1953, some kind of slow learning process al-lowed him to glean new knowledge.

Again, it was a remarkable privilege towork with him and to see what a generousperson he was. The patience and the timethat he gave allowed all of us, up until his lastyears, to continue to discover fascinatingand novel aspects of how our human mem-ories work.

Henry did have an amazing ability to acquire and consciously generate

new information. Certainly, he did not do so in the way that you and I

effortlessly absorb new facts and new world knowledge into our reper-

toire. Nevertheless, it showed that even with the profound amnesia

that made him unable to remember any single event after 1953, some

kind of slow learning process allowed him to glean new knowledge.

Questions from the Audience

Question

Now that you know about the local effectsand the heterogeneous centers of knowledgeacquisition, what would you say is the coor-dinator of this orchestra in the brain?

Suzanne Corkin

Many scientists have described a central ex-ecutive in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. Thisarea of the cortex carries out the highest,most complex cognitive functions. The cur-rent thinking is that this area helps you, ½rstof all, to set goals. Second, it helps you layout and think through all the steps that youneed to take to achieve your goals, and thento perform them in the right order to reachthe desired outcome. So, circuits in the pre-frontal cortex coordinate the orchestra inthe brain.

John Gabrieli

A leader in this ½eld has said that the hip-pocampus, the structure that was removedfrom H.M.’s brain, performs the relationalrole of pulling together different bits of in-formation across the brain–the constituentsof the memory–that are not initially con-nected. In a sense, that’s the master orches-trator, though not necessarily the smartestorchestrator; knowledge may be in the cor-tex and elsewhere, but the hippocampustells the brain that all these different things


are the stuff of an event. The hippocampusforms the relationship that binds them to-gether. Otherwise, they are isolated snow-flakes, falling without leaving an imprint. Inmemory formation, without the hippocam-pus pulling everything together, we wouldbe disparate and unconnected.

Question

H.M.’s amygdala was also removed. Werehis emotional responses tested?

Elizabeth Kensinger

When we tested Henry on labeling facial ex-pressions, his performance was relativelynormal. However, this ability is not unusualfor patients with amygdala damage, whooften rely on other types of knowledge todiscern what, for instance, a caricature of ahappy face looks like. In terms of the rigor-ous testing that we did, we did not seede½cits in his ability to perceive whethersomeone was happy or sad.

Suzanne Corkin

One of the interesting questions aboutsomeone who is missing almost all of bothamygdalae is whether he can experience afull range of emotions. Henry could do that.If he became frustrated, he could showanger, and when a psychiatrist who was in-terviewing him told him that his parents haddied, he teared up appropriately. He had agreat sense of humor. He made up jokes onthe spot. One of his often-repeated lineswas, “Knock on wood,” spoken whileknocking on the side of his head. Many peo-ple have asked whether he was shocked tosee an older man when he looked at himselfin a mirror. He never was, and on one occa-sion said, “Well, I’m not a boy.”

Another interesting question is, was heafraid of anything? I have talked to his care-givers in the nursing home, and as far as Ihave been able to ½gure out, there was noth-ing he was afraid of.

Question

Could H.M. walk or dress himself?

Suzanne Corkin

Following his operation, he could still do allthe daily activities that we do. Henry couldread, write, walk, talk, brush his teeth,shave, get dressed, and so on. Because of theDilantin, he developed osteoporosis, suf-fered various fractures, and eventually beganwalking with a walker. He could still walk,but because of the cerebellar degeneration,he had a very broad-based gait. He walkedslowly, with his feet apart for stability. But hewalked until his legs could no longer supporthim.

Question

I tell my students in introductory psychol-ogy that the case of H.M. shows that acquir-ing a new semantic memory requires intacthippocampi on both sides. How do you ex-plain these quite surprising results?

Elizabeth Kensinger

The hippocampus is essential to learningnew semantic knowledge in the way thatmost of us do: that is, after you hear a fact afew times, it becomes part of your knowl-edge repertoire. If we consider the famouspeople whom H.M. was able to generate in-formation about, none of them became fa-mous in 1980. We were testing him in 2002,and almost all eleven names he recalled werepeople who had been famous in 1960. It

seems likely that most of these names wereones that he had been bombarded with overthe years. Mikhail Gorbachev and JohnGlenn were not names that he heard once;those were names he likely heard at leasthundreds of times. Even some of the ac-tresses and movie stars whose names seemless familiar to us today could have been in½lms that were talked about in a number ofpersonal genres. It suggests the existence ofother mechanisms that we are largely un-aware of because we do not rely on themvery often; we do not need to focus onwhether we acquire new semantic knowl-edge through thousands of exposures be-cause we can learn it through a fewexposures.

Suzanne Corkin

One of the giants in cognitive science, EndelTulving, proposed that you can acquire newsemantic knowledge without having anepisodic memory or an intact hippocampus.He was right. Henry’s display of semanticlearning was impressive given his profoundamnesia, but it was very limited, and it wasunlikely that the mechanisms he engaged forlearning were identical to those used by therest of us when we acquire semantic infor-mation spontaneously and proli½cally.

Question

Memory typically comprises acquisitionand recall. Sometimes, there is informationthat you know you have, but you can’t re-trieve it and have to learn it again. Could itbe that the most impaired part of H.M.’smemory was not the storage or acquisition,but the recall?


remembering h.m.

Suzanne Corkin

When we tested H.M. on his semanticknowledge of events that happened beforehis operation, his capacity for retrieval wasvery good. We cannot attribute his memoryde½cits to a retrieval de½cit because he couldretrieve general knowledge about the worldfrom before his operation. He could not re-trieve knowledge about the world from afterthe operation because the information hadnever been consolidated and stored; whenhe tried to retrieve it, it wasn’t there.

Robert Desimone

Recall that the damage to H.M.’s brain ex-tended beyond the hippocampus. In re-search that is now debated, Mort Mishkinand Faraneh Vargha-Khadem studied chil-dren who had suffered either prenatalanoxia or anoxia immediately after birth.They found that the damage seemed to belimited to the hippocampus. Those kidswere able to learn many things normally:they went to school and learned to talk, buttheir recall was devastated. They could notrecall a story that they had just heard. Butthey were able to learn many other kinds ofinformation that did not require recall of aspeci½c event.

Question

My question relates to the amygdala andfear. The amygdala is supposed to mediaterecognition of the unfamiliar. When some-thing was out of place, such as when a famil-iar landmark was not present, did H.M.show any sign of surprise?

John Gabrieli

H.M. was never surprised by devices that didnot exist before 1953, such as digital clocks orthe computers with which we tested him. Hewas not surprised by the moon landing andwould not have been surprised by the possi-bility of people landing on Mars. Althoughas a time traveler he should have been in astate of constant amazement, as far as Iknew, he was never surprised.

Suzanne Corkin

H.M. learned a great deal by mere exposure.He sort of knew what an astronaut was, andthat they were weightless. He knew thingsyou would never expect him to know.

© 2012 by Robert Desimone, SuzanneCorkin, John D. E. Gabrieli, and ElizabethKensinger, respectively

To view or listen to the presentations,visit http://www.amacad.org/events/statedmeetings/RememberingHM.

Henry’s display of semantic learning was impressive

given his profound amnesia, but it was very limited,

and it was unlikely that the mechanisms he engaged

for learning were identical to those used by the rest

of us when we acquire semantic information sponta-

neously and prolifically.


On March 3, 2012, at a meeting sponsored by the Academy at The Getty Center, FellowsJames Cuno, President and Chief Executive Of½cer of the J. Paul Getty Trust, andThomas W. Gaehtgens, Director of the Getty Research Institute, spoke about the

institution’s exhibitions and collections, its global art restoration and conservation efforts,and its research program. The presentations served as the Academy’s 1982nd Stated Meeting.The meeting also featured the of½cial Induction of sixteen previously elected Academy members.The following is an edited transcript of the presentations.

The Getty Center: Research,Conservation, and Collections


the getty center: research, conservation, and collections

James CunoJames Cuno is President and Chief ExecutiveOf½cer of the J. Paul Getty Trust. He was electeda Fellow of the American Academy in 2001 andserves as a member of the Academy’s Commissionon the Humanities and Social Sciences.

The Getty and Its Role in the World

Ithought I would begin by introducing youto the Getty and its range of commit-

ments here and abroad. Thomas will takeyou more deeply into the programs he di-rects within the Getty Research Institute.The Getty Center, which opened in 1997, in-cludes the Research Institute, the Museum,the Conservation Institute, the Foundation,and the of½ces of the Trust. The Center isperched high on a hill overlooking Los An-geles, Santa Monica, Marina del Rey, andSan Diego (on a clear day). But it is notmeant to be up on a hill, except in the phys-ical sense. It is meant to be deeply embeddedin the lives of all who come to the hill, orwho are reached by the Getty in Los Angeles

and around the world. We are, of course,committed to building collections. Thomaswill talk to you about the Research Insti-tute’s collections, and I will say a few wordsabout the Museum’s collections.

We have made two recent acquisitions.The ½rst is a ½fteenth-century Florentinedrawing, Portrait of a Young Man, from about1470. The artist is thought to be Piero delPollaiuolo, though this attribution is not cer-tain. In the virtually life-sized drawing, thesubject’s gaze and the fact that his shirt isbuttoned on the wrong side make it a veryconvincing drawing of someone viewinghimself in a mirror. If this is true, then thedrawing is not only an early portrait but avery early self-portrait, completed at thedawn of self-awareness, as the Renaissanceis known.

Our second recent acquisition is a paint-ing by Edouard Manet. The year it was com-pleted, 1863, was the year Manet emerged asa leading innovator in French painting, theyear he painted Olympia and Le Déjeuner surl’herbe. This particular painting is a portraitof a young woman, Madame Brunet. Youmay think it’s wonderful, and so do we.Madame Brunet, however, did not; she re-jected it. Fortunately, it stayed with Manetand his studio until later in his career, and ul-timately came to the Getty.

We have two sites for the Museum, theGetty Center and a site in Malibu, whichhouses our ancient Mediterranean collec-tion. But we do not just build our collectionsand present them in our galleries. We alsoprovide extraordinary settings in which tosee works of art. In this sense, there is a con-text for seeing art in the Museum, and thereis a means for connecting with the worldwhen you are here. We not only build ourcollections, but we teach from them. Wehave the rich responsibility of connectingwith all our visitors, whether they come withspecialized knowledge or with no knowl-edge, whether it is their ½rst visit or theirthirty-½fth. One of the great glories of mu-seums is that, unlike universities, we do not

examine people on arrival or on departure.We allow them to make their way as theywish, all the while providing them with in-formed access to different levels of compre-hension or appreciation of works of art.

But we do even more than that. We alsobring exhibitions to the museum to com-plement our collections. We are not an en-cyclopedic museum in the sense of havingrepresentative examples of all the world’scultures under our roof, as the British Mu-seum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, andthe Art Institute in Chicago do. Rather, wefeature exhibitions from elsewhere, oftenin connection with a project that we haveundertaken with another program at themuseum. The Center’s four programs–Research, Conservation, Foundation, andMuseum–work together in a collaborativeprocess to deepen the impact of the Getty inthe world. In the case of the exhibition Godsof Angkor: Bronzes from the National Mu-seum of Cambodia, the Conservation Insti-tute developed, with others, a conservationlaboratory in Cambodia to conserve thesculptures. The bene½ts of that work arebeing shown in our galleries. The Aztec Pan-theon and the Art of Empire, an exhibitionat the Getty Villa, explored Aztec monu-ment-building in relation to ancient Greekand Roman pantheons. Comparing thesecivilizations, equivalent not in date and timebut in mentality, puts the ancient Mediter-ranean world into richer context. The exhi-bition Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Iconsfrom Sinai was the result of a collaborationbetween the Foundation and the Conserva-tion Institute in Sinai. Their work in themonastery where the icons were housed ledto the generous loan of the icons to the GettyMuseum, presenting a bit more of the worldto our visitors in Los Angeles.

We don’t just do exhibitions. We also con-serve works of art that are in our collectionor that come to our collection from else-where in the world. Working with our part-ner colleagues in Italy or in Eastern Europe,for example, we conserve works that then


grace our galleries for a period of time so thatwe can share the bene½t of our work withour larger public. We engage not only inapplied conservation but in pure scienti½cresearch, both in the Museum and in theConservation Institute.

Our work abroad includes a project inGhent, Belgium, where the Foundation hassupported the recent renovation, restora-tion, and conservation of the ½fteenth-cen-tury Northern European painting The GhentAltarpiece. One of the most important paint-ings in the history of art, its conservation ispart of a program supporting the educationof a new generation of conservators workingon panel paintings. Panel paintings were theprimary medium for painters in Europefrom the later Middle Ages to the earliestpart of the Renaissance, and the expertise forconserving them was being lost as a genera-tion of conservators was retiring or dyingwithout a new generation taking its place. Sothe Foundation identi½ed a number of ex-perts in the ½eld, at the Metropolitan Mu-seum, at the Prado Museum, and at the sitein Belgium, among others. It brought thesesenior conservators together with youngerconservators to transfer their knowledge tothe next generation, to perpetuate the abilityto conserve panel paintings. As another ex-ample, a team is working on a Dürer panelpainting from the Prado’s collections.

A website largely supported by the GettyFoundation allows viewers to see the under-drawing beneath the painted surface of TheGhent Altarpiece via infrared reflectogram.1

The website allows you to see how the artistbuilds the painting from an initial drawingthat guides the picture to completion. Youcan zoom in on the painted surface, thenmove beneath it with x-rays and with the in-frared technology. We are very pleased bythis feature and encourage you to visit thewebsite.

Our work is not just in Europe or withEuropean paintings; it’s elsewhere in theworld, too. It’s not just with moveable ob-jects, but includes things that do not moveat all–works in Germany, for example, orKing Tut’s tomb. We collaborate with localconservators not only on the scienti½c analy-sis but also on the execution of conserva-tion. And it is not just in the Mediterraneanworld, but in Western China: in Dunhuang,the Getty has worked with others fordecades in the execution of conservation,the analysis of preventative conservation,

and the site planning to accommodate in-creased tourist interest in the great caves inthe farthest northwest region of China, lo-cated on the Silk Road. If you were a travelerleaving China to embark on a journey alongthe Silk Road–into an unfamiliar world, un-sure if you would return–on your way out,you would stop at the cave temples to saya few prayers. On the way back, havingachieved success in your journey (and hav-ing survived), you would pause to pay grati-tude. We are working not only to preservesites such as this one, but most important, topublish the results of our work so that a col-lection of best practices can go on to influ-ence the work of others after this project iscompleted.

Our work is not just conservation in aphysical sense. In Jordan, we are developingthe Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiq-uities (mega-Jordan), a rich platform for

surveying and documenting the current con-ditions of archaeological sites. A geographicinformation system (gis), written in Arabicand English, allows you to learn about thesites as well as their present conditions. Be-cause two of the greatest threats to archaeo-logical sites are rapid urban developmentand looting, the gis allows Jordanian of½-cials to observe the current state of archae-ological sites and monitor changes from dayto day. They can also use it as a means ofplanning how to protect the site. So when ahighway is developed between one city and

another, it can be designed to go around thatsite rather than through it. The gis is nowavailable as a website and software that areprovided for free and can be adopted byother countries. Iraq is currently adoptingthe software, and that is but one example.

Most recently, I joined Thomas, DeborahMarrow, and other colleagues on a trip toIndia to look at two of the projects that wehave been engaged in there. Two hours out-side of Jodhpur is a Mughal fort in the townof Nagaur. The fort was a mess, so twentyyears ago we awarded a ½rst grant to plan,and a second to execute, its conservation.The fort’s extraordinary wall system hasnow been preserved, restored, and strength-ened. After restoring the built structure, weteamed up with colleagues at the CourtauldInstitute of Art to preserve the paintings in-side. The building is a palace of mirrors withpaintings that date from the seventeenth

We not only build our collections, but we teach from

them. We have the rich responsibility of connecting

with all our visitors, whether they come with special-

ized knowledge or with no knowledge. We allow our

visitors to make their way as they wish, all the while

providing them with informed access to different lev-

els of comprehension or appreciation of works of art.

1 “Closer to Van Eyck: Rediscovering the GhentAltarpiece,” http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be/#home.



and early eighteenth centuries. The paint-ings were in terrible condition, and a greatdeal of mirrored glass had to be preserved aswell. Twenty years of work went into thisbuilding, and a book was published docu-menting all the work done by Deborah, headof the Foundation, and colleagues includingTim Whalen, head of the Conservation In-stitute, and the preservation architect fromIndia who was employed in the project.There were also local craftsmen who knewhow the walls were built and therefore howto preserve them. The published results re-veal best practices to be adopted by othersconcerned with the conservation of Mughalforts.

But we don’t just work on structuresabroad. We conserve buildings here in LosAngeles. The next project of the Conserva-tion Institute is the Eames House, an icon ofmid-century modernism in Los Angeles.The house is sixty years old, and you canimagine how the metal frames for the win-dows, or the elements of the wall systems,have suffered over time. We are now begin-ning to understand how we can preserve,and not distract from, the beauty of thisgreat house.

Our work is not just the execution of con-servation but the training of a new genera-tion of conservators. I mentioned our pro-gram that trains conservators of panel paint-ings. We have a similar program for conserv-ing mosaics, called mosaikon, which isoperating in the eastern part of the Mediter-ranean world, from Tunisia through Syria. Ithas not been an easy time to be involved inthis region, but the Getty has bene½ted fromthe training of these conservators, who havethe great responsibility to steward the safetyof the legacy of ancient Rome as containedin these mosaics. Many mosaics are on-site;some have been lifted and put into museumsdue to a loss of knowledge of conservationand a decline in training of½cials to protectarchaeological sites. The program is beingundertaken in Rome because of the precari-

ous situation in Tunisia, Jordan, and Syria.Fortunately, we have been able to transportSyrian conservators out of Syria to Rome,and back to Syria again, in the educationprocess. And we are not just in Europe andthe Mediterranean but in Africa, where oneproject trained museum management pro-fessionals and photography conservators topreserve the great legacy of photography inAfrica.

The Getty Foundation also supports pro-grams that connect art historians. For manydecades, art historians have tended to focuson their own specialized ½eld and to be inthe company of only their fellow specializedart historians. The Foundation aims to bringpeople from a range of ½elds together. Forexample, Thomas, Deborah, Tim, and I metwith colleagues at Nehru University in Delhias part of a program the Getty has fundedto introduce art historians in India to art his-torians with other specialties. Art historyscholars in India could ½nd themselvesstudying only the history of Indian art, sothe program brings in art historians whospecialize in Greek or Roman, medievalEuropean, or contemporary American art,among other disciplines. With that comesnot only new subject matter but differentmethodologies for studying the history ofart. Scholars visit for a few months and thenare replaced. The exchange is a way to recog-nize that we live in a world without borders.We bring a community of scholars togetherin India, or take them from India to interna-tional conferences that might occur in SouthAmerica or North America.

The Foundation also encourages the pub-lication of scholarship in print or digitalform (and even as an app), and it invests lo-cally in Los Angeles. After taking you aroundthe world, I am bringing you back to thePaci½c Standard Time exhibition here at theGetty Center. We funded the publication ofa number of books and digital media show-ing works of art by Los Angeles artists in thepostwar period, from 1945 to 1985. The exhi-

bition began as a research project dedicatedto ½nding, recovering, and preserving thearchives of artists, dealers, collectors, muse-ums, and galleries, to ensure that this explo-sive moment in the history of art in LosAngeles is saved for posterity.

To promote the conservation of the EamesHouse, we engaged in a kind of guerrilla ac-tivity, bringing together unlikely supportersand interested individuals to promote theproject. Ice Cube (a rapper whose discogra-phy I’m sure you all have) studied architec-ture, and he particularly liked the EamesHouse and the principles employed in devis-ing that great structure. So he helped dem-onstrate the public interest in our projects.

I have given you a snapshot of the Getty,and Thomas will discuss aspects of our workmore deeply. We strive to do good work hereand around the world, in terms of both re-search and applied conservation as well aspresentation to our publics, scholarly andotherwise. It is an obligation we feel we havebecause the legacy of artistic creation in theworld is common to all of us, and we want tobe an important part of that legacy.


Thomas W. GaehtgensThomas W. Gaehtgens is Director of the GettyResearch Institute. He was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy in 2011.

The Getty Research Institute’s GlobalCommitment to Research Projects andResources

A s Jim explained, the Getty is not only a museum, but consists of four institu-

tions that work together: the Museum, theConservation Institute, the Foundation, andthe Research Institute. Everything dependson the cooperation of these four entities.Though this relationship between the fourGetty programs is often not well under-stood, this arrangement provides a uniqueopportunity for research and for the devel-opment of public initiatives. The programswork closely together. Here on the hill, thepresident, vice presidents, and four directorshave lunch every Monday to talk about poli-cies and initiatives in a collaborative spirit.

As part of its mission, the Getty ResearchInstitute (gri) “creates and disseminatesnew knowledge through its expertise, itsactive collecting program, public programs,institutional collaborations, exhibitions, pub-lications, digital services, and residentialscholars program.” The gri is not the onlyGetty program involved in research–theConservation Institute and the Museum alsocarry out research, and the Foundation sup-ports research ½nancially–but the ResearchInstitute provides the general art-historicalresearch component.

Our research facilities include, ½rst of all,a library. This library is probably one of thebest art history libraries in the world. Withmore than a million volumes of books andperiodicals–no other library in the ½eld ofart history has this amount of materials–itis exceptional not only for its size, but alsofor the quality of the collections. That doesnot mean that we do not miss a book fromtime to time, but we try to ½ll the gaps. Wehave 3,500 periodicals and 5,500 collectionsof manuscripts and personal archives fromartists, art historians, collectors, architects,and art dealers. Our collections are richfor contemporary art, especially since thelaunch of the Paci½c Standard Time initia-tive. Collections embrace audio, video, and½lm as well as two million photographs inthe Photo Study Collection.

Our Special Collections contain rare books,photographs, architectural models, draw-ings, sketchbooks, and more than 12,000 lin-ear feet of archives. To give you an example,we have the agendas of the artist Man Ray,in which you can ½nd appointments for“Lunch with Picasso” or “Dinner withGertrude Stein.” We conserve rare photo-graphs, as well as nearly 68,000 rare books,including materials from the ½fteenth cen-tury to the present. The gri is a treasuretrove of material for studying the history ofart.

One of our aims is to support and developthe discipline of art history. Our ScholarsProgram invites researchers from all overthe world to work on an annual researchtopic. In 2011, the topic was the Display ofArt. This year, we are working on ArtisticPractice. Next year, the subject will be Color.We try to bring together scholars from dif-ferent backgrounds. Lectures, colloquia, andperhaps even exhibitions or publications de-velop from the year, half-year, or threemonths the scholars spend at the gri. Wehost about ½fty scholars annually. Some ofthem are delegated to the program from theMuseum and from the Conservation Insti-tute. The gri oversees the administration ofall these Getty scholars.

Given that art history is largely a Westerndiscipline, most of our visiting scholars arefrom Europe, the United States, and Canada.Of the 803 scholars that have received resi-dential Getty scholarships since 1985, 410have come from the United States and 393from other countries. The program is stillvery Western-oriented, and we are endeav-oring to change that. The challenge is notonly the discipline’s Western focus, but alsothat our resources are predominantly West-ern. We have to expand our collections torepresent the artistic traditions from othercountries and to reflect this new globalworld. We have begun to take on this enor-mous challenge. In October 2012, for exam-ple, we will hold a symposium in Beijing onthe subject of artistic exchanges betweenChina and the West. Additionally, we will in-vite sixteen students and eight professors toour Summer Research Academy, bringingWestern professors and students togetherwith colleagues from other cultures. To sup-port such programs, we work closely withthe Getty Foundation.

Another focus is our digitizing initiative.In the past few years, we have digitized animpressive 2.6 million images. The seven



thousand books we have digitized are notsuf½cient, but we will do more to increasethis number. Though we face limitations instaff and resources, we will continue to dig-itize books and share them on the Internet,so that they can be consulted and read allover the world, especially where scholarsmay not have access to this art-historical lit-erature. We are currently developing a proj-ect that will revolutionize the discipline ofart history: together with the Avery Archi-tectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia

University, the Frick Art Reference Library,and the Thomas J. Watson Library of theMetropolitan Museum of Art in New York;the Biblioteca de la Universidad de Málagain Málaga, Spain; the Institut nationald’histoire de l’art in Paris; and the Univer-sitätsbibliothek Heidelberg in Heidelberg,Germany, we are digitizing the entire litera-ture of the history of art before 1923. (Be-cause 1923 is the American copyright date,we cannot digitize material published afterthat year.) We are bringing all this literatureinto a portal so that readers can access itwhether they are in Peru, Germany, Russia,or China. From the beginning, the projecthas focused not only on Western art historybut also on art from China, India, Brazil, andother countries. We plan to launch this dig-ital library on May 31, 2012. In a couple ofyears, it will certainly be a major tool to con-duct art historical research.

The Getty vocabularies form another im-portant project. Consider this example: theMona Lisa is also known as the Portrait of LisaGherardini, La Gioconda, and La Joconde. Allthese different descriptions have to be linkedfor a computer search to recognize all thevariable titles used for the Mona Lisa. Evenmore important, the vocabs can be used allover the world because they are being trans-lated into numerous languages. The Re-search Institute continues to develop thisessential tool.

Another research tool is the ProvenanceIndex, a vast database of inventories, salecatalogs, and collection catalogs. Take forexample a beautiful painting by Rubens atthe Getty Museum, The Entombment, whichshould really be called Lamentation, com-pleted circa 1612. When the Getty boughtthis painting from a catalog, no one knew ex-actly what had happened to it before 1868.On the surface of the picture is the number146, and if one types Rubens and 146 into thesearch boxes of the Getty Research Prove-nance Index, one learns that this paintingwas in the collection of Gaspar de Haro yGuzmán in Spain, from 1600 to 1653. Thisdatabase documents the painting’s entirehistory up to the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies, demonstrating how importantthis resource is for the art market, for the artcollector, and for those who are interested inthe reception of paintings. It is a vital tool forart history in general.

The Getty Research Institute is also en-gaged in a number of research projects,including: the Art of Alchemy; Art onScreen; Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde; The Display of Art in Roman Palaces,1550–1750; German Sales, 1930–45: ArtWorks, Art Markets, and Cultural Policy;Los Angeles Architecture, 1940–1990; Orien-talist Photography; Paci½c Standard Time;Printmaking in the Age of Louis xiv, 1660–1715; Surrealism in Latin America; and TheFuture of Art Bibliography.

How do we come up with all these re-search projects? We conceptualize them bylooking for ways to make our collections ac-cessible to the public. We ½nd scholarswho can help us and invite them to work onthese projects. For instance, The Display ofArt in Roman Palaces was launched becausewe have a large number of inventories ofRoman palaces. Los Angeles Architecturewill be a major exhibition next year at theGetty Museum. Paci½c Standard Time is theinitiative that started with the collections ofthe gri and, as Jim mentioned, is funded bythe Foundation; we participated in curatingthe exhibition at the Getty Museum. In twoweeks, the Paci½c Standard Time exhibitionwill travel to Berlin.

We are trying to incorporate a global focusinto our work. We will not give up our pastin art history as a Western discipline, butwill expand it to include the topic of encoun-ters between different cultures. Because ofour location in California, with close prox-imity to Mexico, Latin America is of sig-ni½cant interest to us, and we have a majorcollection of Latin American art historicallyrelevant photographs and other materials.Furthermore, the gri holds scholarly re-sources on Chinese art, and we are trying tobe more involved in India, the Near East,and Africa, as you can see from our exhibi-tions.

The Getty Research Institute creates and disseminates

new knowledge through its expertise, its active collect-

ing program, public programs, institutional collabo-

rations, exhibitions, publications, digital services, and

residential scholars program. One of our aims is to

support and develop the discipline of art history.


Managing the abundance of material onthe gri’s website is a challenge. Because ourwebsite has 32,000 pages, it is dif½cult to½nd what one is searching for. Making allour material accessible to the outside worldis impossible, but we are trying to make asigni½cant number of our resources avail-able to our many online visitors. From May1, 2009, to February 27, 2012, we had morethan 2.6 million visits to the website, includ-ing 1.7 million from the United States, 131,911from England, and signi½cant numbersfrom other Western countries. Outside theWest, the numbers diminish. There were27,956 visits from Mexico and 18,823 fromIndia. That we have 17,723 online visits fromBrazil probably reflects the fact that theGetty Foundation and the Research Institutetraveled to Brazil to develop a new initiative,which the Foundation is funding, to connectthe international art-historical communitywith that of Brazil. By contrast, online visitsfrom Japan totaled only 17,312; from Russia,17,405; from China, 14,711; and from Taiwan,10,079.

We still have a lot of work ahead of us tomove Western art history into the globalpresent. We have to make our vast resourcesaccessible to scholars in other countries,where these resources may not exist. As aphilanthropic institution, we are proud toprovide free access to our materials. Themaps and statistics I have shown in this pre-sentation indicate where more engagementis needed in the future.

© 2012 by James Cuno and Thomas W. Gaehtgens, respectively

To view or listen to the presentations,visit http://www.amacad.org/events/statedmeetings/GettyCenter.

Jesse Choper (UC BerkeleySchool of Law) and WinslowBriggs (Carnegie Institution for Science)

Lothar von Falkenhausen(University of California, Los Angeles), Thomas Gaehtgens (Getty ResearchInstitute), and Thomas Levy(University of California, San Diego)

Deborah Marrow (The GettyFoundation), Louise Bryson(J. Paul Getty Trust), and Bill Viola (Bill Viola Studio)

Members Gather at the Getty Center


noteworthy

Select Prizes and Awards

Presidential Medal of Freedom,2012

Madeleine Korbel Albright (Wash-ington, DC)

Bob Dylan (Beverly Hills, CA)

Toni Morrison (Princeton Uni-versity)

John Paul Stevens (SupremeCourt of the United States)

Academy Members electedto the National Academy ofSciences, 2012

Susan Athey (Harvard Univer-sity)

Larry M. Bartels (Vanderbilt Uni-versity)

Jagdish N. Bhagwati (ColumbiaUniversity)

Randolph Blake (Vanderbilt Uni-versity)

John Carlson (Yale University)

Richard W. Carlson (CarnegieInstitution for Science)

Demetrios Christodoulou (Eid-genössische Technische Hoch-schule Zürich)

Pablo G. Debenedetti (PrincetonUniversity)

Ronald A. DePinho (University ofTexas M.D. Anderson CancerCenter)

Joseph M. DeSimone (Universityof North Carolina, Chapel Hill;North Carolina State University)

François N. Diederich (Eidgenös-sische Technische HochschuleZürich)

Gideon Dreyfuss (University ofPennsylvania School of Medi-cine)

Denis Duboule (University ofGeneva)

Carol S. Dweck (Stanford Univer-sity)

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (Winters, CA)received the 2012 J. I. Staley Prizefor Mothers and Others: The Evolu-tionary Origins of Mutual Under-standing.

James Earl Jones (Pawling, NY) isthe recipient of the 2012 MarianAnderson Award.

Robert Keohane (Princeton Uni-versity) was awarded a 2012 Cen-tennial Medal from HarvardUniversity.

Yo-Yo Ma (Cambridge, MA) wasawarded the 2012 Polar MusicPrize. He shares the prize withPaul Simon (New York, NY).

Margaret H. Marshall (HarvardLaw School) was awarded theRadcliffe Institute Medal.

Bill McKibben (Middlebury Col-lege) is the inaugural recipient ofthe Sam Rose ’58 and Julie Wal-ters Prize at Dickinson College forGlobal Environmental Activism.

Mike Nichols (New York, NY)won a 2012 Tony Award for BestDirection of a Play, Arthur Mil-ler’s Death of a Salesman.

Carole Pateman (University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles) was award-ed the 2012 Johan Skytte Prize inPolitical Science.

Lisa Randall (Harvard University)is the 2012 recipient of the An-drew Gemant Award, given by theAmerican Institute of Physics.

Amartya Sen (Harvard Univer-sity) is the recipient of the 2012Thomas C. Schelling Award, givenby Harvard Kennedy School.

Laurence Senelick (Tufts Univer-sity) won the Betty Jean JonesAward of the American Theatreand Drama Society.

Paul Simon (New York, NY) wasawarded the 2012 Polar MusicPrize. He shares the prize with Yo-Yo Ma (Cambridge, MA).

Bess Ward (Princeton University)is the recipient of the 2012 Procter& Gamble Award in Applied andEnvironmental Microbiology.

Matthew P. Fisher (University ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara)

Wendell H. Fleming (Brown Uni-versity)

Susan Gelman (University of Mich-igan)

John T. Groves (Princeton Uni-versity)

Tina Henkin (Ohio State Univer-sity)

Hiroo Kanamori (California Insti-tute of Technology)

Guinevere Kauffmann (MaxPlanck Institute for Astrophysics)

Bruce R. Levin (Emory Univer-sity)

Barbara H. Liskov (MassachusettsInstitute of Technology)

Liqun Luo (Stanford University)

Ann E. Nelson (University ofWashington)

Monica Olvera de la Cruz (North-western University)

Nai Phuan Ong (Princeton Uni-versity)

Roy Parker (University of Ari-zona)

Mary Power (University of Cali-fornia, Berkeley)

Louis J. Ptáček (University of Cal-ifornia, San Francisco)

Stephen W. Raudenbush (Univer-sity of Chicago)

Marcia J. Rieke (University of Ari-zona)

Giacomo Rizzolatti (University ofParma)

Bernard Sadoulet (University ofCalifornia, Berkeley)

Pedro A. Sanchez (Columbia Uni-versity)

Eric U. Selker (University of Ore-gon)

Daniel Simberloff (University ofTennessee)

James L. Skinner (University ofWisconsin, Madison)

Gisela T. Storz (National Insti-tutes of Health)

Peter L. Strick (University ofPittsburgh)

Subra Suresh (National ScienceFoundation)

Robert M. Townsend (Massachu-setts Institute of Technology)

Ruth J. Williams (University ofCalifornia, San Diego)

Melinda A. Zeder (National Mu-seum of Natural History)

Other Awards

Daniel Aaron (Harvard University)was awarded a 2012 CentennialMedal from Harvard University.

Cornelia Isabella Bargmann (Rock-efeller University) was awardedthe Kavli Prize in Neuroscience.She shares the prize with Ann M.Graybiel (Massachusetts Instituteof Technology) and WinfriedDenk (Max Planck Institute forMedical Research, Germany).

William Drayton (Ashoka: Inno-vators for the Public) received the2012 Richard E. Neustadt Award,given by Harvard Kennedy School.

Mildred S. Dresselhaus (Massa-chusetts Institute of Technology)was awarded the Kavli Prize inNanoscience.

David A. Evans (Harvard Univer-sity) is the recipient of the 2012Welch Award in Chemistry.

Ann M. Graybiel (MassachusettsInstitute of Technology) wasawarded the Kavli Prize in Neuro-science. She shares the prize withCornelia Isabella Bargmann (Rock-efeller University) and WinfriedDenk (Max Planck Institute forMedical Research, Germany).

Nancy Hopkins (MassachusettsInstitute of Technology) wasawarded a 2012 Centennial Medalfrom Harvard University.


Select Publications

Poetry

Jorie Graham (Harvard Univer-sity). Place: New Poems. Ecco, May2012

A.E. Stallings (Athens, Greece).Olives: Poems. Triquarterly, April2012

Fiction

Francine du Plessix Gray (NewYork, NY). The Queen’s Lover. Pen-guin Press, June 2012

Elie Wiesel (Boston University).Hostage. Knopf, August 2012

Non½ction

Paul Auster (New York, NY).Winter Journal. Henry Holt andCo., August 2012

William J. Baumol (New YorkUniversity). The Cost Disease: WhyComputers Get Cheaper and HealthCare Doesn’t. Yale UniversityPress, September 2012

Henry E. Brady (University ofCalifornia, Berkeley), Kay LehmanSchlozman (Boston College), andSidney Verba (Harvard Univer-sity). The Unheavenly Chorus: Un-equal Political Voice and the BrokenPromise of American Democracy.Princeton University Press, May2012

Leo Braudy (University of South-ern California). The HollywoodSign: Fantasy and Reality of anAmerican Icon. Yale UniversityPress, March 2012

Eli Broad (Eli and Edythe BroadFoundation). The Art of Being Un-reasonable: Lessons in Unconven-tional Thinking. Wiley, May 2012

John W. Dower (MassachusettsInstitute of Technology). Ways ofForgetting, Ways of Remembering:Japan in the Modern World. NewPress, July 2012

J. H. Elliott (University of Ox-ford). History in the Making. YaleUniversity Press, October 2012

New Appointments

Dennis A. Ausiello (Harvard Med-ical School; Massachusetts Gen-eral Hospital) was elected to theBoard of Directors and Scienti½cAdvisory Board of Alnylam Phar-maceuticals, Inc.

David Eisenbud (University ofCalifornia, Berkeley) was namedDirector of the Mathematical Sci-ences Research Institute.

Mary Ann Glendon (Harvard LawSchool; Ponti½cal Academy of So-cial Sciences) was appointed tothe U.S. Commission on Interna-tional Religious Freedom.

Kathleen Kennedy (The Kennedy/Marshall Company) was namedBoard Cochair at Lucas½lm Ltd.

Jim Yong Kim (Dartmouth Col-lege) was named President of TheWorld Bank.

Steven E. Koonin (Science andTechnology Policy Institute) wasnamed Director of the Center forUrban Science and Progress atNew York University.

Paul LeClerc (New York, NY) wasappointed Director of ColumbiaUniversity’s Global Center inParis.

Earl Lewis (Emory University)was elected President of The An-drew W. Mellon Foundation.

Michael A. Marletta (Scripps Re-search Institute) was appointed tothe Independent Citizens Over-sight Committee, the governingboard of California’s stem cellagency, the California Institutefor Regenerative Medicine.

Richard A. Meserve (Carnegie In-stitution for Science) was electedPresident of Harvard University’sBoard of Overseers.

David Robertson (St. Louis Sym-phony) was appointed Artistic Di-rector and Chief Conductor of theSydney Symphony in Australia.

Amos Oz (Ben-Gurion Univer-sity) and Fania Oz-Salzberger(University of Haifa). Jews andWords. Yale University Press, No-vember 2012

Gustavo Pérez-Firmat (ColumbiaUniversity). Life on the Hyphen:The Cuban-American Way. Univer-sity of Texas Press, May 2012

Martin Rees (University of Cam-bridge). From Here to In½nity: AVision for the Future of Science.W.W. Norton, June 2012

Robert I. Rotberg (Harvard Uni-versity). Transformative PoliticalLeadership: Making a Difference inthe Developing World. University ofChicago Press, June 2012

Kay Lehman Schlozman (BostonCollege), Sidney Verba (HarvardUniversity), and Henry E. Brady(University of California, Berke-ley). The Unheavenly Chorus: Un-equal Political Voice and the BrokenPromise of American Democracy.Princeton University Press, May2012

Silvan S. Schweber (BrandeisUniversity). Nuclear Forces: TheMaking of the Physicist Hans Bethe.Harvard University Press, June2012

Ian Shapiro (Yale University). TheMoral Foundations of Politics. YaleUniversity Press, October 2012

Theda Skocpol (Harvard Univer-sity). Obama and America’s PoliticalFuture. Harvard University Press,September 2012

Richard Slotkin (Wesleyan Uni-versity). The Long Road to Anti-etam: How the Civil War Became aRevolution. Liveright, July 2012

Robert Somerville (ColumbiaUniversity). Pope Urban II’s Councilof Piacenza (March 1–5, 1095). Ox-ford University Press, December2011

Wole Soyinka (Abeokuta, Nige-ria). Of Africa. Yale UniversityPress, November 2012

Günter Grass (Lubeck, Germany).From Germany to Germany: Journalof the Year 1990. Houghton MifflinHarcourt, November 2012

Linda Greenhouse (Yale LawSchool). The U.S. Supreme Court: AVery Short Introduction. OxfordUniversity Press, March 2012

Vartan Gregorian (Carnegie Cor-poration of New York). The Emer-gence of Modern Afghanistan: Politicsof Reform and Modernization. Stan-ford University Press, January2013

Douglas Hofstadter (Indiana Uni-versity) and Emmanuel Sander(University of Paris). Surfaces andEssences. Basic Books, September2012

Charles Larmore (Brown Univer-sity). Vernunft und Subjektivität.Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, April2012

Arend Lijphart (University ofCalifornia, San Diego). Patterns ofDemocracy: Government Forms andPerformance in Thirty-Six Countries.Yale University Press, September2012

Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Universityof Michigan). The Scienti½c Bud-dha: His Short and Happy Life. YaleUniversity Press, September 2012

Jennifer Jane Marshall (VisitingScholar, 2005–2006; Universityof Minnesota, Twin Cities). MachineArt, 1934. University of ChicagoPress, June 2012

James M. McPherson (PrincetonUniversity). War on the Waters:The Union and Confederate Navies,1861–1865. University of NorthCarolina Press, September 2012

Mary E. Miller (Yale University)and Barbara E. Mundy (FordhamUniversity), ed. Painting a Map ofSixteenth-Century Mexico City: Land,Writing, and Native Rule. Yale Uni-versity Press, December 2012

Victor S. Navasky (Columbia Uni-versity) and Evan Cornog (Hof-stra University), ed. The Art ofMaking Magazines: On Being anEditor and Other Views from theIndustry. Columbia University Press,September 2012


We invite all Fellows and For eign Honorary Members to send notices abouttheir recent and forthcoming pub lications, scienti½c ½ndings, exhibitions andperformances, and honors and prizes to bulletin@ama cad.org.

Peter Stansky (Stanford Univer-sity) and William Abrahams. Ju-lian Bell: From Bloomsbury to theSpanish Civil War. Stanford Uni-versity Press, January 2012

Sidney Verba (Harvard Univer-sity), Kay Lehman Schlozman(Boston College), and Henry E.Brady (University of California,Berkeley). The Unheavenly Chorus:Unequal Political Voice and the Bro-ken Promise of American Democ-racy. Princeton University Press,May 2012

Robert Louis Wilken (Universityof Virginia). The First ThousandYears: A Global History of Christian-ity. Yale University Press, Novem-ber 2012

Edward O. Wilson (Harvard Uni-versity) and Alex Harris (DukeUniversity). Why We Are Here: Mo-bile and the Spirit of a Southern City.Liveright, October 2012

noteworthy

Wu Hung (University of Chica-go). A Story of Ruins: Presence andAbsence in Chinese Art and VisualCulture. Princeton University Press,May 2012

Luigi Zingales (University ofChicago). A Capitalism for the Peo-ple: Recapturing the Lost Genius ofAmerican Prosperity. Basic Books,June 2012

RemembranceIt is with sadness that the Academy notes the passing of the following members.*

Frederick Herbert Bormann–June 7, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1972

Michel Boudart–May 2, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1991

William Francis Brace–May 2, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1971

Thomas M. Cover–March 26, 2012; elected to the Academy in 2003

George A. Cowan–April 20, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1997

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau–May 18, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1984

Robert W. Floyd–September 25, 2001; elected to the Academy in 1974

Carlos Fuentes–May 15, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1986

George Peabody Gardner–May 9, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1960

Robert Joy Glaser–June 7, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1965

Avram Goldstein–June 1, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1995

David Sutphin Heeschen–April 13, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1972

Friedrich Ernst Peter Hirzebruch–May 27, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1992

Andrew Fielding Huxley–May 30, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1961

Nicholas DeBelleville Katzenbach–May 8, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1988

Richard Wall Lyman–May 27, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1971

Helen Florence North–January 21, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1975

Elinor Ostrom–June 12, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1991

Louis Heilprin Pollak–May 8, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1972

Aaron Jeffrey Shatkin–June 4, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1997

Robert Summers–April 17, 2012; elected to the Academy in 2001

Phillip V. Tobias–June 7, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1986

Edward Reed Whittemore–April 6, 2012; elected to the Academy in 1975

*Notice received from April 11, 2012, to June 15, 2012

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

Louis W. Cabot, Chair of the Board and Trust

Leslie Cohen Berlowitz, President and William T. Golden Chair

Jerrold Meinwald, Secretary

Robert P. Henderson, Treasurer (Interim)

Gerald L. Early, Chair of the Council

Neal Lane, Vice Chair of the Council

John Katzenellenbogen, Vice Chair, Midwest

Jesse H. Choper, Vice Chair, West

publications advisory board

Jesse H. Choper, Denis Donoghue, Gerald Early, Linda Greenhouse,Jerome Kagan, Steven Marcus, Jerrold Meinwald

editorial staff

Phyllis S. Bendell, Director of Publications

Micah J. Buis, Associate Editor

Erica Dorpalen, Assistant Editor

Scott Eaton Wilder, Design & Layout

Initial design by Joseph Moore of Moore + Associates

Bulletin Summer 2012Issued as Volume lxv, Number 4© 2012 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,136 Irving Street, Cambridge, ma 02138. Periodi cals rate postage paid atBoston, ma, and at additional mailing of½ces. Post master: Send addresschanges to Bulletin, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 136 Irving Street,Cambridge, ma 02138.

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

photo credits

Steve Rosenthal page 1, top

Imijination Photography pages 2–3

Martha Stewart pages 4, 12–13, 15, 20, 22–23

Stu Rosner Photography page 5

Nikolai Sokov, vcdnp pages 6–7

Wendy Barrows Photography pages 10–11

Kent Dayton, mit page 19

Ryan Miller/Capture Imaging pages 28, 31, 33

Notice to FellowsThe Nominating and GovernanceCommittee, chaired by Emilio Bizzi,is seeking recommendations for posi-tions on governing bodies, includingOf½cers and Directors and Councilmembers. All candidates must beFellows of the American Academyand interested in being activelyinvolved in Academy work. Pleasesubmit suggestions via email [email protected] or in writing(postmarked by August 31, 2012) tothe Nominating and GovernanceCommittee, American Academy ofArts and Sciences, 136 Irving Street,Cambridge, MA 02138.

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

american academy of arts & sciences bulletin€¦ · great science organized by the u.k....

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