GSAS Centennial Medal Awarded to Three Alumni

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

An ethicist, a historian of science, and a chemist received Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Centennial Medals at a ceremony on Wednesday, June 3, at the Faculty Club.

The 1998 Centennial Medalists are Sissela Bok, PhD '70,

I. Bernard Cohen, PhD '47, and Richard Zare, PhD '64.

The Centennial Medal was first awarded in 1989 at the 100th anniversary of the School. The medal honors alumni for contributions to society that have emerged from their graduate education at Harvard.

Bok, daughter of Alva Myrdal, winner of the 1982 Nobel Peace Prize, and Gunnar Myrdal, winner of the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics, and wife of Harvard President Emeritus Derek Bok, received her Ph.D. in philosophy in 1970.

Bok was a lecturer at Simmons College from 1971 to 1972 and at the Harvard-M.I.T. Division of Health Sciences and Technology from 1975 to 1982. From 1982 to 1984, she lectured at Harvard.

In 1985, she joined the faculty of Brandeis University, where she remained until becoming Distinguished Fellow in the Department of Population and International Health at the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard.

Bok has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford and served on the Pulitzer Prize Board and the Board of the Hastings Center, a research center devoted to issues of ethics in medicine, life sciences, and the environment.

She has also served on the boards of numerous journals and has written extensively in the fields of bioethics, applied ethics, public affairs, and biography and autobiography.

Some of her most notable publications are Lying: Moral Choice in Private and Public Life (1978, recipient of both the Melcher award and the George Orwell award); Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (1982); Common Values (1995), Alva Myrdal: A Daughter's Memoir (1991, recipient of a second Melcher award); and Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment (1998).

She has also been awarded the Abraham L. Sacher Silver Medallion from Brandeis University and the Radcliffe College Graduate Society Medal.

Born in New York City in 1914, Cohen received his B.S. degree from Harvard in 1937 and his Ph.D. in the history of science in 1947. His teaching career began at Harvard in 1942, and in 1977 he was named the Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Science. He has been Professor Emeritus of that department since 1984.

His career has also included lectureships and fellowships at University College, London; Cambridge University; Queen's University, Belfast; Brandeis University; and Tel Aviv University.

Cohen's numerous books and articles range over such diverse topics as interactions among the natural and social sciences, the history of computers, and the science and political thought of the Founding Fathers. His books include Benjamin Franklin: His Contribution to the American Tradition (1953); Franklin and Newton: An Inquiry into Speculative Newtonian Experimental Science and Franklin's Work in Electricity (1956): and The Birth of the New Physics (1959).

He has served as the chairman of the U.S. National Committee for the History and Philosophy of Science, president of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science, and president of the American History of Science Society.

In 1974 he was awarded the George Sartor Medal and, in 1986, the Pfizer Book Prize, both from the History of Science Society. In 1995 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Zare received his Ph.D. in chemical physics in 1964. His first teaching position was at M.I.T., followed shortly by a position at the University of Colorado where he held a joint appointment in the departments of chemistry, physics, and astrophysics.

In 1969 he became full professor of chemistry at Columbia University, and in 1975 Columbia named him the Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences. He joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1977, where he now holds the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professorship in Natural Science.

His research, which examines a variety of topics ranging from the basic understanding of chemical reaction dynamics to the nature of the chemical contents of single cells, has resulted in a greater understanding of chemical reactions at the molecular level.

Zare serves as chairman of the Natural Science Board and has been a member of the Science Editorial Board, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications for the National Research Council.

In 1983 he won the National Medal of Science for "seminal contributions to molecular spectroscopy, photochemistry, and chemical reaction dynamics."

His other honors include the Earle K. Plyler Prize and the Irving Langmuir Prize, both from the American Physical Society, and the Peter Debye Award from the American Chemical Society. In 1997 he was named California Scientist of the Year.