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Clyde A. Hutchison III, Kenan professor of microbiology and immunology, has
been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Hutchison was one of 146 scholars, scientists and artists nationwide chosen in
this year's election. He joins two centuries of great minds in the academy,
founded during the Revolutionary War by political and intellectual leaders
including John Adams and John Hancock to "cultivate every art and science which
may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free,
independent and virtuous people."
The academy honors four divisions of intellectual excellence: physical
sciences, biological sciences, social arts and sciences and humanities and fine
arts. There are 4,000 members nationwide, including 160 Nobel laureates and 65
Pulitzer Prize winners. Hutchison also joins more than two dozen living fellows
from Carolina.
Originally from New York City and raised in Chicago, Hutchison earned an
undergraduate degree from Yale in 1960 and a doctorate from the California
Institute of Technology in 1968. He has taught at Carolina since 1968, minus
two years as a visiting scientist to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in
Cambridge, England, and a recent stint at the Institute for Genomic
Research--better known as TIGR--in Rockville, Md. TIGR made headlines recently
by announcing that a collaboration to sequence the human genome was ahead of
schedule.
Hutchison's research has led to many breakthroughs in genetic research and two
Nobel Prizes, although the prizes went to other scientists. In 1993, for
example, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored Michael Smith of the
University of British Columbia for his and Hutchison's method of splicing
foreign components into genetic molecules.
In 1995, Hutchison was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the
highest honors a U.S. scientist or engineer can receive. Later that year, Gov.
James B. Hunt presented him the North Carolina Award, the state's highest
civilian honor.
"This was a surprise," Hutchison said of his most recent election. "I've been
joking to everyone that I was disappointed to get elected because of work in
science and not on the basis of my piano playing. It pleases me to be in the
same club as Wynton Marsalis. The academy includes not just scientists, but all
of the country's great painters and musicians."
Hutchison will be inducted formally at an Oct. 3 ceremony at the House of the
Academy in Cambridge, Mass.
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