Projects

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Academy organized several conferences and studies devoted to the history, origin, and development of fields of research, such as physics, molecular biology, and bioenergetics.

The Academy gathered together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to design a study of environmental decision-making that focused on the theoretical aspects of the process and examined policy analysis and decision-making.

The Academy was instrumental in the establishment in 1970 of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in Nairobi, Kenya. The goal of the ICIPE is to develop more effective and less dangerous pesticides through a greater understanding of insect biology.

As the economic and technological gap widened between the developed nations and the developing world, the Academy, the National Academy of Sciences, and other scientific organizations considered the feasibility of establishing an International Foundation for Science to support the research of young scientists and technical investigators in developing countries. In 1972, the IFS was established as a nongovernmental organization in Stockholm.

In 1969, the American Council of Learned Societies, of which the Academy is a founding member, convened its annual meeting to examine confrontation and challenges to the value of scholarship in society, inspired by the dissident rebellions at institutions of higher education in 1968.

In 1969, during a time of great student unrest across the country, the Academy founded The Assembly on University Goals and Governance to study a series of issues in higher education that were not directly linked to the problems of disorder.

At a time when national and international leaders were involved in a debate over restraints on chemical and biological weapons, the Academy, with the Salk Institute, organized a conference to illuminate the most important public policy issues raised by the existence of chemical and biological weapons.

This project brought together American and Japanese scholars and decision-makers to discuss the security problems of East Asia and the Western Pacific. Participants met five times over several years, in the United States and in Japan.

A group of scholars from the historical, psychological, psychiatric, and social science disciplines met in a series of seminars to explore the interplay between individual psychology and historical change.

In the 1960s, the United States developed a national system of social programs based on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 declaration of “unconditional war on poverty.” In 1966, the Academy convened a series of seminars on the many components of poverty.

With new surgical techniques, like heart transplants, becoming indispensable tools in prolonging human life, the issue of human experimentation became a matter of increasing public interest. The Academy created an interdisciplinary working group to study the ethics of human experimentation, and the working group’s papers were initially published in Dædalus in 1969.

Published as a double issue of the Academy’s journal, Dædalus, this study is a comprehensive survey of the problems and the status of African-Americans in American society, a topic of great urgency at the time. The resulting volume has been considered seminal in explaining the complexities and implications of racial problems in the United States in the 1960s.

The Academy initiated this study in 1964 to imagine the future and identify the problem areas and social and intellectual questions likely to be central by the year 2000.

This project traced the development of the modern general-purpose philanthropic foundation and assessed its role in philanthropy as a whole, as compared with the roles played by government, business corporations, company-affiliated foundations, individual donors, community-service organizations, and other participants in philanthropic activity.

In 1962, the Academy received a grant from NASA to study the long-range effects of space exploration on American life. At a time when the nation was committing enormous and unprecedented financial, scientific and manpower resources to the NASA program, the Academy study was charged with investigating the potential consequences, intended and unintended, of this mobilization on various sectors of society.

The Academy convened a program of conferences and studies that led to the seminal 1960 special issue of Dædalus on arms control, which President John F. Kennedy subsequently called the “Bible” on the subject.