National Academy of Sciences

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The National Academy of Sciences was created in the final, rushed hours of a Senate session, when lawmakers passed a bill they had barely examined. It was the 3rd of March 1863, in the middle of the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln signed the measure just before the session closed. Neither chamber debated its provisions or scrutinized who stood to benefit. Even though the move was later hailed as a milestone for American science, it stirred enormous ill feeling among scientists. That was true whether or not they had been named in the bill.

  Who pushed a plan like that through Congress at the worst possible moment for anyone's attention? What made an academy answerable to no single branch of government worth building in the middle of a war? And how did a charter written in an afternoon end up governing thousands of working scientists more than a century and a half later?

• 2. A Bill Nobody Debated

  ›

  Many of the Academy's first members belonged to the so-called 'Scientific Lazzaroni.' It was an informal network of physical scientists working in and around Cambridge, Massachusetts, around 1850. In 1863 the organizers enlisted Alexander Dallas Bache and Charles Henry Davis. Davis was an astronomer recently recalled from the Navy to head the Bureau of Navigation in Washington. They also brought in Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-American geologist, and Benjamin Peirce, an American mathematician, who together planned how to establish the Academy. Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson was set to name Agassiz to the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution. Agassiz then traveled to Washington at the government's expense, to help plan the new organization with the others.

  The planning bypassed Joseph Henry, who was reluctant to see a bill for such an academy brought before Congress. He believed such a resolution would be 'opposed as something at variance with our democratic institutions.' Henry later became the Academy's second president despite his early doubts.

  Agassiz, Davis, Peirce, Benjamin Gould, and Senator Wilson gathered at Bache's house to finish the job. Together they 'hurriedly wrote the bill incorporating the Academy, including in it the name of fifty incorporators.' Wilson introduced it late in the session, and Lincoln signed it soon after.

  The law itself required the Academy to 'investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art' whenever a government department asked. In return, it would 'receive no compensation whatever for any services to the Government of the United States.' The new institution did not solve the problems of a nation at war, as the Lazzaroni had hoped, and it never centralized American scientific work. Still, election to the Academy came to be considered 'the pinnacle of scientific achievement for Americans.' That held true until the Nobel Prize was established at the end of the 19th century.

  In 1870 Congress amended the charter to remove its original limit on how many members the Academy could have. More than a century later, in 2013, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked to write a speech marking the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. In it, he credited Lincoln with 'setting our Nation on a course of scientifically enlightened governance, without which we all may perish from this Earth.'

• 3. Advisers Who Serve For Free

  ›

  Alongside the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine, the Academy is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Current members elect new members each year, based on continuing achievement in original research. Those members serve without pay, acting as what the Academy itself calls 'advisers to the nation' on science, engineering, and medicine. The Academy also holds a congressional charter under Title 36 of the United States Code. Its founding purpose set it apart from other federal knowledge bodies. Rather than serving one branch or agency, as the Library of Congress does for Congress, the Academy was built differently. It was meant to enrich and inform any part of the federal government.

  Agencies of the United States government fund about 85 percent of the Academy's work. The rest comes from state governments, private foundations, and industrial organizations. A 17-member Council governs the Academy. Five of its members are elected officers: president, vice president, home secretary, international secretary, and treasurer. The remaining 12 are councilors, all elected from the membership. That Council can also delegate specific jobs to committees as needed.

  One standing example is the Committee on Animal Nutrition, which has produced a series of Nutrient Requirements of Domestic Animals reports since at least 1944. Each report is initiated by a different subcommittee of experts, drawing for instance on specialists in dairy cattle.

  Once a year the Academy meets in Washington, D.C., a gathering documented in its own scholarly journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The National Academies Press, the umbrella organization's publisher, makes more than 5,000 publications freely available on its website. From 2004 to 2017 the Academy ran the Marian Koshland Science Museum. Its exhibits focused on climate change and infectious disease. In 2017 the museum closed, making way for a new outreach program called LabX.

• 4. A Trickle Of Women

  ›

  By its own admission in 1989, the arrival of women in the Academy 'continues at a dismal trickle.' At that time the membership included 1,516 men and just 57 women. Elsewhere, the Academy's rolls have included 2,687 members and 531 international members, with about 190 of them Nobel Prize winners. In 2005 the organization employed about 1,100 staff.

  As of 2026, the Academy counts 2,705 active members and 557 international, non-voting members, and 3,218 of them are living. Existing members elect newcomers for life, choosing up to 120 new members and up to 30 foreign citizens as international members each year. The process runs from formal nomination through a vetting period to a final ballot at the annual meeting each April.

  Members are sorted into six fields, called classes. They are Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Biological Sciences, Engineering and Applied Sciences, Biomedical Sciences, Behavioral and Social Sciences, and Applied Biological, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences. Which universities have produced the most of these elected scientists turns out to depend heavily on whether a school runs a medical school at all.

• 5. Where The Members Come From

  ›

  Harvard University is tied to more Academy members than any other school across the organization's entire history, 331 in all. Without counting its medical school, the University of California, Berkeley leads instead, with 255 members. That split matters because schools like Berkeley, MIT, Princeton, and Caltech have no medical school, while Harvard and Stanford do.

  Ten institutions, two from the University of California system and four from the Ivy League, account for nearly 28 percent of every member ever elected. Those same ten are also the only institutions in Academy history to reach 100 or more members overall. MIT counts 219 members all-time, Stanford 234, Princeton 133, and Caltech 132.

  Among living members, only 14 institutions have 50 or more, counting medical schools where they apply. Together those 14 represent 32 percent of all living members. Harvard leads that list with 179 living members, 113 of them outside its medical school. Stanford follows with 178, and the University of California system counts 143. The National Institutes of Health, with no undergraduate campus at all, still counts 45 living members.

• 6. Building On The Mall

  ›

  At 2101 Constitution Avenue in northwest Washington, D.C., the National Academy of Sciences Building sits on the National Mall itself. It stands next to the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building and faces the headquarters of the State Department. Architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue designed the building in a neoclassical style, and it was dedicated in 1924.

  Goodhue brought in a team of artists, including Albert Herter, Lee Lawrie, and Hildreth Meière, to design interior embellishments celebrating the history of science. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It hosts lectures, symposia, exhibitions, and concerts, along with the annual meetings of the Academy and its two sister organizations. Roughly 150 staff members work inside it. In June 2012 it reopened to visitors after a two-year restoration that updated its aging infrastructure and improved accessibility.

  Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences also hosts exhibitions exploring the crossover between art and science, among them Mathemalchemy. On the 5th of March 2014, the building hosted the ceremony for the 2012 Presidential Award for Math and Science Teaching.

  More than 1,000 National Academies staff work out of the Keck Center, at 500 Fifth Street in northwest Washington, D.C. The center also houses the National Academies Press Bookstore. The Marian Koshland Science Museum once stood nearby, at 525 E Street, welcoming school field trips and the public to its permanent exhibits. Two more conference centers sit outside the capital. The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center sits at 100 Academy Drive in Irvine, California, near the University of California, Irvine. The J. Erik Jonsson Conference Center sits at 314 Quissett Avenue in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

• 7. Twenty-Two Presidents

  ›

  Geophysicist Marcia K. McNutt became the first woman to lead the National Academy of Sciences when she took over as president in 2016. Her current term is set to expire on the 30th of June 2026. The presidency goes to whoever wins a majority vote of the membership. The governing Council sets the term length, up to six years, with the option of a second term. Terms typically begin on the 1st of July and end on the 30th of June.

  McNutt is the 22nd person to hold the office since the Academy's founding. Frank Press led the organization from 1981 to 1993. Bruce Michael Alberts followed from 1993 to 2005, then Ralph J. Cicerone from 2005 to 2016. The Academy's very first president, Alexander Dallas Bache, served from 1863 to 1867.

  Other presidents have included the physicist Albert Abraham Michelson, who served from 1923 to 1927. The geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan followed, from 1927 to 1931.

• 8. Politics, Prizes, And Firsts

  ›

  Among the honors the Academy gives out is the Public Welfare Medal. Field-specific awards include the Henry Draper Medal in astronomy and the Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology. The John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science recognizes broad contributions to research. Other prizes include the NAS Award in Chemical Sciences and the Gibbs Brothers Medal for naval architecture and marine engineering.

  In 2005 the national science academies of the G8 nations joined those of Brazil, China, and India in signing a joint statement on climate change. The National Academy of Sciences was among the G8 signers. Those three developing nations were among the world's largest greenhouse gas emitters at the time. The statement argued that the science was clear enough to justify prompt action.

  On the 7th of May 2010, 255 Academy members signed a letter published in Science magazine, decrying 'political assaults' against climate change scientists. The letter responded to a civil investigative demand that Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli had filed against the University of Virginia. Cuccinelli sought a broad range of documents from Michael E. Mann, a climate researcher who had taught at the university from 1999 to 2005. By then Mann had moved to the University of Pennsylvania. Cuccinelli alleged Mann may have defrauded Virginia taxpayers through his environmental research, but investigations cleared Mann of falsifying or suppressing data.

  Edward C. Pickering, who lived from 1846 to 1919, became the youngest scientist ever elected to the Academy, in 1873. Florence R. Sabin, who lived from 1871 to 1953, became the first woman elected to the Academy, in 1924. David Blackwell, who lived from 1919 to 2010, became its first African-American member in 1965. Ben Barres, who lived from 1954 to 2017, became its first openly transgender member in 2013. In 2024, Peter Ungar, born in 1963, became the first Arkansan ever elected to the Academy.