VOLUME 12, NUMBER 17 • MARCH 9, 2001

E.O. Wilson Wins This Year’s Lewis Thomas Prize

In his newest book, Consilience, Edward O. Wilson seeks a union between science and the humanities. Fittingly, Wilson is this year’s winner of The Rockefeller University’s Lewis Thomas Prize, an award established in 1993 by the trustees of The Rockefeller University to recognize a scientist "whose voice and vision can tell us of science’s aesthetic and philosophical dimensions."

Scientist and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner E.O. Wilson will receive the 2001 Lewis Thomas Prize, which honors "the scientist as poet."

Wilson’s own career bridges the sciences and humanities:he is both a foremost entomologist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.

He received his B.S. and M.S. in biology from the University of Alabama and, in 1955, his Ph.D. in biology from Harvard, where he has since taught and where he has received both of Harvard’s college-wide teaching awards. He currently is University Research Professor and Honorary Curator in Entomology of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. His two Pulitzer Prize-winning books are On Human Nature (1978) and The Ants (1990, with Bert Hölldobler). He is the recipient of many fellowships, honors and awards, including the 1977 National Medal of Science, the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1990), the International Prize for Biology from Japan (1993), and, for his conservation efforts, the Gold Medal of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (1990) and the Audubon Medal of the National Audubon Society (1995). He is on the board of directors of The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International and the American Museum of Natural History and gives many lectures throughout the world.

Lewis Thomas himself received the first Lewis Thomas Prize in 1993. Other recipients of the prize have been François Jacob (1994), Abraham Pais (1995), Freeman Dyson (1996), Max Perutz (1997), Ernst Mayr (1998) and Steven Weinberg (1999).

The award ceremony will take place on Tues., March 27, at 5:30 p.m.