Former professor David A. Hamburg to receive prestigous NAS medal
The National Academy of Sciences
will award its Public Welfare Medal in April to David A. Hamburg,
president emeritus of the Carnegie Corp. of New York and a Stanford
professor of medicine and human biology from 1961 to 1976. In
selecting Hamburg for the academy's most prestigious annual award,
the selection committee noted that the crisis he faced in 1975 when
four of his Stanford students were kidnapped in Tanzania "prompted
him to devote his energies to using science to help meet social
needs." The students were studying primate behavior when they were
kidnapped by rebels from Zaire and held for ransom and other
demands. Hamburg spent 10 weeks negotiating their release. He went
on to lead Carnegie, where he directed the organization into
"addressing fundamental issues in arms control, conflict avoidance
and resolution and the origins of ethnic and religious strife,"
said Academy President Bruce Alberts. The award is the latest in a
string of honors for Hamburg. He received the Presidential Medal of
Freedom in 1996 and last year the Carnegie Corp. honored him by
funding fellowships and symposia at Stanford in two areas of
special interest to him the prevention of deadly conflict and
the problems of early adolescence. The Public Welfare Medal was
established in 1914 to honor extraordinary use of science for the
public good.