Meanwhile, back “At the National Academies”

The National Academy of Sciences was created by an act of Congress in 1863, empowering “fifty men of science” to form an academy that would “whenever called upon by any department of the Government, investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art” and to “receive no compensation whatever for any services to the Government of the United States” (1). Thus, the “sole obligation” of the National Academy of Sciences at its creation was to provide objective scientific advice to the nation—its honorific function, for which it is arguably better known by the public, developed later. Over the years, Academy members, empowered by Congress to make their own rules, added elements to the Academy to help fulfill that obligation—creating PNAS (1914), a journal to disseminate scientific advances, the National Research Council (1916), an investigative arm to support the use of scientific research for evidence-based policy making, and two additional academies, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 1964 and the Institute of Medicine in 1970, rechartered as the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) in 2015, to broaden its scope across the burgeoning national scientific enterprise.

So, a lot has changed since 1863. Collectively, NASEM (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine) has almost 7,000 members, many of whom are not even “men of science.” Although the organization is considerably more complicated structurally, its founding mission has remained the same. Today, the extent of the advisory activity through the joint efforts of NASEM is 10 times the size of the NAS alone. Increased size and complexity have created challenges, chief of which is communication, both internally and externally. To address this challenge, PNAS has created a new feature, “At the National Academies” (ATNA), which will emphasize the shared mission of all three national academies—to provide objective scientific advice to the nation.

Technically speaking, the feature isn’t entirely new—it’s a restructured version of the feature “From the Academy”(2), launched in 1997 by Editor-in-Chief Nick Cozzarelli as an “experiment” to inform readers “about the structure and activities” of NAS. At the time, Nick lamented that “although most scientists learn early in their careers that the United States has an academy of sciences, its actual operations are not widely known even though it is often the leading representative of American science.” “From the Academy” ultimately disappeared, but citation patterns indicate that the experiment was a success overall; each of the articles published during its run remains regularly accessed online. Among the most durable contributions are President Obama’s 2009 address at the NAS annual meeting and a commentary by Alberts (3) on the balance between openness and secrecy in the context of publishing bioterrorism-related modeling studies. By far, though, the most downloaded piece is the one by Alberts and Fulton (4) titled “Election to the National Academy of Sciences: Pathways to membership,” which has been accessed more than 14,000 times.

PNAS has created a new feature, “At the National Academies” (ATNA), which will emphasize the shared mission of all three national academies.

In view of the growth and diversification of the Academy enterprise, Nick’s lament may be more apt today than it was in 1997. That matters because scientific issues have increased in number and complexity as well, such that providing the government with all of the advice it wants or needs is too big a task for 7,000 people. Indeed, because many of America’s most pressing science and technology issues are global in nature, NASEM’s mission has become global and within its portfolio are collaborations with national science academies around the world on matters that transcend international borders.

Among the most important tools that NASEM has for producing useful information is its convening power—its ability to gather people together, from across the nation’s scientific enterprise, for a specific shared purpose. NASEM studies, frequently funded by federal agencies, can address pressing problems as universal as sexual harassment in science or as local as assessing the ecological and socioeconomic risks of introducing nonnative Asian oysters into Chesapeake Bay. Constituting a study committee requires representation of a diversity of specific expertises and a broad continuum of perspectives—far more attainable if the pool of potential participants extends across the world rather than just across the academies. This is even more the case for academy activities that are undertaken at the initiative of the academies themselves, rather than a specific federal agency—addressing issues such as human rights, arms control, science education, public engagement, and research quality and integrity. All three academies, for example, have developed unique portfolios in public engagement: NAS has launched The Science Behind It and LabX, NAE hosts Engineer Girl (an initiative that was inspired by the report of the NAE Committee on the Diversity of the Engineering Workforce), and NAM created the Visualize Health Equity Project, which recruits artists to depict the health challenges and opportunities in their communities “through a creative lens.”

Even PNAS depends on the broad scientific community, not only for submitting manuscripts describing potentially transformative research for publication in the journal but also for helping the 222-member Editorial Board identify which among the more than 19,000 manuscripts submitted each year are most deserving of publication within its 26,000 pages every year. In 2019, in addition to 1,194 NAS members who served as handling editors, 1,277 nonmembers served as guest editors and more than 12,000 served as ad hoc reviewers.

The hope for ATNA is that a broad cross-section of the PNAS readership will find it interesting—an adjective much maligned for its vagueness, but perfect in the context of its dictionary definition of “holding the attention and curiosity.” We hope that you’ll find the ongoing NASEM activities worthy of your attention and, as well, inspire curiosity about the opportunities available to contribute to those activities. Contributors are needed both within and beyond NASEM; other than the 25 individuals who are members of all three academies, most members of only a single academy typically know very little about the “structure and activities” of the cognate academies.

Let us know at PNAS@nas.edu if you like what you read and if there are any topics you’d like to know more about. Although the 1863 act of incorporation formalized NAS’s responsibility for providing useful information to society, that responsibility has long been the purview of the scientific enterprise; we all can provide “the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery…of new and useful things” [as stated by President Abraham Lincoln, who signed the 1863 act into law, and quoted by President Barack Obama, right here in PNAS in 2009 (5)].