THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY

1230 YORK AVENUE - NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10021

 

February 13, 1979

Dr. David R. Goddard

Office of the Home Secretary
National Academy of Sciences
2101 Constitution Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20418

Dear Dr. Goddard:

The committee for the James Murray Luck Award met
on the Rockefeller campus on February 8, 1979, all
members being present, and has arrived at a nominee
for the first award. The individual we propose is
Dr. G. Alan Robison, Professor and Chairman, Department
of Pharmacology, University of Texas Medical School at
Houston. A statement of the basis for our recommendation,
a citation, and a vitae with selected bibliography are
attached.

The material we considered in arriving at the nomina-
tion included nominees received from a sample of over
one hundred scientists in key positions who were queried
by the committee plus suggestions by members of the com-
mittee itself, together with citation data supplied by
the Institute for Scientific Information. The initial
search yielded a list of thirty scientists clearly
IMeriting consideration for the award. In sifting these
we were aided by citation analyses, examination of repre-
sentative publications by members of the committee and
of course discussions in the committee meeting based on
the various members! individual experience. The citation
.data were quite helpful but it is clear that they can be
even more so another year if the search is begun earlier
and Dr. Garfield and his colleagues are consulted in time
to make use of this year's experience effectively.

The principal criteria we used were that the contri-
butions to reviewing on the part of a nominee should have
extended over an appreciable period of time (rather than
constituting only a single important paper), that we could
find evidence that the reviewing effort contributed im-
portantly to some scientific advance, and, secondarily,
that the individual should not have been so widely recognized
for other scientific accomplishments that recognition for
the reviewing effort would be overshadowed.

The members of the present committee agree that
rotating the award in a systematic way over different
principal fields of science from year to year would
greatly facilitate the task of selecting nominees. That
our candidate for the first award is identified with the
life sciences is doubtless not unrelated to the fact that
the largest number of worthy nominees coming to our atten-
tion fell into this area. The committee suggests that in
each of the next two years it be planned in advance to
select the nominee one year from the physical sciences
(including mathematics and engineering) and one year from the
behavioral and social sciences (perhaps including statistics
and computer science). In this connection a suggestion I
would like to offer based on experience with this year's
procedure and materials (but that I did not have time to
discuss with other members of the committee) is that consid-
eration might be given to drawing the nominee from the
life sciences in alternate years so that over a period
of time, if the award continues to be given, the ratio
of the life sciences to the other two areas would be
2:1:1.

Finally, in case you might wish to transmit the
information to future committees for any use they might
make of it, I might say that in arriving at our final
selection it was exceedingly difficult to choose from
among four "finalists" - Julius H. Comroe, Jr., A. H.
Conney, Jane M. Oppenheimer, and G. Alan Robison. We
found these four individuals so highly and nearly equally
deserving that we aren't sure a random selection from
the group might not have been as reasonable a way of
coming down to one nominee as the rather extended delibera-
tions we actually went through. Two other individuals we
found highly deserving of consideration were Hans Bethe
(down-graded somewhat because of his wide recognition for
other efforts) and Donald Knuth.

I will keep on file for a time the results of our
initial search in case the material might be of use to
future committees.

For the selection committee

Yours sincerely,

MG 64 EL

William K. Estes

WKE: jt
Enecs.