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Archeological Discoveries Shed Light on Old New York

An old map/street grid of lower Manhattan in NYC.

Slavery, landfill and brothels: Archeologists are learning more about the history of New York City after recent discoveries in downtown Manhattan that date back to the city’s pre-colonial days.

Published July 1, 2006

By Diana Wall

New York City map, circa 1755. Image courtesy of Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

New York is unique among American seaboard cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston in that it is regarded as a city with a present and a future, but not with a past. Recent archeological excavations in downtown New York, however, give the lie to that notion. In this oldest part of the city, archeologists have discovered sites dating from the early 17th century until the end of the 19th century, yielding artifacts left by Dutch and English settlers, enslaved Africans, and working-class and middle-class families. Digs have also yielded many secrets about the infrastructure of the old city: how people claimed land from the rivers and how they built on newly made land.

Fruits of Development

Urban archeology in New York itself dates only from around 1980, when preservation regulations, based on local, state, and federal legislation, first took hold. The regulations state, in effect, that any construction project that has government involvement (which might range from federal money to a local zoning variance) requires an environmental review, including an archeological study.

The developer hires archeologists to see if an important find might be preserved in the proposed construction site. In most cases, these studies conclude either that there was never anything of archeological interest, or that (as is usually the case in Lower Manhattan) any remains were destroyed by recent development, such as the construction of a 20th-century building with a very deep basement.

However, if an intact site could be present, the regulations require that archeologists conduct test excavations. If those tests are positive—to the archeologist’s joy and the developer’s agony—the impact of construction on the site has to be “mitigated.” Mitigation can occur in several ways: by moving the construction project, by modifying its plans so that it will not harm the archeological site, or by excavating the site. In Lower Manhattan, where real estate is so valuable, development projects are never canceled and get modified very, very rarely. But there are relatively frequent excavations. In fact, over a dozen large-scale excavations have taken place.

From the perspective of archeologists, these government-mandated Downtown projects are double-edged. On the one hand, archeologists do not choose the sites they get to dig; instead, the sites are chosen, for better or worse, by the vagaries of development. But on the other hand, if there were no development and no government regulations, there would be no archeological excavations in Lower Manhattan at all.

Beneath the Kitchen Floor

Once archeologists are in the field, they are particularly eager to excavate “features,” such as the pits from outhouses and the basements from long demolished houses which might survive under modern basement floors. Features often contain treasure troves of artifacts that were deposited in the ground at a single time and can often be linked with a particular household or business. Archeologists use artifacts to date the layers of soil inside these features, and then use that date to find out who was living or working in the building at that time by consulting historical documents like city directories and tax and census records.

Archeologists have excavated two sites that date to the 17th-century Dutch and early English colonial periods, both on Pearl Street, which was once the East River shoreline. At the Broad Financial Center site, just south of Broad Street, archeologists led by Joel Grossman unearthed the cobble-paved basement floor of a warehouse that Augustine Heermans built in the late 1640s, just next to the Dutch West India Company’s warehouse.

Heermans, a Bohemian, had come to New Amsterdam as an agent for a Dutch mercantile company. He dealt in tobacco, wines, and provisions, and was also involved in the trade in enslaved Africans. There on the floor of the warehouse, the Grossman team discovered a token that had been issued by Prince Maurice of the House of Orange to commemorate his election as a Stadtholder of the City of Utrecht in 1590.

The First Large-scale Excavation in Lower Manhattan

The Stadt Huys Block dig excavated over three tons of artifacts from a slightly later period. Nan Rothschild and I led this first large-scale excavation to take place in Lower Manhattan. Our team found the foundation walls and cellar deposits from the King’s House, the tavern that the English provincial governor Francis Lovelace had had built in 1670. Thousands of clay tobacco pipes, pieces of dark green liquor bottles, and shards from glasses all evoked 17th-century revelers.

The charred basement floor revealed that the tavern had burned—a fact that was not in the historical records. In addition, the archeologists found a barrel buried under the kitchen floor. Inside the barrel were about a dozen whole liquor bottles as well as some whole clay tobacco pipes—the only intact pipes and 17th-century bottles that were found. The barrel and its contents seem to have been a cache, perhaps left by the tavern keeper or by an enslaved African who worked in the kitchen when the tavern burned.

Dozens of features dating to the late 18th and 19th centuries are associated with middle-class households whose members both lived and worked in the same buildings—households like that of Daniel van Voorhis, a silversmith, who, with his family, journeymen, and apprentices, both lived and had his workshop on Hanover Square in the 1780s. Another excavation took place in the Five Points District, the Irish working-class neighborhood which was located to the northeast of City Hall Park. Martin Scorsese recently immortalized this notorious slum in Gangs of New York. Charles Dickens described it after a visit in 1842 as “reeking everywhere with dirt and filth… Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old.”

A Hard Life in the Slums

Life could be extremely hard in the slums. In one of the privy pits, excavators discovered an unusual array of artifacts: ornate dishes; implements used for fancy sewing, such as embroidery; an unusually high number of chamber pots (almost 40); glass bed pans, all designed for women; and a ceramic pot inscribed with “AMAILLE, s.d. Vinaigrier.” The privy also contained the skeletons of three infants—two newborns and a fetus.

Rebecca Yamin, the director of the interpretive phase of the project, discovered historical records that confirmed that there had in fact been a brothel on the site which had been shut down by the police in 1843. The artifacts had presumably been discarded into the privy when the brothel was closed. The bedpans spoke of the illnesses that the young women suffered as occupational hazards, and the vinegar container perhaps of attempts at birth control. Whether the infants died of natural or unnatural causes (we shall never know the answer), their remains also speak of tragedy—they were discarded into the privy rather than accorded proper burials.

Filling in the Blanks

Discoveries at the African Burial Ground have put the spotlight on slavery in the North. This slave, named Caesar, outlived three masters on the Nicoll estate in Bethlehem, outside Albany, until his death at age 115. Daguerreotype, 1851, reproduced collection of the New York Historical Society.

In addition to revealing aspects of daily life, archeological excavations have also uncovered secrets of the city’s infrastructure. Many New Yorkers are not aware that much of Lower Manhattan is made up of landfill—land claimed from the East and Hudson Rivers, as well as low-lying inland areas filled to the height of the surrounding grade. Three blocks of new land were added along the East River shore, from the late 17th through the early 19th century. And four new blocks were added along the Hudson, beginning in the early 19th and continuing into the late 20th century. Excavating in landfill lets us learn about the landfill process itself and also find out what has been buried beneath it.

Some of the landfill came from the river bottom, and was probably dredged up from slips or alongside piers. Other fills are made up of clean soil, probably from grading down hills and excavating cellars. Others contain garbage that was probably picked up by local cartmen and then dumped into the landfill.

Although archeologists cannot link this trash to particular households or businesses in the city, it can reveal details about the city as a whole. During the yellow fever epidemics in the early 19th century, the city government passed regulations outlawing the dumping of organic material into the landfill. But then, as now, illegal dumping was prevalent—an excavation along the Hudson River revealed offal from butchering when such dumping was illegal.

Landfills and Bulkheads

New Yorkers used many different techniques to hold the landfill in place. Most common were bulkheads made out of planks or logs. But archeologists led by Joan Geismar working at 175 Water Street, a mid-18th-century landfill block, discovered an unusual form of bulkhead. There, an 18th-century merchant ship had been scuttled and sunk to form part of the bulkhead line. Another ship, apparently sunk for the same purpose, has been uncovered in the basement of two of the Water Street buildings owned by the South Street Seaport Museum.

This spring, archeologists working with the MTA on the expansion of the South Ferry subway station in Battery Park discovered part of a seawall. This wall, which also served as a battery and was mounted with cannon to protect the city in case of attack, was put into place between 1730 and 1766. Later, after the Revolutionary War, it was buried in the landfill that was added to the shoreline to create Battery Park. Archeologists uncovered around 600 feet of this seawall in four different areas; the wall is made of stone and is 8 to 10 feet wide. There are plans afoot for reconstructing parts of the wall as an exhibit in Battery Park.

Building on a Landfill

Archeologists have also discovered the different ways that people have dealt with the problem of building on landfill. If buildings are constructed on landfill before it has had a chance to settle, the buildings shift and crack due to the settling. One solution when building in shallow water involves resting the footing stones of the foundation walls directly on the natural river bottom.

Another technique consists of using spread footers—wooden structures laid on top of the landfill and made up of large beams placed on rows of planks set perpendicularly to the beams along the line of the building’s foundation wall. Builders then lay the stone foundation wall on top of the beams. This results in spreading the load of the building so that it in effect “floats” on top of the landfill. This was the most common technique in the 18th and early 19th centuries, when people were building structures out in what had been deep water in the East and Hudson Rivers.

The final technique (a variation of which we still use today) involves driving pilings down through the landfill to the underlying river bottom along the outline of the footprint of the building and placing large beams on top of the pilings. Builders then lay the stone footings of the foundation wall on top of these beams. This technique, which has only been discovered at one site in New York City, required an enormous amount of energy to execute before the invention of the steam-driven pile driver.

A Hidden History

Landfill also helped preserve what many consider the most remarkable site not only in Lower Manhattan but in the whole nation: the African Burial Ground, which was excavated in 1991-1992. This project began when the Federal government was about to build an office tower at 290 Broadway, a block north of City Hall Park.

Archeologists began this project as they always do—by studying the history of the site. They learned that during the 18th century, part of the Negros Burial Ground had been located on part of the parcel that the government was developing. But buildings on that part of the site in the late 19th and 20th centuries had had deep basements, so deep that archeologists assumed that the burial ground had been destroyed, except in the area of an old alley.

Archeologists checked the alley and found something completely unexpected: In the 18th century, the ground surface in the area of the Burial Ground was much lower than it is today. In the early 19th century, developers had added 20 to 25 feet of landfill that served as a blanket and protected most of the burials from being destroyed by subsequent development.

Over the next year, archeologists disinterred over 400 burials. The human remains were taken to Howard University, where they were studied by a team led by Michael Blakey, a physical anthropologist. A decade later, in 2003, the remains were returned to New York, and amidst great ceremony were reinterred in vaults right next to the office tower where they had originally been buried and had lain for over 200 years.

Important in Many Ways

The African Burial Ground is important in many ways. First of all, the presence of slavery in early New York City, and even in the north as a whole, has been denied in modern popular history. But 18th-century New York City had a higher population of enslaved Africans than any other city in the British-American colonies except for Charleston, South Carolina.

Throughout the English colonial period in the 18th century, enslaved Africans constituted from 14% to almost 21% of the city’s population, and in 1703 (the only year for which a detailed census survives for the period), 40% of the city’s households included slaves. The discovery of the burial ground brought home in no uncertain terms to today’s New Yorkers that Africans have had a deep historical presence in New York City from the time of the first European arrivals.

Secondly, because Africans and other members of the disenfranchised tend to have been ignored in written historical records, archeological study is the best way that we have to find out about their lives. The people whose remains were disinterred at the African Burial Ground constitute the largest sample of people of African descent from the colonial period that has ever been studied in the United States. Although we will probably never know the names of any of those whose remains were unearthed—we know them only by the numbers that were assigned to them as they were disinterred—the Blakey team has been able to write their biographies.

Burial 101

Several women were buried with infants resting in the crooks of their arms, presumably mothers who, along with their babies, died during or shortly after childbirth. And there was “Burial 101.” His coffin was unusual in that it was decorated with a design formed by brass tacks. The excavators initially thought that the design represented a heart, but as Blakey discovered, it might also be a Sankofa bird symbol used by the Akan people of Ghana and the Ivory Coast to mean “turn to the past in order to build the future.”

Unlike many of the other burials, Burial 101’s remains showed no signs of stress suffered during childhood. This suggested to the Blakey team that he had been born in Africa and spent his childhood in freedom. His front teeth had been filed into an hourglass shape, an African custom apparently not practiced in the Americas, more evidence suggesting an African past.

But, as Blakey put it, his vertebrae showed fractures that indicate that after his capture and removal to North America as an adult, “his forced labors were backbreaking in the most literal sense.” However, his burial in the decorated coffin—one of only four decorated ones found at the site—indicates that he enjoyed prestige in his community despite his forced labors.

A Spotlight on the Ignored

Many modern-day African-American New Yorkers have been guiding the direction of the African Burial Ground Project. Earlier this year President Bush designated the site a National Monument, and construction is underway on an African-inspired memorial that includes an ancestral libation court and chamber. An interpretive center is planned. Meanwhile, the New York Historical Society has opened a small permanent exhibit on slavery in New York, a smaller spin-off of an earlier landmark exhibit spurred by the Burial Ground discoveries.

As we all know, history is written by the victors. But as digs in New York have demonstrated, archeology can shine a spotlight on individuals and groups whose presence in the past is often ignored or even denied.

Also read: Beyond the Beaches: Revealing the Real Puerto Rico Part I and Beyond the Beaches: Revealing the Real Puerto Rico Part II.

About the Author

Diana Wall, professor of Anthropology at the City College of New York, is co-author (with Anne-Marie Cantwell) of Unearthing Gotham: The Archeology of New York City (Yale, 2001) and Touring Gotham’s Archeological Past (Yale, 2004).

Back to the Future: The Academy’s History

A black and white illustration of an old NYC building.

A pitiless creditor, arson, and rivalry between medical schools: All play a role in the history of the Academy’s real estate. Learn about the Academy’s history, dating back to 1817.

Published July 1, 2006

By Simon Baatz

The New York Institution on Chambers Street, home to several intellectual societies, housed the Academy in the early 19th century.

In a pleasant twist of fate, its move Downtown returns The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) to a location just blocks away from where it was founded nearly 200 years ago. On January 29, 1817, a group of 21 men, almost all recent graduates or professors of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, met for the first time in a room of that institution, then located on Barclay Street near Broadway, close to City Hall.

Known (until 1876) as the Lyceum of Natural History, the group was open to anyone with an interest in natural knowledge. By contrast, the two leading scientific societies of the prior century, Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society and Boston’s American Academy of Arts and Sciences, were limited to the socially prominent.

A Link to the Medical School

The Lyceum’s link to a medical school was no coincidence: In the early 19th century, science was not part of the college curriculum and there was no career structure for science per se, so medicine was the logical profession for young men with scientific curiosity.

With the aim of hosting public lectures on science and establishing a museum of natural history, the Lyceum needed more capacious quarters, a situation that sounds familiar today. And so, in April 1817, the Lyceum moved to a set of rooms in the New York Institution on the south side of Chambers Street directly opposite City Hall. The New York Institution was a cultural and intellectual mecca; the three-story building, on loan to New York’s literary societies from the City, housed the New York Historical Society, the New York Literary and Philosophical Society, the American Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Lyceum of Natural History.

Rapid Expansion

The Lyceum of Natural History was able to take good advantage of the City’s generosity; over the next two decades, the membership and activities of the society expanded rapidly. The growth of the Lyceum caused the members to imagine that they might own their own building, thus ending their dependence on a loan that could be revoked at any moment. In 1831 the Lyceum did eventually move from the New York Institution into a temporary home provided by the New York Dispensary at the corner of White and Centre Streets. But this also was unsatisfactory and in 1834 the members initiated a subscription campaign to raise the funds to construct a new building.

A safe harbor with NYU at the Stuyvesant Institute on Broadway.

Their efforts seemed successful; two years later the Lyceum moved into its handsome new home on Broadway between Houston and Prince Streets. It was a notable accomplishment for scientific endeavor in New York City. There was a large lecture room on the first floor and on the second floor, a spacious gallery for the Lyceum’s collections in natural history. The members set aside rooms for a library at the rear of the building and several small meeting rooms on the third floor.

But it was all too good to last. To buy the land and build, the Lyceum incurred debt, hoping to pay it off through ongoing donations. Then came the severe economic recession of 1837. That stalled fund-raising and soon the Lyceum had to take on more debt, for a total of $35,000. The members struggled valiantly to hold onto their building but to no avail; a creditor threatened legal action and in 1843 the Lyceum sold its home at auction for $37,000.

A Serious Blow

The loss of the Broadway building was a serious blow. For a while, a small group of dispirited devotees met in the home of the Lyceum’s president. But then the Lyceum found shelter under the wing of a successful upstart, the newly founded medical school at New York University. That school felt that a tie to the Lyceum would bring it prestige in its competition with the well-established College of Physicians and Surgeons, later to be part of Columbia University.

Less than a year after their own building was sold, the Lyceum, along with its magnificent natural history collection and its superb library of books, moved to the NYU medical school’s home at the Stuyvesant Institute on Broadway between Bleecker and Bond Streets. In 1851 the Lyceum moved with the medical school to a new building on the outskirts of the city at 14th Street close to Third Avenue.

But 15 years later, disaster struck. The NYU medical school was adjacent to the Academy of Music, a large opera house on the corner of 14th Street. On the night of Monday, May 21, 1866, an arsonist set a fire to the rear of the Academy of Music. The flames quickly spread and soon the entire block on 14th Street between Irving Place and Third Avenue was ablaze.

The NYU medical school, along with the Mott Surgical Museum and the collections of the Lyceum of Natural History, burned to the ground despite the best efforts of New York City firemen. A collection of birds donated to the Lyceum by John James Audubon, a mineralogical collection from the New York State Geological Survey, and the ichthyological specimens of Samuel Latham Mitchill, an energetic founder of the Lyceum—all vanished in the flames.

Another Severe Setback

The loss of the Lyceum’s collections was a severe setback to the cause of science in New York; it was not certain that they would ever be replaced. But ironically, the loss cleared the way for the creation of a new institution, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Thanks to the generosity of New York City and State, and of the city’s wealthiest citizens, the AMNH opened on Central Park West in 1874.

Its establishment meant a circumscribed role for the Lyceum of Natural History—it would no longer attempt to rebuild its own museum. But the creation of the AMNH had its blessings; renamed the New York Academy of Sciences, the former Lyceum moved into rooms in the museum’s capacious building on Central Park West and assumed a modest, yet significant, role as a spokesperson for the scientific community in New York City.

In the early decades of the 20th century, the Academy organized a comprehensive survey of the natural history of Puerto Rico, a project that coincided with the research of such notable members as Franz Boas and Nathaniel Lord Britton.

Rising from the Ashes

Farewell to the magnificent Woolworth Mansion on East 63rd Street.
Courtesy CBRE.

But it was Eunice Miner, a former researcher at the AMNH who was executive secretary of the Academy from 1939 through 1968, who did more than any other member to revitalize the Academy and to secure it a permanent home. In her rounds of New York philanthropists, Miner attracted the attention of Norman Woolworth, scion of the family that owned a network of chain stores. Woolworth was so impressed that, on learning of the Academy’s search for a new home, he donated his own ornate five-story mansion on East 63rd with the sole requirement that the Academy pay all the necessary legal fees.

It was a spectacular gift. The Academy, the oldest science organization in New York City, could now boast a magnificent home—and a permanent measure of independence and self-sufficiency. After many happy years, and after much careful consideration, Academy members voted to sell the mansion in 2005. But in the other whimsical twist of fate, the Academy’s new home looks down upon the magnificent Gothic spire of the landmark Woolworth Building, which housed the Woolworth company for 80 years and is now being converted into residential apartments. And, of course, the proceeds from the sale of the mansion have resulted in an endowment that will be the bulwark of the Academy for years to come, back Downtown.

Also read: Academy’s Past: Where It All Began (11-part series) and Knowledge, Culture and Science in the Metropolis: The New York Academy of Sciences (1817-1970)

About the Author

Simon Baatz, who teaches American history at George Mason University, is the author of Knowledge, Culture, and Science in the Metropolis: The New York Academy of Sciences 1817-1970 (1990). His most recent book, For the Thrill of It: The Murder that Shocked Chicago, a history of the Leopold-Loeb case, will be published by HarperCollins in 2007.

PATH Forward: Connecting New Jersey and New York

A shot of the Oculus in downtown NYC.

Santiago Calatrava’s new transport terminal will encourage Downtown residents, commuters and tourists to look up and marvel.

Published July 1, 2006

By Fred A. Bernstein

Image courtesy of sean via stock.adobe.com.

In his first completed project in New York, the Spanish-born architect Santiago Calatrava designed a time capsule meant to be opened in the year 3000. Calatrava’s bulbous, polished metal box, which stands outside the American Museum of Natural History, was clearly inspired by nature. But it would take experts from several departments of the museum to pin down all the referents. Some observers see a seashell; others, a flower or a seedpod; still others, an elaborate crystal. Animal, vegetable, or mineral?

In a world where most buildings are simply containers, their forms influenced only by other buildings, Calatrava’s blatantly biomorphic structures have made him, at 54, the most accessible of the current generation of superstar architects.

Most of Calatrava’s structures— bridges, airports, train stations, and museums—are in Europe, but as many as three more could arrive on the Lower Manhattan skyline by the end of the decade. The largest (and the one most certain to be built) is the $2.2 billion PATH terminal at Ground Zero, scheduled to open in 2009.

Hands in Prayer? Or Birds in Flight?

The terminal, just east of where the Twin Towers stood, will be topped by a pair of curved canopies of glass and steel that reach high into the sky as decoration. A hydraulic system will allow the canopies to rise, creating an opening about 35 feet wide at its center, bathing the huge concourse in sunlight.

Some visitors will see the canopies as hands interlocked in prayer; others will see birds in flight (to heighten the allusion, Calatrava released a dove into the air when he unveiled his design). Or perhaps it isn’t the bird but the birdcage, opening to the sky in a symbol of freedom. The building has been particularly welcome news at Ground Zero, where architectural squabbles—some growing out of forced collaborations— continue to make headlines.

Calatrava collaborates with no one, and it’s just as well, since he has too many ideas already. Born in Valencia, he speaks nearly a dozen languages and sometimes uses all of them—citing the works of philosophers, composers, poets, and painters—in a single sentence. He has no compunction about mixing metaphors in his buildings; how else can he hope to get a fraction of his ideas built in just one short lifetime?

Thirty years ago, after receiving an undergraduate degree in architecture, Calatrava moved to Switzerland to study engineering. He quickly developed a style all his own. His student work resembled the streamlined forms of one of his idols, Robert Maillart, an early 20th-century designer of bridges in the Swiss cantons. Maillart’s goal was to remove excess material, which resulted in concrete bridges so thin, they appeared to be stretched almost to breaking.

Bridging Twist and Turn for Decorative Effect

But unlike Maillart’s strictly economical structures, Calatrava’s bridges twist and turn for decorative effect. Not surprisingly, the great Catalan architect, Antonio Gaudi, who rarely used right angles and whose buildings ornament Barcelona, is another one of Calatrava’s idols.

Since the advent of modernism, architects have almost universally tried to explain form as the direct result of function, as if anything less rational were suspect. But Calatrava has joyfully shaken off that stricture. His design for a music school in Switzerland uses five exposed steel cables. Calatrava has said “I chose five, even knowing that I could have used only two, because music is read over five lines.”

More recently, he designed an opera house for Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, with a vast curved wing that resembles a crescent moon, a wave, an orchid, or about half a dozen other forms from nature. Asked about the origins of the wing, which significantly increased the cost of the building, Calatrava didn’t pretend that it served any practical purpose—except the purpose to inspire.

Lately, the architect has been creating buildings that don’t just look ready to move; they do move. Shortlisted to redesign the Reichstag in Berlin, Calatrava proposed a glass dome that would open when the Bundestag was in session, symbolizing openness in government. That design was never built. But in 2001 his ideas took flight in an entry pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum. There, a roof that resembles a bird’s wings opens to the sky in good weather. Getting the wings built was tricky—after long delays and huge cost overruns, Calatrava had the pieces assembled in Spain and flown across the Atlantic in a giant Soviet transport plane. Even then, there were minor problems with the mechanism.

A Secular Version of Gothic Cathedrals

In the end, Milwaukee garnered an important civic symbol—and even skeptics find the building’s now-reliable daily displays irresistible. The expense is of little concern to Calatrava’s fans, who see his buildings as the modern, secular version of Gothic cathedrals: uplifting symbols of humankind’s highest aspirations.

Private developers in the U.S. are just beginning to see whether Calatrava’s panache can produce profits. If completed in Chicago, his Fordham Spire, a mixed-use tower that twists a few degrees with every floor, would be the tallest building in the United States. For South Street in Lower Manhattan, Calatrava has designed a tower of 45-foot cubes hanging from cables—a plan the architect worked out with blocks of wood and marble.

Each cube would contain a single “apartment” priced at $30 million or more. He has also designed a gondola that could bring visitors from Manhattan to Governors Island—a pro bono project that he accepted at the request of city and state officials hoping to spark interest in the island’s redevelopment.

There’s only one problem with a Calatrava gondola: There had better be a very special building at the other end, or the trip will be an anticlimax.

Also read: An Architectural Historian’s Perspective of NYC

About the Author

Fred A. Bernstein studied architecture at Princeton and law at NYU, and writes about both subjects.

Enjoying What New York City has to Offer

A band performs at the Knitting Factory.

An intrepid neuroscience postdoc at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory heads downtown for museums, fine dining, and rock ‘n roll.

Published July 1, 2006

By Linda Wilbrecht

Nighttime fun at the Knitting Factory. Image courtesy of Update magazine.

To me “going downtown” has always meant “good food.” This is especially true in Manhattan, where some of the best restaurants in New York City are concentrated below Canal Street.

I asked two friends to join me at the Financier Patisserie, near Hanover Square, ready for a day of exploration downtown. Pouring rain made the cobblestones and pubs outside on Stone Street look more like London than New York. The Financier probably gets noisy at lunchtime on weekdays with its green and white tiled walls and floors, but this Sunday morning it was blissfully quiet, every customer sitting on a French brasserie chair rapt in a news- paper with a bowl of cappuccino resting on a saucer.

Each saucer also held a small golden cake, the traditional French financier made with almonds and egg whites. I scanned the pastry case, trying to decide between éclairs, tarts, and crème brûlées. I settled on the raspberry éclair, its pastry lid held aloft by fresh and perfect berries sitting in cream. Not my usual breakfast, but this felt like a special occasion.

Properly sugared and caffeinated, we moved on to the National Museum of the American Indian. I was surprised I had never noticed it before, installed inside the ornate U.S. Custom House at Bowling Green. I was pleased to find admission was free; the museum is part of the Smithsonian.

From Museums to Shopping

The collection represents a vast number of tribes from the Americas, and includes clothing, pottery, basketry, carvings, even saddlery. I was struck by a model tipi, perhaps a planning model, perhaps a toy. It is made of deer hide, and painted riders dance across its surface with all the lightness of a Chagall. The Born of Clay exhibit showcases pots, jars, and storage vessels spanning 5000 years.

Several water jugs are decorated with paintings of deer with arrows running from their mouths to their bellies. Others are in the shape of trophy heads and maize gods. Contemporary potters are also well represented. On a simple gray basin made in 1986 by Peter Jones, an Iroquois potter, three clay singers emerge from the lip, looking like Edvard Munch figures beating a drum.

By the time we were back out on Bowling Green, the clouds had cleared. My friends were planning a trip to Hawaii, so they needed sandals and a new camera. We were in the perfect neighborhood to shop for both. At Century 21, New York’s most famous discount warehouse (located at 22 Cortland Street), we went elbow to elbow with young women pawing metallic purple Manolo Blahnik stilettos, marked down from $400 to $200. We found our sandals for a more reasonable price.

Passing quickly through the rest of the store, we petted 400 thread-count sheets and racks of silk ties, some garish, some at- tractive. Then we headed just a few blocks away to J&R, the computer and electronic superstore at Park Row (between Beekman and Ann Streets), to scope out cameras. I priced some wireless software, but we all decided to order online, in order not to burden ourselves with more packages for the rest of the day.

Beers and Parks

Now quite hungry, we wandered a few blocks north to Duane and West Broadway where we found Blaue Gans, a festive and relaxed Austrian and German restaurant decorated by a hundred or more colorful art posters. The sunlight poured through the windows onto tall glasses of slightly cloudy lemon-colored hefe  weisse, a wheat beer we used to wash down our starters of brown bread and burenwurst.

For lunch we shared a superb Wiener schnitzel with lingonberries, as well as a salty goulash with buttery spaetzle. Although we were full, our curiosity led us to the dessert menu and we were thrilled to discover the best apple strudel any of us had ever tasted: crispy crust and perfectly cooked apples, not too cloyingly sweet or runny.

We decided to walk off our lunch along the promenade at Hudson River Park. Then, we ducked into the World Financial Center Winter Garden and had a look at the palm trees and the display Recovery to Renewal, showcasing plans for the Freedom Tower and 9/11 memorial at the World Trade Center site. We admired models of the winning designs and debated their superiority to the alternatives, also shown, a discussion rendered more relevant by the fact that cost overruns are now forcing a rethinking of the memorial design.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage

Further south on the river path we came to the Museum of Jewish Heritage at 36 Battery Place. From the outside I had always thought this museum was quite small, but today I realized the rotunda is connected to the new and much larger Morgenthau wing that juts from the waterfront off into Battery Park City. If you want to see the whole exhibit you should schedule at least three hours.

The Museum aims to honor the victims of the Holocaust by celebrating their lives, and affirming today’s vibrant world-wide Jewish community. Everything in the museum is unusually personal, often bearing the original owner’s name and country of origin. I was particularly struck by the dented trumpet of Louis Bannet, “the Dutch Louis Armstrong,” who managed to survive for three years as a musician at the Auschwitz- Birkenau concentration camp.

Above the instrument hangs a quote from Bannet: “This wonderful horn kept me alive.” On the lower level is a large exhibit on Jewish culture, illustrated by videos of synagogues around the world and religious, ceremonial, and everyday objects. A modern Sukkah, or harvest shelter, painted by Aryeh Steinberger with scenes of Budapest and Israel, caught my eye with its rainbow of colors.

The City’s Nightlife

For dinner we wanted to eat outside with a water view. Our options included Steamers Landing, Liberty View, and Southwest NY up near the World Financial Center, but we settled on the elegant Gigino at 20 Battery Place. We sat under a brick archway on the terrace with a direct view of the Statue of Liberty.

As we sipped Italian wine, the sun was setting over the skyscrapers of Jersey City and an enormous cruise ship floated by like an iceberg silently headed out to sea. It dwarfed the little orange Staten Island Ferry as they crossed paths far in the eastern reach of the harbor. I eyed the osso buco di pollo, but decided instead on the duck breast over arugula with pineapple carpaccio.

A day in New York also needs nightlife. We saw singles sitting outside flirting at Merchants NY (90 Washington Street). On Greenwich Street, women in stylish designer clothes were chatting intensely at Yaffa’s outdoor tables (353 Greenwich). We decided we wanted music, so cut east to Leonard Street, near Church, to the Knitting Factory, which has three different performance spaces. It used to offer jazz and experimental music, but now tends to cater to a younger rock and pop audience.

The street outside was lined with young men with shaved heads and Mohawks. We were carded. The band in the main room tonight was the Horrorpops, led by an upbeat young woman in a strapless dress who enthusiastically swayed with an electric double bass. The whole room “pogo-ed” up and down very happily and we joined in until our feet hurt and it was time to go home.

Also read: An Architectural Historian’s Perspective of NYC

An Architectural Historian’s Perspective of NYC

A shot of the downtown Manhattan skyline, with the Freedom Tower at the center of the shot.

Lower Manhattan boasts new work by the world’s foremost landscape designers, as well as timeless vistas of New York Harbor

Published July 1, 2006

By Francis Morrone

Image courtesy of oldmn via stock.adobe.com.

Lower Manhattan was once notorious for its lack of parks and greenery. As the oldest part of New York, it was built up when most of Manhattan Island was still countryside and wilderness. Who needed open spaces when all around was one big open space? As the years went by, the countryside was developed, Downtown’s buildings grew ever larger and its streets ever more congested.

Fortunately for us, the twenty-first century is shaping up as a golden age for open space Downtown. From government-funded baseball fields to the re-landscaped riverside public plaza at privately owned 55 Water Street, a multitude of scenic options beckon those who wish to catch some fresh air and sunshine before or after a meeting. The recently opened 7 World Trade Center, new home of The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy), is an excellent starting point for a stroll through some of Downtown’s finest outdoor attractions.

Battery Park City and Hudson River Park

Two blocks to the west is Battery Park City, a mixed-use complex under development since the 1980s on Hudson River landfill. (Please bear in mind that this is “Battery Park City,” while “Battery Park” refers to a separate park, which we will visit later, at the very bottom of Manhattan Island.)

It’s a good thing Battery Park City wasn’t built in the 1970s, as was first planned. It would have looked like any gigantic, sterile high-rise housing complex built under the ill-conceived “urban renewal” rubric. In the years of waiting, architects and planners changed their approach to development. They started to stress recreating the charms of traditional cityscapes, with buildings of modulated scale and warm materials along real streets, together with ample outdoor space for recreation and relaxation.

Combining Utility and Aesthetics

New Yorkers are much taken with the waterfront parks and two-mile-long esplanades of Battery Park City, which anchor the southern end of Hudson River Park (and will eventually stretch unbroken all the way north to 59th Street). As you enter from Vesey Street, turn right to see Battery Park City’s northernmost jewel. Nelson A. Rockefeller Park is named for the New York governor (and U.S. vice president) who first conceived of Battery Park City.

This park was designed by a leading landscape architecture firm, Carr, Lynch, Hack & Sandell, as a park for active sports and recreation that was also pleasing to look at—a rare combination. At the northern end a children’s playground sports whimsical bronze sculptures by the popular Tom Otterness. “In this smallish utopia,” says one critic, “safety regs and aesthetics can coexist.” One also sees a gazebo inspired by Greek temples, designed with great care by Demetri Porphyrios, one of the leading classical architects in the world today. Broad lawns slope westward. The park is used for basketball, volleyball, frisbee, and handball, as well as running and biking.

The World Financial Center

Continuing south, one comes to the World Financial Center office complex, at the heart of Battery Park City. Headquarters of American Express, Merrill Lynch, and Dow Jones cluster around the greenhouse-like Winter Garden. Within is a space as big as Grand Central Terminal’s concourse. With its sixteen giant palm trees, benches, and sunlight, the Winter Garden is by day a reposeful haven for office workers.

On nights and weekends, it offers year-round cultural programming and performances. Before September 11, 2001, the grand stairway at the east end led to an aerial bridge over West Street to Six World Trade Center. Not only was that bridge destroyed on that terrible day, so too was the Winter Garden itself. That it was rebuilt and reopened within a year was indescribably heartening to New Yorkers. Today the east end has been redesigned as a viewing platform from which one may look directly down upon Ground Zero.

To the west outside the Winter Garden is World Financial Center Plaza, looking out on a boat basin and the Hudson River. Designed by landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg with artists Scott Burton and Siah Armajani, the plaza overflows with cafe tables and a variety of seating for eating take-out food, making it one of Manhattan’s most pleasant spots for weekday lunch in fine weather.

Beyond Battery Park City

Farther south, beyond Battery Park City’s streets of apartment houses opening off the esplanade, is the unusual South Cove Park, a collaboration of architect Stanton Eckstut, landscape architect Susan Child, and environmental artist Mary Miss. It is in part a recreation of the original 17th- and 18th-century Hudson River shoreline, replete with the rocks, plants, and wooden piers that one might have then encountered. In addition, the artful assemblage of rocks and exotic plantings screens a rear section of the park that is deliciously secluded. It in turn leads south to a curious, freestanding, elevated platform of steel, shaped like the crown of Lady Liberty. From this platform, one can look directly out at the iconic statue itself.

Continue south, past the Museum of Jewish Heritage, which opened in 1997 and was expanded in 2003. Within the museum is an outdoor, contemplative “Garden of Stones” by artist Andy Goldsworthy. Beyond the museum is the southernmost of Battery Park City’s parks, Robert F. Wagner, Jr. Park, named for a three-term mayor of New York. Here are expansive lawns that on warm afternoons are as dense with sunbathers as any spot in Manhattan.

Set among the lawns are granite-rimmed “container gardens” of lavish floral displays created by renowned public gardener Lynden B. Miller, whose designs evoke the shimmering foliage in French impressionist paintings. The large arched structure at the southeast corner of the park has, in its base, a cafe and rest rooms. Climb to the top for splendid views of the gardens, the sunbathers, and the water.

Battery Park

Behind the Wagner Park structure one may follow the sidewalk to the south and east to enter Battery Park. Over the last couple of years, this city park has undergone extensive renovations overseen by the Battery Park Conservancy, a group dedicated to reestablishing it as one of the outdoor treasures of New York. The park has several interesting features. Leading from its northeast entrance (off of Broadway) on a southwest diagonal to the park center is a formal, tree- and bench-lined allée of a kind one seldom sees in New York, where our landscape architecture stems from the British 18th- and 19th-century romantic tradition that hated straight lines.

The French, on the other hand, loved their “Cartesian” straightaways, as did New York master builder Robert Moses when he redesigned Battery Park after World War II. The allée leads to a circular stone structure, Castle Clinton, that was built as a fort just before the War of 1812 to protect the city from a British attack (which never came). When built, the fort was on an island in the water; later the space between it and the Manhattan shoreline was filled in. The fort served for many years as the New York Aquarium, now located in Brooklyn’s Coney Island. Today Castle Clinton serves as the ticket booth for trips to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.

Also at the southwest end of the allée stands the great bronze sphere that sculptor Fritz Koenig designed for the plaza of the World Trade Center in the 1970s. Though badly dam- aged in the terrorist attacks, the sculpture nonetheless was reinstalled in Battery Park, serving as an unofficial 9/11 memo- rial until the memorial park on the World Trade Center site is completed.

The Southern Tip of the Park

At the southern tip of the park, along the water, sprout new fascinating gardens designed by the Dutch gardener Piet Oudolf. Oudolf eschews commonly used flowers like roses and favors a wild and natural look incorporating flowering plants such as sea holly, anemones, and astilbes, as well as wild grasses.

Along the sea wall, a long ribbon of flora is a “Garden of Remembrance”—a tribute to the survivors of 9/11 and a place of solace for all who seek renewal. Wider swirling flower beds surround sitting areas that also include snack kiosks. Oudolf is as famous as a rock star in his native country and, with works by him, Miller, and Child, this stroll showcases some of today’s foremost landscape gardening talent.

Continuing south and east round the waterfront railings, one comes to an austere octet of large granite slabs inscribed with names. Dedicated by President Kennedy in 1963 (his last public speech in New York), the East Coast Memorial honors U.S. servicemen who perished in the Atlantic during World War II.

From Worst to Best

The northeast corner of Battery Park leads to Broadway and Battery Place. A block west on Battery Place, at Greenwich Street, is a noisy, polluting, ugly set of facilities built in the 1950s to serve the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel: a big ventilation building, a big garage, and a great gash of car access ramps repellent to any walker. That’s why the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the New York City Department of City Planning, working with some of the nation’s best designers, plan a complete overhaul of this southernmost part of Greenwich Street—once, unbelievably, the ritziest residential thoroughfare in the city.

Among much else, the gash will be decked over—much as the train yards to the north of Grand Central Terminal were once decked over to create lower Park Avenue. Atop the deck will go a new, two-and-a-half-acre park that promises to transform one of downtown’s worst spots into one of its best. The timetable is uncertain, but will soon come into focus as construction proceeds on other big downtown projects such as the World Trade Center site and the Fulton transit hub.

Up Broadway to City Hall

Broadway is New York’s main street. At its foot stands the majestic edifice of the former U.S. Custom House that in turn faces the city’s oldest public open space, Bowling Green. The compact oval, once the focal point of a neighborhood of mansions and now loomed over by several of the city’s handsomest old office buildings, got its name from the games of lawn bowling that were played on the spot in Dutch colonial times.

In 1776 a mob of New Yorkers, fired with revolutionary zeal, broke through a protective iron fence to topple the equestrian statue of King George III that stood in the center of the green. Our city’s most remarkable relic of revolutionary times is that iron fence, the very one still surrounding Bowling Green. This park itself has also had a recent overhaul that has added to its charm.

Walk north on Broadway to Wall Street. To one’s left is Trinity Church. The church of today, a lovely Gothic revival edifice from the 1840s, is the third Trinity Church on this site. One may step inside at any time during the day for quiet meditation. The surrounding churchyard, with its picturesque gravestones, dates to the 17th century. On the southern end a granite obelisk marks the burial site of Alexander Hamilton.

St. Paul’s Chapel and City Hall Park

Farther north, at Fulton Street, is St. Paul’s Chapel and its surrounding churchyard. Built in the 1760s, it is Manhattan’s oldest standing church. St. Paul’s miraculously survived the Great Fire of 1776, was George Washington’s church when he resided in New York as the first president of the United States, and miraculously survived the destruction of the World Trade Center, which stood directly across Church Street.

In the days after September 11, 2001, the chapel served as a place where rescue workers could take a break, get something to eat, and listen to soothing live chamber music. The chapel then became the magnet for impromptu outpourings of grief and love in the form of banners, signs, flowers, and objects of all kinds, many of them now preserved in exhibits throughout the chapel interior.

City Hall Park is diagonally across Broadway from St. Paul’s. At the park’s north end is the beautiful Louis XV-style City Hall completed in 1811. Prior to its construction, this park was known as the Commons. In the 1990s it was extensively refurbished, with new pavings, plantings, and benches, and the return of an extravagant Victorian 1870s fountain, original to the park, which had spent sixty years in Crotona Park in the Bronx. In addition to being a fine place to relax, the park is a good spot for politician-spotting, as it is a frequent backdrop to Mayor Bloomberg’s photo ops.

After taking in these sights, one may walk west on Vesey Street to the starting point at 7 World Trade Center. Central Park may be more famous, but Downtown’s open spaces are among the most varied and interesting urban spots anywhere.

Also read: Archeological Discoveries Shed Light on Old New York

About the Author

Francis Morrone, an art critic and architectural historian, is the author of five books including An Architectural Guidebook to Brooklyn (Gibbs Smith, 2001).

The Anthropic View of the Universe

A colorful shot of the galaxy.

According to Leonard Susskind, the universe we know might be just one crude but carefully balanced case among a host of different universes, each with its own physical laws.

Published June 9, 2006

By Sheri Fink, MD, PhD

Sponsored by: The New York Academy of Sciences and Little, Brown & Co.

Image courtesy of Maximusdn via stock.adobe.com.

Stanford University professor Leonard Susskind has had an illustrious career in theoretical physics. He is known as a “father of string theory”—the idea that everything, at its most minute scale, is made of combinations of vibrating strings. String theory began as a search for a unified theory capable of reconciling quantum field theory with general relativity, but has expanded in recent years and has caused a major shift in theoretical and experimental physics.

In his recent popular science book, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, Susskind addresses some startling recent developments in string theory, and on April 10, 2006 he took the podium as a part of the Academy’s Readers & Writers series to discuss why these ideas are making such waves in the physics community.

Susskind’s book deals with the meeting of two controversial ideas. One is the anthropic principle, which suggests that our corner of the universe is perfectly tailored to our existence—otherwise we would not be here to observe it. The other is string theory’s prediction of the “multiverse,” a giant, diverse universe with a rich landscape of “pocket universes,” each governed by its own laws of physics. The expansive possibilities of the multiverse provide a plausible explanation for the unlikely perfection of our own, relatively small, universe.

The Not-So-Elegant Universe

The array of elementary particles that determine the properties of atoms has grown in recent years. Electrons, photons, quarks, gluons, Z bosons, and neutrinos are just a few of the many elementary particles thought to exist. “It’s a rather large list,” said Susskind. “It’s hardly the kind of list that a minimalist would have invented.”

There is no particular reason known for the existence of these particles. Some of them, however, are requisites for life. For example, atoms need to contain electrons, which are held in the nucleus by the force of photons jumping back and forth from the electron to the nucleus. The nucleus, in turn, is held together by gluons jumping back and forth between quarks.

“To me the whole thing does not look like the product of an elegant mathematical theory,” said Susskind. “It doesn’t look like beautiful numbers like e or pi or √2; instead, it looks like a Rube Goldberg machine! It looks like something that was designed by a rather poor engineer for some purpose. While it works, it’s hardly elegant.”

Aside from particles, the existence of certain forces has allowed life to evolve. Some seem finely tuned such that if the values were slightly bigger, life could not exist. Take gravity, for example—a force 42 orders of magnitude weaker than the electrical force. If it were even one order of magnitude stronger, “the universe would expand and recontract in a much shorter time than it would take for evolution,” said Susskind. “Instead of being filled with galaxies, the universe would be filled with black holes. Even if an earth did form, it would not last very long. It would just have been sucked right into a black hole.”

The Puzzle of the Cosmological Constant

The weakness of gravity, the existence of just the right motley set of particles to form the building blocks of life—are these facts enough to cause physicists to abandon their quest for mathematical elegance and shift to embrace the anthropic principle? No, said Susskind, there is still the possibility that they arose by chance. “But there is one fine-tuning of nature, one accident, one conspiracy we might call it, which is so extraordinary that nobody thinks it’s an accident.”

Even the greatest of scientists have been prone to second-guessing. Einstein was not immune. He posited the existence of the “cosmological constant”—the energy density of empty space, which, if positive, gives rise to a repulsive pressure that counteracts gravity. While he later abandoned the concept, it did not disappear completely. “This is a case of Pandora’s Box,” said Susskind—once the lid had been raised on the idea, scientists could never explain it away.

The cosmological constant is also known as vacuum energy. In quantum theory, the continuous agitation of a vacuum creates energy, leading to the outward pressure that the cosmological constant describes. However, when physicists combine the theory of elementary particles with the theory of gravity and use quantum field theory to calculate the cosmological constant, they derive a gigantic value; if it existed, such a large amount of energy would conflict with astronomical observations and would be disastrous. “It would be enough not only to shatter the earth, it would be enough to shatter every atom and molecule,” said Susskind. “Every nucleus, every quark would go flying apart.”

More Mystery Around the Cosmological Constant

Nothing in known physics explains why the cosmological constant is not the size that quantum field theory predicts it to be. Physicists at first surmised that other particles and constants contributing to the calculation of vacuum energy must cancel out the large value, leading to a cosmological constant that is exactly zero.

In 1987, physicist Steven Weinberg proposed another idea. Physicists believe that gravity forced the bland early universe to differentiate into planets and galaxies by squeezing and contracting slightly denser regions of matter and sucking mass out of less dense regions. Weinberg showed that the cosmological constant must be extremely small—on the order of 10−120 units (joules/cm3)—to prevent a repulsive force from counteracting this process.

“A cosmological constant even ten times bigger than this would have been destructive and deadly to life,” says Susskind. “It would have prevented the creation of the home of life—stars, galaxies, and especially planets.” Using the anthropic principle, Weinberg made a prediction. While life depends on the cosmological constant being smaller than 10−120 units, the value does not need to be very much smaller than that. So, he predicted, if the value of the cosmological constant is determined by the existence of life, then its 121st digit will be a number other than zero.

Several years ago, the 121st decimal place of the cosmological constant was measured through cosmological observation; its value appears to be 2 instead of 0. To Weinberg and to Susskind, this confirmation of the earlier prediction is the best support for the anthropic contention that “some features of our own existence determine certain things about the laws of nature.”

Explaining the Appearance of Design

What else, besides an intelligent designer, could have tailored the universe to fit the needs of planets and people, including unlikely features that defy current mathematical prediction? Susskind’s answer lies in string theory—a mathematical model of nature to which many, if not most, physicists now subscribe.

String theory makes sense in 10 dimensions of space, not our usual three. The extra six-dimensional spaces are known as Calabi Yau or CY spaces. “These spaces control all the properties of the world in a large scale,” said Susskind.

“The (elementary) particles have to be able to fit into these spaces. If they fit, then they’re allowable particles. If they don’t, they’re not allowable. All the laws of nature and string theory are controlled by these features of these CY spaces.” There are about a million different CY spaces, or “manifolds.” Each one can be decorated with “little lines of flux that can wind around them in many, many ways,” said Susskind. “When you start counting up all the possible ways the CY manifolds can be decorated with these fluxes, the numbers are humongous.”

Thus, string theory allows for a landscape of possible universes “so rich that it appears there may be as many as 10500 different environments that can be described.” The number of possibilities is so large that it can compensate for the incredible unlikelihood of the cosmological constant being so exceptionally small.

Do these alternate universes actually exist outside of the realm of possibility, or is the universe everywhere the same as it is here, in all the places we can measure it? Nobody knows the answer yet. What is known is that the universe is far wider than the 10 billion light years across that it was once assumed to be.

Inflationary Cosmology

The school of inflationary cosmology holds that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate. An exponential and perpetual expansion would be possible if, as the universe expanded, new bits of space formed to fill interstitial spaces. The theory of eternal inflation suggests that as the universe grows, bubbles of alternate types of space appear.

“If a bubble is too small, it will melt back into the environment,” said Susskind. “If it happens to grow a little bit, it will then start to really expand.” Within that expanding bubble, more bubbles will form. “It creates this enormous diversity of different properties and in some tiny, tiny fraction of it, perhaps a comfortable little green neighborhood appears where life can exist. That’s where we are.”

Because physics has long posited a world controlled by elegant mathematics, the anthropic principle and the multiverse represent a fundamental shift in the way that many physicists and cosmologists view their fields. In fact, Susskind’s theories have drawn the ire of some prominent scientists. Stanford professor Burton Richter, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics, has accused Susskind of having “given up” on the effort to find a theory that explains all the properties of fundamental particles and forces, bringing to an end the “reductionist voyage that has taken physics so far.”

Creationism

Religious figures, on the other hand, abhor Susskind’s views because they contradict the idea that God created the universe. The Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christof Schonborn, wrote in The New York Times that the multiverse hypothesis was “invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science.”

Susskind, for his part, seems to relish the controversy. “Paradigm shifts, serious ones, raise people’s anger, raise people’s passion. They are threatening,” he said. “The anger, the passion, the fighting spirit that goes with these questions is extremely intense.” The fact that Susskind’s ideas have aroused such emotion reflects the great attention that is being paid to this new way of looking at the universe.

About the Speaker

Leonard Susskind, PhD, grew up in the South Bronx, where he worked as a plumber and steam fitter during his early adult years. As an engineering student at the City College of New York, he discovered that physics was more to his liking than either plumbing or engineering. He later earned a PhD in theoretical physics at Cornell University.

Susskind has been a professor of physics at the Belfer Graduate School in New York City and at the Tel Aviv University in Israel. He has also been the Felix Bloch Professor in theoretical physics at Stanford University since 1978. During the past forty years he has made contributions to every area of theoretical physics, including quantum optics, elementary-particle physics, condensed-matter physics, cosmology, and gravitation.

In 1969 Susskind and Yoichiro Nambu independently discovered string theory. Later on, Susskind developed the theory of quark confinement (why quarks are stuck inside the nucleus and can never escape), the theory of baryogenesis (why the universe is full of matter but no antimatter), the Principle of Black Hole Complementarity, the Holographic Principle, and numerous other concepts of modern physics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Also read: Cosmic Chemistry and the Origin of Life

About the Author

Sheri Fink is the author of War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival (PublicAffairs, 2003). Fink obtained her MD and PhD in neurosciences at Stanford University and now, based in New York, writes about medicine, public health, and science for a range of publications.

Strategies from Successful Women Scientists

A gloved hand handles a blue liquid in a beaker in a science lab.

Author and former scientist Ellen Daniell discussed how participating in a small problem-solving group can lead to success in academic and other careers.

Published May 25, 2006

By Leslie Knowlton

Sponsored by: The New York Academy of Sciences and Yale University Press.

Image courtesy of sutlafk via stock.adobe.com.

Almost 30 years ago, Ellen Daniell, then an assistant professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley and the first woman in her department, joined a small bimonthly group of faculty, staff, and postdocs formed to reduce isolation and foster solutions to professional and other problems, including gender equity issues.

Today she credits the seven-member “Group” of high-achieving women, several of whom are well-known scientists, for seeing her through several difficult transitions, including being denied tenure at Berkeley, establishing herself in another career in business, and retiring from that to be a writer and enjoy her own interests.

In her book, Every Other Thursday: Stories and Strategies from Successful Women Scientists, Daniell tells the story of her experience with Group in an effort to help others form similar alliances. In her March 14, 2006, talk at The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy), she explained the effect of Group on her life, saying, “I strongly believe I have made more satisfactory decisions and choices because I’ve talked out the possibilities, as well as the frequently apparent impossibilities, with Group.”

She also recommends this kind of organization to others not only in academia but also in a variety of professions, activities, and stages of life.

Common Concerns

Reading from her book’s preface, Daniell gave representative perceptions expressed by Group members, ingrained ideas and feelings that inhibit many women in many professions from achieving their full potential. They include

  • Maybe having a fulfilling personal life is incompatible with a successful career.
  • I feel like I’m an emotional cafeteria responding to what others want.
  • I feel responsible for everything but have no power to change anything.

Women also have trouble with recognizing personal achievements and taking credit for them. “It starts with forgiving mistakes … and moves from self-acceptance to self-appreciation and then to celebrating accomplishments.” This process requires developing a sense of entitlement. Group jokes that sometimes you have to say, “Maybe I AM the Queen of Sheba.”

After they learn to give themselves credit, it is important for women to take credit publicly when credit is due to them. This is important because in most pursuits, advancement and job satisfaction are affected by the image one presents to others. “We’ve worked long and hard on this while in the phase of careers when struggling to succeed and be recognized, and then found another puzzle—that of how to act as successful as we really are, without being dismissive of others.”

Another problem seen frequently in Group has been being able to make choices with a belief in the right to make them. “Change is stressful, no matter how desirable it is, and many support groups function primarily to help members through times of change and turmoil,” Daniell said. Some efforts are of the “egging-on” variety, giving encouragement to get on with a choice that’s already made. But most of the focus is on helping each other recognize when there are choices that can be made and figuring out how to make them.

How Group Works

Meetings are held evenings at homes of Group members, with the host of each session acting as facilitator. Group keeps a fixed bimonthly schedule, regardless of who can attend a particular session, and follows a set framework to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to speak, work, and listen.

First, the facilitator asks who wants to work on particular issues and how much time each person needs. The facilitator keeps track of the time requested and when that time is up, she asks if the person working wants more time. “Thinking about what you want to discuss and how long you think it might take both to describe the issue and to get feedback that you want is pretty good practice for assessing and asking for what you want outside of Group,” said Daniell.

While members, after becoming very good friends, now discuss personal issues, such as retirement, health, grandchildren, and aging parents, professional concerns still predominate. Members listen very closely, saying nothing until the speaker requests feedback, at which time other members give an honest appraisal of both the issue presented and solutions to it. “We try very hard not to make nice and not to say what it is that we think the person working wants to hear,” Daniell explained.

Eliminating Negative Self Perceptions

To help identify problems, Group raises “pig alerts” in response to certain kinds of statements. A pig is a “negative self-perception, an external judgment that you lay upon yourself and then use to defeat practically anything that you’re trying to accomplish.” They are frequently identified by the words always or never or by personal characteristics, such as being lazy or disorganized. Members attempt to replace pigs with a positive view.

For example, instead of saying, “I have so many papers lined up to be written because I’m lazy or disorganized,” one might change one’s perception by saying, “There are papers lined up because I’ve gotten so many interesting research results from my hard work.” This allows the person with the pig to overcome the negative characterization and address the problem.

After identifying a problem, Group creates a strategy to solve it. Members often make a contract, which includes a concise formulation of objectives, either immediate or long-range, to solve a problem or reach a goal. The contract should be “doable,” recognizing that it is often necessary to break large problems into the many small ones of which they are composed. A benefit of contracts is that often an apparently new issue may relate back to a previous contract. “By using this mode of thinking about something in terms of a contract,” Daniell advised, “you may find connections among various issues that at first didn’t seem connected.”

After work is done, members have refreshments and give each other strokes, positive statements about someone else. Stroke etiquette requires that in receiving a stroke one try to absorb and believe it, or just say you believe it. “It’s easier to give strokes than to get them at first, but once you get into it, they are really quite delicious.”

The Membership

Daniell noted that her book was written with the review and approval of all members, including Christine Guthrie, Carol Gross, Judith Klinman, Mimi Koehl, Suzanne McKee, and Helen Wittmer, each of whom let her struggles and fears be presented to motivate and help others. Women frequently cite isolation and marginalization as reasons that they avoid or get out of science and engineering at major research institutions, she said. They are also underrepresented relative to men in top faculty positions. Daniell sees her book as a way to help those women realize their potential.

Concluding her talk, Daniell said Group helps “alleviate the sense that you’re swimming with sharks and does so in an atmosphere of complete confidentiality—a place where everybody is truly on your side.” Along with practical support comes compassion and humor. In her experience with Group, pig images have become humorous symbols of struggles. All members have collections of ceramic, wood, and glass pigs displayed in their homes, along with pig bookends, plush stuffed pigs, pig earrings, and pig socks. “In contrast to the mental pigs that threaten our well-being, these little tangible pigs are a benign species that remind us to treat ourselves with compassion.”

About the Speaker

Ellen Daniell is a writer and consultant. She graduated from Swarthmore College in 1969 with high honors in chemistry and received her PhD, also in chemistry, from the University of California, San Diego. She was assistant professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and has held management positions in human resources and patent licensing in the biotechnology industry.

Also read: Supporting the NeXXt Generation of STEM

The Art of Sci-Fi: 80 Years of Movie Posters

An illustration of an astronaut shooting a ray gun.

A new art exhibit combines art and science as it explores 80 years of science fiction movie posters. See the styles of different artists from Argentina and the United States to Germany and Japan.

Published May 1, 2006

By Fred Moreno

Image courtesy of Update: The New York Academy of Sciences Magazine, May/June 2006 via Posteritati.

Ever since science gave birth to the cinema more than a century ago, the link between the two has often been intimate and exciting – and sometimes rather disturbing. Sort of like the relationship between Dr. Frankenstein and his creation. Countless movies have featured aspects of science and technology, both credible (or almost so) and fantastic (mostly). Just as fanciful is the varied collection of absurdly mad or strangely saintly scientist “heroes” that have populated the movies over the years.

Numerous studies have shown that movies are a major source for what the general public thinks about science and scientists. And just as the films themselves have influenced societal perceptions, so too have their movie posters. With its images of heroic sacrifice, spaceships, other worlds, and scientifically engendered creatures, the movie poster has produced some of the most iconic visual signposts of our time.

Coming Attractions! 80 Years of Cinematic Science: Movie Posters from Around the World, an exhibition in The New York Academy of Sciences’ (the Academy’s) Gallery of Art & Science through June 30, brings together posters for more than 25 movies, including examples from such countries as Argentina, Germany, Japan, Russia, Great Britain, Italy, Poland, and the U.S., among others.

The exhibit includes a British poster for the rerelease of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis; one from France for the American eco-drama, Soylent Green; and an Argentinean poster for the Italian film Mission Stardust. Also represented will be posters for such true-to-life dramas as Inherit the Wind, the thinly disguised rendition of the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial,” and a poster for the glossy American tribute to the medical profession, Not as a Stranger.

Visual Lures

All works in the exhibition come from Posteritati Movie Posters, a New York gallery specializing in international movie art. It has more than 12,000 posters in its collection. The works are used courtesy of Posteritati owner Sam Sarowitz.

“Some of the world’s most talented illustrators, painters, art directors, and graphic designers have produced movie posters,” said Tony Stinkmetal, a filmmaker and screenwriter who is serving as curator for the Academy exhibition. “They have used their fertile imaginations to give us a visual impression of both today’s world and tomorrow’s possibilities while, at the same time, luring us into the theater.”

Mr. Stinkmetal noted that the posters in the exhibition reflected a variety of styles and designs, but that similarities in approach were discernible in works from the same country.

“American and British posters tend to be more direct and traditional, such as the masked surgeon in the Not as a Stranger poster,” he said. “On the other hand, more abstract and conceptual treatments are typical of Eastern European illustrators, such as the cosmic bodywork in the poster for Innerspace of Polish artist Andrzej Pagowski or the stark metallic automaton in the Czech poster for The Terminator.”

Also read: From Imagination to Reality: Art and Science Fiction

The Road to Discovery in 20th Century Science

A black and white photo of a 20th century female scientist reviewing paperwork.

For author Alan Lightman, reading landmark scientific papers provides a window into the lives and intellectual adventures of the men and women behind the 20th century’s most influential ideas.

Published April 14, 2006

By Karen Hopkin

Otto Loewi. Image courtesy of Institute of Pharmacology, Graz, CC-BY-SA-3.0-DE, via Wikimedia Commons.

The key experiment came to him in a dream. It was 1921 and Otto Loewi, a German pharmacologist, was looking for a way to determine how nerve cells communicate. Was the signal conveyed from one neuron to the next—or from a neuron to a muscle or organ—electrical? Or was it chemical?

The scientist awoke, jotted down his musings on a slip of paper, and went back to sleep. “It occurred to me at six o’clock in the morning that during the night I had written down something most important,” he later recalled, “but I was unable to decipher the scrawl.”

From Dream to Nobel Prize

Fortunately, the idea returned the following night. That time, Loewi must have written more legibly, because he was able to carry out his Nobel Prize-winning experiment that day. He dissected the hearts from two frogs and placed them, still beating, into separate dishes of saline solution. Loewi then stimulated the vagus nerve he’d left attached to the first heart. As expected, the heart slowed its beating.

Now here’s the elegant part. Loewi took some of the solution bathing the first heart and poured it over the second heart, from which he’d stripped the vagus nerve. This heart, too, slowed, proving that the message transmitted by the vagus nerve was chemical in nature. The compound, which Loewi called “Vagusstuff,” turned out to be acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter found widely throughout the nervous system.

For Loewi, the experience suggested that “we should sometimes trust a sudden intuition without too much skepticism.” And for Alan Lightman, physicist and author of The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th Century Science, the story illustrates how scientists think, and reminds us that science is a process of exploration carried out by human beings.

Hearing the Scientist’s Voice

Over the years, Lightman has come to realize that scientists rarely read original research papers, perhaps because they view science as being all about the bottom line. “If science is an explanation of the way that the world behaves, then you don’t need to know how you got to that understanding,” says Lightman. “You just need to know the facts, ma’am. And that’s all that matters.”

That view, although valid, is limited, Lightman told an audience at The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) on January 31, 2006. “You can read a textbook on the theory of relativity and you can understand relativity,” he says. “But you don’t understand the mind of Einstein. You don’t hear his voice.”

To remedy that loss, Lightman assembled The Discoveries, a handpicked collection of 22 of the greatest ideas and experiments in 20th century science. Lightman asked his scientist pals—physicists, chemists, astronomers, biologists—for recommendations and then winnowed down the resulting list to the two dozen stories he presents in the book. For each discovery—from Werner Heisenberg’s enumeration of the uncertainty principle to Barbara McClintock’s revelation that genes can jump from one chromosome to another—Lightman provides a guided tour to the original paper along with an essay on the life and times of the scientists involved.

Measuring the Distance of Stars

Henrietta Leavitt. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Among Lightman’s favorite tales is that of Henrietta Leavitt’s development of a method for measuring the distance to the stars. Leavitt was hired in the late 1800s by Edward Pickering, director of the Harvard College Observatory, to pore over photographic plates and calculate the positions and brightness of thousands of stars. As one of the cadre of women that formed Pickering’s low-paid battalion of human “computers,” Leavitt was expected to “work, not think,” says Lightman. “But some of the women disobeyed him, and Henrietta Leavitt was one of those.”

Through painstaking measurements, Leavitt uncovered a relationship between the periodicity and luminosity of the Cepheids, a group of stars that brighten and dim in predictable cycles that vary between three and 50 days. Leavitt found that the longer a star’s period, the greater its intrinsic luminosity, and that knowing how bright a star is allows one to calculate how far away from Earth it lies. Thus the Cepheids, which are scattered throughout the night sky, could serve as cosmic beacons by which astronomers could gauge distances in space.

Leavitt’s work laid the foundation for many of the astronomical discoveries that would follow, including Hubble’s determination that the universe is expanding. Yet the scientist remained uncelebrated in her lifetime. “Even today there are very few people who’ve heard of her,” notes Lightman. In 1925, a representative of the Swedish Academy of Sciences wrote to Leavitt to propose nominating her for a Nobel Prize. Unfortunately, Leavitt had been dead for three years by then, rendering her ineligible for the honor.

Passion and Obsession

The most satisfying stories, Lightman says, are the ones in which the researchers’ personalities drive the discovery. Take, for example, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson’s detection of the cosmic background radiation—the persistent hum left over from the Big Bang. “Both men were incredibly meticulous experimentalists,” says Lightman. “If they hadn’t been so anal compulsive about the details then they wouldn’t have been so certain that this residual hiss in their antenna was something worth investigating.”

But, he adds, “they were so fastidious, so picky, and so careful” that they methodically chased after the source of the noise. And after they eliminated every possible thing they could think of, Penzias and Wilson concluded “this was something worth writing about,” says Lightman. Indeed, their almost comically understated paper, entitled “A measurement of excess antenna temperature at 4080 Mc/s,” formed the basis of their 1978 Nobel Prize.

In the end, Lightman himself discovered a thing or two in putting together the book. Although he did not uncover any particular scientific temperament—scientists’ personalities run the regular human gamut—Lightman did find that, regardless of the field in which they worked or how they came to their discoveries, all the scientists he profiled “were really passionate about what they do. All loved to solve puzzles. They all loved to challenge authority. All were independent thinkers. And all were really obsessed with science.”

And though all didn’t necessarily dream about their work, they did labor tirelessly to solve their favorite puzzles, leaving behind them tales that are certainly worth telling.

About the Speaker

Alan Lightman, PhD, is adjunct professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a novelist, essayist, physicist, and lecturer, Lightman is committed to making science accessible and understandable to a wide audience. His writings cover a range of topics dealing with science and the humanities, particularly the relationship between science, art, and literature. Lightman’s short fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous popular magazines and publications, including Discover, Harper’s, Nature, and The New Yorker.

He is the author of four novels, including the international bestseller Einstein’s Dreams, which was runner-up for the 1994 PEN New England/Boston Globe Winship Award, has been translated into 30 languages, and is the basis for more than two dozen independent theatrical and musical productions. In addition to his novels, Lightman is the author of several science books, drawing on his research in the areas of gravitational theory, accretion disks, stellar dynamics, radiative processes, and relativistic plasmas.

Lightman holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology, and an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Bowdoin College. He served a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University before becoming assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard University and research scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In 1989 Lightman joined the faculty of MIT, and in 1995 was appointed John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities, a position he resigned in 2001 to allow more time for his writing.

For his contributions to physics, Lightman was elected fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, both in 1989. In 1996 he was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and that same year, was recipient of the American Institute of Physics Andrew Gemant Award for linking science to the humanities.

Resolving Evolution’s Greatest Paradox

A black and white photo of an elder Charles Darwin.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection has never been very good at explaining novelty or complexity in living organisms. The new theory of “facilitated variation,” however, promises to fill in the gaps.

Published March 3, 2006

By Robin Marantz Henig

Sponsored by: The New York Academy of Sciences and Yale University Press.

Charles Darwin in 1868. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

“I came neither to praise Darwin nor to bury him,” Marc Kirschner, founder and chair of the department of systems biology at Harvard Medical School, told an overflow crowd on January 25, 2006, as part of the Readers and Writers lecture series at The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy). Kirschner, coauthor with John Gerhart of The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma, said that his goal, in both the lecture and the book, was to achieve a middle ground, a way “to challenge Darwin in the name of buttressing the theory of evolution.”

Kirschner and Gerhart, a professor in the graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, have long been plagued by a paradox in Darwin’s theory of natural selection, one that creationists and Intelligent Design proponents have used to cast doubt upon evolution as a whole: How it is that extraordinary complexity could have evolved from the accretion of tiny, supposedly random variations?

The answer, at least in part, is that the changes are not as random as they seem. “Even though science has shown that genetic variation is random,” Kirschner told his audience, “phenotypic variation cannot be random—because you can only change what already exists.” You never see a vertebrate with six limbs, he said; some mechanism limits the number of limbs to four, and the number of digits to five. “Yet these limits are hardly very constraining,” Kirschner noted, “generating everything from a whale’s flipper to Artur Rubenstein’s hand.”

The Theory of Facilitated Variation

The constraints on phenotypic variation, “rather than being limiting, greatly enable evolutionary change,” Kirschner said. In his talk, he related how he and Gerhart developed a new theory to explain complexity, which they call the theory of facilitated variation.

As background, Kirschner began by describing the two different paths that biology was taking around the time of Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species: the fascination with variation that led to the zoos and natural history museums of the late 19th and early 20th century; and the simultaneous realization, with the growth of cell biology and embryology, that much of life is characterized not by differences, but by similarities.

“So where does this leave us?” asked Kirschner. “Two paths in science, one extolling the variety of life, the other obsessed with its universal properties. Herein lies a paradox: how can this immense variation arise from this universality?”

This is where facilitated variation comes in. Kirschner used an analogy borrowed from the kindergarten classroom to explain how his and Gerhart’s theory differs from evolutionary theory up to this point. Traditionally, he said, biologists have compared life to a lump of modeling clay, “incredibly plastic, and able—due to the accrual of many small changes—to go in any direction.” But this is the wrong metaphor, he said. In truth, life is more like a bunch of Lego blocks. As with Legos, the basic building blocks of biology are rigid and quite similar to one another, but “there is a large variety of structures that can be assembled from similar parts.”

If You Give a Monkey a Typewriter

Another way of looking at it, Kirschner said, is to try to imagine trying to get a monkey to write the word “MONKEY.” You could do so by giving the monkey a pen and paper, but that would never work—all you’d get would be “random lines and scratches.” But if you gave him a typewriter, then you might be getting somewhere.

It would take a very long time (Kirschner calculated about ten years, typing at the rate of one keystroke per second round-the-clock), but the monkey would eventually produce all six letters in the right order, because the typewriter restricts the results of his physical actions—always letters instead of scribble-scrabble. “Letters have at least a chance to be useful,” Kirschner said. “Most pen scratches to do not.”

If, instead of a typewriter, the monkey was pounding on a computer keyboard programmed with an automatic spelling corrector, the time it would take for him to type out the word “MONKEY” would be reduced dramatically, from ten years to probably less than a single day. “More constraint equals more useful outcomes,” Kirschner said.

The point is that something similar seems to be at work in nature. Facilitated variation works like that computer spell-checker, leading to “a coordination of conserved processes that are highly adaptive and facile in situations that require change.”

Consider the evolution of limbs. Among vertebrates, Kirschner said, limbs can be “as varied as the wings of an albatross, the hooves of an antelope, and the claws of a tiger.” How could such a vast array have evolved from small and random variations? By having a certain logic to the variations, said Kirschner, something “quite ingenious, simple, and forgiving.”

Gene Feedback Inhibition and Tissue Morphogenesis

Complexity in multicellular organisms—changes and refinements in beak shape, pigmentation, jaw structure, limb formation—can be explained, he said, by forces involved in “changing the time and extent of a process rather than creating a new process.” The forces are those that have been uncovered recently in the field of molecular biology, such as gene feedback inhibition, and the field of developmental biology, such as tissue morphogenesis. They help account for the surprising fact that the human genome isn’t much bigger than the genome of a frog or a fruit fly. The vast differences among these organisms are accounted for not by number of genes, he said, but by how the genes are expressed.

“In multicellular organisms, the same few genes must be reused in many different contexts,” said Kirschner. “The organism has liberated itself from a requirement that each gene has to operate in the same way in each anatomical region.” What this means for evolutionary theory is that even though the variations found in genes can be tiny, they can lead to big differences in the phenotype—and big differences in the appearance and behavior of complex organisms.

Understanding Embryonic Development

Kirschner said that the modern understanding of embryonic development can help explain how facilitated variation works. “Embryonic development is replete with cell types that have multiple options and ranges of options, such as the neural crest, that can form cartilage, nerve, and pigment,” he said. “Thus, changes in beak shape, pigmentation, or jaw structure can easily occur by changing the time and extent of a process rather than creating a new process.” In other words, the gene itself doesn’t have to be different; what changes is the timing or location of the gene’s expression.

The theory of facilitated variation, as outlined in The Plausibility of Life, is a new way of synthesizing the first two pillars of Darwin’s theory of evolution, natural selection and genetics, Kirschner said. He quoted a colleague who once told him that in the future, the only way to teach evolution would be through the explanatory lens of facilitated variation. “Any other approach,” Kirschner’s colleague told him, “would seem like an arbitrary selection of ‘Just-So Stories.'”

About the Speaker

Marc Kirschner, PhD, is founding chair of the department of systems biology at Harvard Medical School. His laboratory investigates three broad, diverse areas: regulation of the cell cycle, the role of cytoskeleton in cell morphogenesis, and mechanisms of establishing the basic vertebrate body plan.

Kirschner was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London and a Foreign Member of the Academia Europaea in 1999. He was the 2001 recipient of the William C. Rose Award, presented by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. He received a 2001 International Award by the Gairdner Foundation of Toronto. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has served on the advisory committee to the director of the National Institutes of Health and as president of the American Society for Cell Biology.

Kirschner arrived at Harvard Medical School in 1993 from the University of California, San Francisco, where he had served on the faculty as professor for fifteen years. He graduated from Northwestern University and received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Following postdoctoral research at Berkeley and at the University of Oxford, he was appointed an assistant professor at Princeton University.

He and John Gerhart are coauthors of Cells, Embryos, and Evolution and The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma.

Also read: From the Annals Archive: How Darwin Upended the World

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