News Release 04-030

NSF to host Washington Academy of Sciences forum March 20-21, 2004

March 10, 2004

This material is available primarily for archival purposes. Telephone numbers or other contact information may be out of date; please see current contact information at media contacts.

ARLINGTON, Va.—Although Washington, D.C. is the nation's undisputed political powerhouse, the area's rich endowment of scientific and technological brainpower is not so often recognized. In fact, the area is home to over a dozen Nobel Laureates, several top-ranked research universities and premiere government research facilities, as well as the headquarters of prestigious science and engineering societies.

The Washington Academy of Sciences (WAS), an umbrella organization for a collection of Washington-area science and engineering groups, will hold a "Capital Science" conference on Mar. 20-21, 2004, at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va., to showcase the breadth of intellectual capital in the nation's capital.

Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel P. Langley were among several noted scientists who founded WAS over 100 years ago to encourage the advancement of science and "to conduct, endow, or assist investigation in any department of science." Today, the group's array of affiliate societies includes everyone from aviators to zoologists and even paint technologists.

"We believe that showcasing the intellectual muscle of the area will help provide the support needed to continue to build and keep the United States at the forefront of scientific achievement," said Peg Kay, WAS president-elect.

The "Capital Science" program includes special presentations by Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Marburger, former NSF Director Rita Colwell and Nobel Laureate William Phillips, who won the prize for his work in low-temperature atomic physics. Dozens of topic sessions are scheduled, including:

• A tribute to Ilya Prigogine, by various speakers. Prigogine won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1977 for demonstrating that a new form of ordered structures, which he termed ''dissipative structures," can exist under such conditions that are far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Dissipative structures exist only in conjunction with their environment. Description of these structures led to many fundamental discoveries and applications and has also been used to describe phenomena in social systems. Prigogine wrote several books including Order out of Chaos and The End of Certainty, Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature. He died in 2003.



• A talk by George Washington University professor, Amitai Etzioni, extending ideas in his latest book, My Brother's Keeper: A Memoir and a Message. Etzioni launched the communitarian movement in the 1990's and he is the Founder and Director of George Washington University's Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies. Like most of his writing, the book engages two major themes: rights and responsibilities, and how we get a new moral infrastructure.



• The Economics of the Moon, by Klaus P. Heiss, High Frontier, Inc. The ability to deploy vast distributed-aperture observatories across the electromagnetic spectrum on the Moon looking toward Earth will open a new era in observing the Earth's land and oceans. Heiss will discuss applications and benefits, including crop measurements, monitoring and forecasting, with 'feedbacks' to crop distribution and production decisions.



• A Paradigm Shift?, by Harold Morowitz, George Mason University. The recent discovery from DNA sequences that genes are transferred horizontally among prokaryotes refocuses the already difficult question of what we mean by a "species" and may extend to eukaryotes as well. We are simultaneously discovering that the core of the chart of intermediary metabolism is very old, ubiquitous and extremely robust to change, which allows stability in a fluctuating noisy genetic background. The stability forces a reexamination of the dogma of molecular biology and asks in which way the information flows. This possible shift of paradigm has implications for evolutionary theory, biogenesis, Lamarkianism and our general philosophic view of biology.

Press may attend the conference at no charge. For the complete program see: http://www.washacadsci.org/Website/schedule.htm. The luncheon on Mar. 20 is sold out.

-NSF-

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Media Contacts
Leslie Fink, NSF, (703) 292-5395, email: lfink@nsf.gov
Peg Kay, Washington Academy of Sciences, (703) 536-0990, email: pk@vertechinc.com

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