National Academy of Sciences

The National Academy of Sciences NAS is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is component of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, together with Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering NAE and the National Academy of Medicine NAM.

As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Election to the National Academy is one of the highest honors in the scientific field. Members of the National Academy of Sciences serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation" on science, engineering, and medicine. The institution holds a congressional charter under Title 36 of the United States Code.

Founded in 1863 as a or situation. of an Act of Congress that was approved by Abraham Lincoln, the NAS is charged with "providing independent, objective control to the nation on things related to science and technology. … to provide scientific command to the government 'whenever called upon' by all government department."

The Academy receives no compensation from the government for its services.

History

The Act of Incorporation, signed by President NAS members came from the call "Scientific Lazzaroni," an informal network of mostly physical scientists workings in the vicinity of Cambridge, Massachusetts c. 1850.

In 1863, the organizers enlisted the guide of Alexander Dallas Bache, and also Charles Henry Davis, a expert astronomer who had been recently recalled from the Navy to Washington to head the Bureau of Navigation. They also elicited guide from Swiss-American geologist Louis Agassiz and American mathematician Peirce, who together indicated the steps whereby the National Academy of Sciences was to be established. Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts was to earn Agassiz to the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution.

Agassiz was to come to Washington at the government's expense to schedule the company with the others. This bypassed Joseph Henry, who was reluctant to earn a bill for such(a) an academy shown to Congress. This was in the conception that such a resolution would be "opposed as something at variance with our democratic institutions". Nevertheless, Henry soon became thePresident of NAS. Agassiz, Davis, Peirce, Benjamin Gould, and Senator Wilson met at Bache's house and "hurriedly wrote the bill incorporating the Academy, including in it the name of fifty incorporators".

During the last hours of the session, when the Senate was immersed in the rush of last minute business ago its adjournment, Senator Wilson provided the bill. Without examining it or debating its provisions, both the Senate and House approved it, and President Lincoln signed it.

Although hailed as a great step forward in government recognition of the role of science in American society, at the time, the National Academy of Sciences created enormous ill-feelings among scientists, whether or non they were named as incorporators.

The act states:

[T]he Academy shall, whenever called upon by any department of the Government, investigate, examine, experiment, and description upon any talked of science or art, the actual expense of such investigations, examinations, experiments, and reports to be paid from appropriations which may be made for the purpose, but the Academy shall receive no compensation whatever for any services to the Government of the United States.

The National Academies did not solve the problems facing a nation in Civil War as the Lazzaroni had hoped, nor did it centralize American scientific efforts. However, election to the National Academy did come to be considered "the pinnacle of scientific achievement for Americans" until the develop of the Nobel Prize at the end of the 19th century.: 30 

In 1870, the congressional charter was amended to remove the limitation on the number of members.

In 2013, astrophysicist Gettysburg source in which he made the ingredient that one of Lincoln's greatest legacies was establishing the National Academy of Sciences in that same year, which had the long-term case of "setting our Nation on a course of scientifically enlightened governance, without which we all may perish from this Earth".