1925
The Research Corporation Award was approved by the Board at its January 1925 meeting. The Research Corporation Award was not a grant, but was instead designed to recognize outstanding achievements in science by “one who has not undertaken the utilization of his research work for his own pecuniary benefit, whether this has been due to voluntary action on his part, to the circumstances of his employment, or to scientific or professional affiliations.” At its inception, it was one of very few recognitions of scientific achievement. The award consisted of a plaque molded in white Bakelite (designed by sculptor Herbert Adams who also designed the bronze doors at the Library of Congress and the Vanderbilt memorial bronze doors at St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York), an honorarium that ranged over the course of the award from $2,500 to $10,000, and a banquet in honor of the recipient.
The first awardee was John Abel, an American biochemist who held the first chair in pharmacology at Johns Hopkins from 1893 until his retirement in 1932. Abel’s work was largely directed toward the isolation and characterization of hormones. In 1897, he isolated a physiologically active substance from the adrenal glands which he named epinephrine (also known as adrenalin). By 1912, Abel had formulated the idea of an artificial kidney, and in 1914 he isolated amino acids from the blood for the first time. In 1926, he announced that he had crystallized insulin though this work was not generally accepted until the mid 1930s. After his retirement Abel devoted his energies to a study of the tetanus toxin.
Abel was followed by such luminaries as Andrew Ellicott Douglass; Ernest Lawrence, Vannevar Bush, Francis Crick and James D. Watson, among others. In a 1949 correspondence, Bush recalled “I have never forgotten the fact that when I received the award myself, it was one of the most pleasant things that had been given me, particularly because of the graceful way in which it was done. Incidentally, I was in Ernest Lawrence’s office just a day or two ago and sitting at his desk I found his award plaque before me.”
Ten to 12 people were nominated each year and an advisory group, made up of scientists and administrators in the sciences, voted for their choice. The 1949 advisory group included: Merle Tuve of the Carnegie Institution; L.A. DuBridge, president of CalTech; E.O. Lawrence of University of California; Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institution; Hugh S. Taylor of Princeton; Bruno Rossi of MIT; Percy Bridgman of Harvard; and Henry Eyring of University of Utah.
The awards were made sporadically—and were postponed during World War II—until 1947 when they became an annual event. They were terminated in 1969.
A complete listing of awardees:
1925 John J. Abel “for his work in connection with ductless glands, animal tissues and fluids.”
1929 Bergen Davis “for his contributions to experimental physics, including the Davis Double X-ray Spectrometer, his demonstration of the Raman effect and the extension of the Compton effect to the scattering of X-rays by bound orbital electrons” and Werner Heisenberg “for his contributions of matrix mechanics, for his exposition of the principle of indeterminance and other brilliant studies in his field.”
1930 Andrew Ellicott Douglass “for his studies of tree rings with reference to variations in solar radiation” and Ernst Antevs “for his studies of sedimentary rocks and clays with reference to variation in clay bands and their relation to variations of solar radiation.”
1937 Ernest O. Lawrence “for his work in nuclear physics” and Percy W. Bridgman “for his pioneer work on a wide variety of physical phenomena under extremely high pressure.”
1938 Vannever Bush “for his fruitful and stimulative work with colleagues in the development of powerful and rapid methods of computation” and Hugh S. Taylor “for his work in the field of catalysis.”
1947 Lee Du Bridge “for his scientific contributions in the field of radar and for his outstanding administration of the wartime microwave laboratory” and Merle Tuve “for his scientific contributions in making possible the proximity fuze (sic) and his outstanding administration of the scientific, engineering and production groups that equipped the Armed Forces with this device.”
1948 Henry Eyring “for his outstanding contributions to the field of chemical kinetics and rate processes” and Bruno Rossi “for his outstanding contributions in the fields of cosmic radiation and properties of mesons.”
1949 Edward C. Kendall “for work in the field of steroid chemistry which culminated in 1948 with the synthesis of cortisone.”
1950 Edwin M. McMillan as “co-discoverer of Neptunium and Plutonium, for outstanding contributions in the field of nuclear physics.”
1951 Willard F. Libby “for developing the technique and apparatus of determining the ages or acheological items of vegetable or animal origin by measuring their residual radioactivities.”
1952 Harold S. Black “specifically for his invention and development of the negative feedback system.”
1953 George E. Uhlenbeck and Samuel A. Goudsmit “for their discovery of electron spin.”
1954 Willis E. Lamb Jr. “in recognition of major contributions in the field of atomic structure and quantum electrodynamics.”
1955 Robert B. Woodward “for his major achievements in chemical synthesis and elucidation of chemical structures.”
1956 Claude E. Shannon “for his pioneering researches on the mathematical foundations of information theory.”
1957 Charles Hard Townes “in recognition of his distinguished researches in microwave spectroscopy which have added to the understanding of the fundamentals of molecular structures.”
1958 Chien-Shiung Wu “in recognition of her crucial contributions to the major advances during the last ten years in understanding beta-decay and the weak interactions.”
1959 Melvin Calvin “in recognition of his contributions in the field of biochemistry, especially for investigations on the mechanism of photosynthesis.”
1960 Rudolf L. Mössbauer “for his discovery of the recoilless resonance absorption in nuclei, now widely known as the Mössbauer effect.”
1961 Francis H.C. Crick and James D. Watson for their discovery of the structure of DNA
1962 Bernd T. Matthias “for his discovery of new and unexpected superconductors and ferroelectrics and for his stimulating investigations which are providing important challenges for modern solid state theory.”
1963 Paul J. Cohen “for his revolutionary studies in the foundations of mathematics, culminating in his proof of the independence of the continuum hypothesis and of the axiom of choice, initiating a whole series of advances in the field” and Heisuke Hironaka “for his monumental and profound work, liquidating the classical problem of algebraic geometry on the resolution of singularities of an algebraic manifold, and opening the way to progress in an old field.”
1964 William M. Fairbank “for his elegant and precise performance of several crucial experiments of fundamental importance in the field of very low temperature physics…”
1965 Neil Bartlett “for his discovery of compounds of noble gases.”
1966 Marshall W. Nirenberg “for his pioneering work in the discovery of the mechanism through which the code in genetic material determines the proteins synthesized by a cell.”
1967 Val L. Fitch and James W. Cronin “for their demonstration that the combined symmetry of parity and of charge conjugation is not, as had been previously believed, a universal symmetry law of nature.”
1968 Murray Gell-Mann for “contributions of highest significance to the theory of elementary particles and, specifically, for his successful prediction of the Omega Minus particle.”
1969 Brian D. Josephson for “his fundamental work on the theory of electrons in superconducting materials and specifically for his discovery of the macroscopic interference between the quantum fields of two superconductors.”