The world is witnessing the emergence of new nuclear states that have acquired or are pursuing nuclear capabilities. These new nuclear actors pose significant threats to global security as they challenge the existing nuclear order and nonproliferation regime.

Lassina Zerbo, Rose E. Gottemoeller, Siegfried Hecker, and Robert Rosner participated in a discussion on the prospects for ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and the challenges presented by nuclear testing.

Projects in Science, Engineering, and Technology seek to strengthen the capacity of science and engineering to improve the human condition. This goal has never been more important. Global challenges increasingly require collaboration across disciplinary, professional, and national boundaries, while advances in information processing and transmission raise issues for both the management of scientific and technical information and for the ability of individuals and institutions to assimilate and act on new discoveries.

"Much of the biological variability I encountered in my childhood stays vividly with me now and very much forms part of my ongoing research drive."

America is the most punitive nation in the world: we incarcerate the largest number of individuals and at the highest rate. American criminal justice policies of such punitive excess and unequal protection under the law have been shaped by and sustain racial inequality and exclusion and add to the harsh conditions of American poverty.

On a gray London morning in January, I walked past familiar markers of institutional gravity on my way to the Royal Society. Stone facades. Heavy doors. Plaques engraved with names that have outlived the controversies of their eras. It is easy, in places like this, to slip into a kind of historical reverence that feels comforting, even anesthetizing.

Select Prizes and Awards to Members

“The bottom line is that despite the profound global threat of pandemics, there remains no global health mechanism to force parties to act in accordance with global health interests,” write Paul Wise and Michele Barry in the Fall 2017 issue of Daedalus.

A challenge facing the United States is how to combine the good and bad of our history into shared narratives. Telling Our Nation’s Story, one of the recommendations of the Academy’s Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, calls for communities to work toward a common narrative by engaging in honest conversations about the past in order to reckon with what divides us while uncovering what unites us. Participants in this virtual program brought a regional approach to a conversation across the Research Triangle.

At a program hosted by the Academy’s New Haven Program Committee, Linda Greenhouse (New York Times columnist and Senior Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School) discussed the United States Supreme Court’s transformational year and the challenges to Roe v. Wade.

David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks discuss how inequalities in race, gender, and income continue to divide American society. Through the 2000–2001 Stated Meeting series on inequalities, the Academy seeks to reevaluate what has been achieved in the past quarter-century and assess the challenges that await us in the future.

Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy hosted a Civic Scientist Lecture on the Academy's recent report.

The Academy’s record of distinction in Science, Engineering, and Technology dates to its founding mission “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” Rather than generate new scientific research, the role of the Academy has been uniquely interdisciplinary, bridging the social sciences and arts with the physical sciences to support a national understanding, belief, and trust in science and discovery. Perhaps no better example of this can be found than in the mid-1800s when the Academy hosted hotly contested debates about a new scientific theory–the theory of evolution.

The Global Security and International Affairs program area draws on the expertise of policy-makers, practitioners, and scholars to foster knowledge and inform innovative and more substantial policies that address crucial issues affecting the global community. Projects underway in this area engage with pressing strategic, development, and moral questions that underpin relations among people, communities, and states worldwide. Each initiative embraces a broad conception of security as the interaction among human, national, and global security imperatives. Project recommendations move beyond the idea of security as the absence of war toward higher aspirations of collective peace, development, and justice.

Reflections on the American Academy’s work on New Dilemmas in Ethics, Technology, and War and its engagement with international organizations

On the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary, their gathering embodies the principles of the Declaration of Independence about working together across differences to find common ground—in this case, quite literally.