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273  JL:
David A. Hamburg: President-Elect of AAAS.
 Science, Vol. 221, July 29, 1983. 431-432


     David Alan Hamburg is the president-elect of the AAAS, scheduled
to assume office as president at the annual meeting in May 1984.
Hardly a newcomer to association affairs, he has been a member of AAAS
for many years and was elected to its Board of Directors in August
1980.

      Hamburg was born on 1 October 1925 in Evansville, Indiana, and
attended the University of Indiana and its medical school, receiving
his M.D. in 1947.  He interned at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago,
and did residency work there and at Yale's department of psychiatry.
He did military service as a psychiatrist at Brooke Army Hospital in
San Antonio, Texas, and began his research career at the Walter Reed
Army Institute of Medical Research in Washington, D.C.  Hamburg
returned to Michael Reese Hospital in 1953.  In 1958 he joined the
National Institute of Mental Health as chief of the Adult Psychiatry
Branch, and in 1961 he was called to the chair of psychiatry at 
Stanford University School of Medicine, where he remained for almost 15
years.  He had become familiar with Stanford from a tour at the Center
for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences in 1957-1958, a cycle which
he repeated a decade later.  During this period he established himself
as an investigator of biobehavioral process, his work ranging from the
endocrine effects of stress in the human of the biosocial roots of
aggression studied in higher primates in their natural habitat.  The
breadth of his perspectives is signaled by his research focus in
psychoendocrinology at the same time that he was a candidate and then
a graduate in the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute.

     At Stanford he established a new department of psychiatry, 
distinguished for its breadth of research in the biology of mental 
illness, and was founding participant in many all-university programs, 
such as the curriculum, in human biology.  During the same interval he 
founded and cochaired a program in science, technology, and society at 
the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences.Scores of students,
fellows, and faculty have testified to the inspirational role Hamburg
played in the crystallization and critical orientation of their
careers in every aspect of behavioral science.

     Hamburg's next career was signaled by his call to the presidency
of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences
for a 5-year term beginning in 1975.  In this position , he had a major
role in the mobilization of national analytical and critical talent in
many aspects of health policy, ranging from research strategy and 
investment to international technical assistance and the economics of
the health care professions in the United States.  His rare combination
of deep insight together with an ability to harmonize the views
of others--long recognized by his colleagues at Stanford--became well
known on the national scene: to some extent in the public eye, but far
more within every branch of government and its supporting intellectual
structure.

     In 1980 Hamburg moved to Harvard, where he founded a new Division
of Health Policy Research and Education, a more academically focused
extension of the work he initiated at the IOM. Just after he completed
that effort, with assurance that the division would endure, he was
invited to his present position, effective January 1983, as president
of the Carnegie Corporation, with headquarters in New York City.

     He has been married since 1951 to Beatrix Hamburg, who is a 
professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine
and was formerly director of studies for the President's Commission on
Mental Health.  They have a son, Eric, who is a public interest lawyer
in California , and a daughter, Margaret, who recently graduated from
Harvard Medical School, has done neurochemical research at NIMH, and
is now a medical intern at New York Hospital (Cornell).

     From 1950 to the mid-1960's Hamburg was a pioneering investigator
on the relation of hormonal homeostasis to stress and emotional 
stability in the human.  Studies in this genre require not only skillful
laboratory technique and interpersonal rapport, but the anticipation
and management of many delicate ethical and medical problems.  For the
most part, his subjects were people subjected to unavoidable external
stress, such as severe illness in a child, and these experiments 
cannot be conducted unless the investigator is furnishing an ample
measure of emotional support during the study.  That is, the experiment
must be therapeutically beneficial to the subjects themselves.
His work integrated studies of naturally occurring stressful 
experience with laboratory analysis, and did much to clarify the 
interrelations of brain and endocrine function.  In addition, he opened
up the field of human coping behavior under stress.  In the course of 
these inquiries, he began to explore the evolutionary origins of human 
stress responses in studies conducted mainly at a primate field research
station at Gombe, Tanzania.

     At a later period, Hamburg lent enormous energies to the 
stimulation of research programs among his colleagues in the psychiatry 
department at Stanford, to a degree that is scarcely reflected by the
appearance of his name in authorship of publications.  Those authors
include his colleagues Barchas, Dement, Moos, Adams, Yalom, Ochberg,
Brodie, Noble, Berger, Levine, and many other central figures in
scientific research and leadership in psychiatry today.  In this 
fashion, much of Hamburg's career has been devoted to the building of a
scientific base for a psychiatry that links the biological and 
behavioral sciences.

     The work at Gombe also furnished exemplary field laboratory 
experience for groups of Stanford undergraduates enrolled in the human
biology curriculum.  This program was designed to fill the gap between
social studies (politics, economics, sociology, history) predicated
on human nature unexamined as a biological phenomenon, and  the
concentration on the chemistry and physiology of the cell that is 
the mainstream of experimental biology as a discipline.  These students
also served as willing hands for the unremitting watch tours required
in the field studies on wild primates.

     On 19 May 1975 this idyll of inquiry was shattered by a raid on
the camp by a guerilla group of rebels who were encamped across Lake
Tanganyika, in Zaire.  After an agony of uncertainty, the word came
out that the students were unharmed, but were being held for ransom
and other demands.  The rebels sought to replenish their weapons for
their campaign against the Kinshasa government.  Any effort to ransom
the students would run afoul of the most delicate political 
interests.  In the abstract, "Never negotiate with terrorists" is a 
doctrine that is categorically articulated by responsible governments.
In the concrete, the lives of those young students were at stake; and
while many others vacillated over the moral and political dilemma,
Hamburg wasted no time in flying to Gombe to seek life-saving solutions.
It must be left to imagination to visualize the subtlety of the
interventions needed to negotiate the students' safe release over a
period of several months, in the course of which the cross-cutting 
interests of the governments of Zaire, Tanzania, and the United States
were engaged.

     Hamburg is not eager to publicize this story, but to leave it out
is to miss a life-vectoring motivation of his further career.  No one
could be more reflective about the ironic mirroring of primate and
human behavior in that experience.  Perhaps no one could have been so
effective, unless grounded in just that reflection, in threading 
successfully through the complexities of violently conflicting interests.
His immersion in realities of hatred, violence, ignorance, disease,
and poverty strengthened his conviction of the need to apply 
compassionate intelligence to human problems.

     After moving to the IOM, Hamburg devoted his energies to policy
concerns in health and to the potential of using science and technology
to help meet social needs.  During his terms as president, the
organization developed several major thrusts: expanding the scope of
the health sciences, strengthening disease prevention, finding ways
of meeting the health needs of the underserved, examining relations
between health and behavior, and tackling heavy burdens of disease in
developing nations.

     At Harvard he drew together the faculties of the John F. Kennedy
School, and the School of Public Health, providing a broad-based 
approach to the examination of policy issues in the health sciences and
their relations to disease prevention, mental illness, the health of
children and youth, and the special needs of the elderly.  For his 
debut as president of Carnegie Corporation in New York, in early 1983,
he lectured on "Man and Nature" at the American Museum of Natural 
History.  In that series he brought together many of his interests in an
evolutionary perspective on contemporary problems, especially in
health and in international conflict. His theme was the rapid, pervasive
and unprecedented world transformation of modern times, and he
dealt with needed institutional responses along two lines: (i) the
strengthening of institutional capability for objective analysis of
critical issues based on a broad foundation of knowledge and experience
and (ii) the reorienting of education to make full use of the
sciences over their entire range for intellectual satisfaction, 
occupational productivity, and social problem-solving.

     Since moving to Carnegie, he has given much attention to conflict
between groups and to the overriding problem of nuclear war.  In a
re-capitulation of his lectures and of his thematic goals for the
Carnegie Foundation, he states:

     "Contemporary power, in a moment of evolutionary time, suddenly
dwarfs all of history.  This power is, above all, significant in 
relation to the pervasive tendency toward conflict in the history of our
species.  We have not had time to develop effective institutions to
resolve large-scale conflict.  Mass slaughter in modern times has
occurred all over the world--not just long ago, but yesterday and
today.  No continent is exempt, no people too civilized, no nation 
beyond susceptibility to this social disease.  Education in all its
forms--from family through schools to mass media--must increasingly
come to appreciate and convey the facts of an exceedingly complex,
pluralistic, crowded, interdependent, and fascinating world.

     Human societies have a pervasive tendency to make distinctions
between good and bad people, between heroes and villains, between 
in-groups and out-groups.  The human species is one in which individuals
and groups easily learn to blame others for whatever difficulties
exist.  But in the present nuclear predicament, blaming is at best
useless and worst likely counterproductive.  The scientific community
is the closest approximation our species has so far constructed of a
single, interdependent, mutually respectful worldwide family.  It does
not solve problems by blaming others but rather by undertaking objective
analysis.  So too the spirit of science must be brought to bear on
this crucial problem of nuclear conflict.

     It is the great task of contemporary humans to invent solutions
to problems that are largely unprecedented in the history of the 
species.  Science can help.  But to be truly effective in meeting these
novel human predicaments, science too must transcend its traditional
boundaries and achieve a level of mutual understanding, innovation,
and cooperation among its disciplines rarely achieved in the past.  "
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