Gerald Weissmann elected to the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the National Academy of Italy in Rome

Gerald Weissmann, member of the Ellison Medical Foundation Scientific Advisory Board, has been elected to the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the National Academy of Italy in Rome http://www.lincei.it . It is the oldest secular academy in the world (1603), listing Galileo as one of its earliest members. Of the five foreign members elected to the academy this year the only other Anglophone is Sir Frank Kermode, of Cambridge.

The inauguration, with low-keyed academic pomp, will be held at the Palazzo Corsini in Rome on November 7-8, 2002. It's not quite the social occasion provided in Paris or Stockholm - to put it mildly - but the past list of foreign members includes such luminaries as Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Woodrow Wilson, Albert Einstein and T.S. Eliot. The recognition is for biomedical research on the cellular basis of inflammation ( signal transduction in neutrophil activation ), the co-discovery of liposomes (artificial cell membranes that can deliver enzymes, drugs, and genes to cells) and for seven books of essays, which the San Francisco Examiner praised as having “contributed elegantly to the revival of the popular scientific essay as a staple of contemporary literary _expression."