Yale Scientists Elected to National Academy of Sciences

Steven Hebert, M.D., C.N.H. Long Professor and Chairman of Cellular & Molecular Physiology at Yale School of Medicine, and Michael Donoghue, G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale, were elected today to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

Election to membership in the Academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a U.S. scientist or engineer. The NAS today elected 72 new members and 18 foreign associates from 14 countries in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Yale now has 64 NAS members.

Hebert, the C.N.H. Long Professor, is responsible for discoveries that have had a fundamental impact on understanding of the regulation of salt balance by the kidney. His group identified a critical channel that regulates potassium excretion by the kidney. Loss–of–function mutations in this channel cause Bartter’s Syndrome Type II, an inherited disorder that results in loss of sodium and potassium in the urine. Hebert’s group has the only viable mouse model of this disease.

Hebert’s group identified two sodium chloride transporters that are exclusively expressed in kidneys and that are the target sites for the most important clinically used diuretics. Changing the activities of these salt transporters alters salt and water balance and thereby controls blood pressure. His group also identified a calcium–sensing receptor that contributes to the maintenance of body calcium balance. This discovery led to development of a medication, Amgen’s Sensipar, for treatment of both primary and secondary hyperparathyroidism. The latter affects most of the more than one million patients worldwide with end–stage kidney disease.

Donoghue is the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, professor of geology and geophysics, and director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. His research revolves around understanding phylogeny with a focus on plant diversity and evolution. He has a long–term interest in Viburnum and Dipsacales, and in the origin and early evolution of flowering plants.

Donoghue also has worked on a number of conceptual and theoretical issues, specifically the notion of species, patterns in the distribution of homoplasy, character evolution and comparative methods, phylogenetic nomenclature, and combining data from various sources. He has published on other conceptual issues as well, including methods for assessing the direction of evolution, the analysis of large data sets, and identifying shifts in diversification rate. He helped build and still coordinates development of a relational database of phylogenetic knowledge called TreeBASE.

The election to the NAS was held today during the business session of the 142nd annual meeting of the Academy. Those elected bring the total number of active members to 1,976.

The NAS is a private organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare. It was established in 1863 by a congressional act of incorporation signed by Abraham Lincoln that calls on the Academy to act as an official adviser to the federal government, upon request, in any matter of science or technology.