By RICHARD RAY
UNC-CH News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- Dr. Clyde A. Hutchison III, Kenan professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Hutchison was one of 146 scholars, scientists and artists nationwide chosen in this year's election, which took place April 17. He joins two centuries of great minds in the academy, founded during the Revolutionary War by political and intellectual leaders including John Adams and John Hancock to "cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people."

The academy honors four divisions of intellectual excellence: physical sciences, biological sciences, social arts and sciences and humanities and fine arts. There are 4,000 members nationwide, including 160 Nobel laureates and 65 Pulitzer Prize winners. Hutchison also joins more than two dozen living fellows from UNC-CH.

Originally from New York City and raised in Chicago, Hutchison earned an undergraduate degree from Yale in 1960 and a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology in 1968. He has taught at UNC-CH since 1968, minus two years as a visiting scientist to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, and a recent stint at the Institute for Genomic Research -- better known as TIGR -- in Rockville, Md. TIGR made headlines recently by announcing that a collaboration to sequence the human genome was ahead of schedule.

Hutchison's research has led to many breakthroughs in genetic research and two Nobel Prizes, although the prizes went to other scientists. In 1993, for example, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored Dr. Michael Smith of the University of British Columbia for his and Hutchison's method of splicing foreign components into genetic molecules.

In 1995, Hutchison was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors a U.S. scientist or engineer can receive. Later that year, Gov. James B. Hunt presented him the North Carolina Award, the state's highest civilian honor.

"This was a surprise," Hutchison said of his most recent election. "I've been joking to everyone that I was disappointed to get elected because of work in science and not on the basis of my piano playing. It pleases me to be in the same club as Wynton Marsalis. The academy includes not just scientists, but all of the country's great painters and musicians."

Hutchison will be inducted formally at an Oct. 3 ceremony at the House of the Academy in Cambridge, Mass.

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