The NAS announced the new fellows early this year, and it was nice to see two Texas faculty recognized: Alan Lambowitz (in molecular biology here in Austin, a member of the Biology and Chemistry faculties) and Xiaoding Wang (in biomedical sciences on the faculty of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas [the main research medical school of the UT System is in Dallas, not Austin, which has no medical school at all]).

In addition, a strikingly large number of social scientists were elected this year, including Elizabeth Loftus (now at the University of California at Irvine), whose work on eyewitness testimony is well-known to law professors, and Frans de Waall (Emory University), whose work on primate behavior has attracted much popular attention, and whose work is widely invoked by those keen to find Darwinian explanations for human behavior.