Shouldice Award recipient elected to National Academy of Sciences lished last year in the journal Human Nature, Alice Dreger, a Guggenheim Fellow and a professor of medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University, said of the charges: “The truth was quite the opposite.” “I was stunned by the phone call I received from my Anthropology colleagues who are in the National Academy of Sciences, who informed me of my election to the Academy,” Chagnon said. “This is a great honor for any researcher, especially one whose work has provoked a great deal of controversy as mine has done since 1968 because of an article I published in the journal Science. In the end, my defense of the scientific method won.” Chagnon’s defense is spelled out in his forthcoming book, Noble Savages (Simon & Schuster, January 2013). “My election to the National Academy of Sciences is a kind of victory for those of us who regard science and its methods as the most certain route to understanding the world around us -- including and especially our own behavior,” Chagnon added. In February, Chagnon was appointed an adjunct research scientist at the University of Michigan, where he will be putting the results of his life’s research efforts into an archive that will eventually be made available to academics at major research universities. Chagnon spent his first year in college, 1957-58, at Michigan Tech’s Sault Branch. After transferring to the University of Michigan, where he planned to study physics, he took an anthropology class that changed his career path. He has won many awards for his 21 documentary films and is the author of more than 100 publications. He has held faculty positions at the University of Michigan, Pennsylvania State University, Northwestern University, in addition to UCSB. He has also been a visiting professor at Cambridge University. Napoleon Chagnon and Prof. Gary Johnson Former Sault Tech student and 1999 Shouldice Award recipient Napoleon Chagnon Ph.D., an emeritus professor of anthropology at University of California-Santa Barbara, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Chagnon and a fellow UC-Santa Barbara professor were among 84 new members from the U.S., and 21 foreign associates from 15 countries, elected to the Academy in May in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Election to the NAS is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a U.S. scientist or engineer. Those elected in May bring the total number of active members to 2,152, and the number of foreign associates to 430. The new members will be inducted into the academy in April 2013 at the group’s annual meeting in Washington, DC. Michigan native Chagnon, who started at UCSB in 1984 and contin6 ued there until he retired from teaching in 1999, now lives in Traverse City, Mich. Much of his 35 years of research was devoted to extensive studies of the Yanomamö Indians, a tribe located on the border of Venezuela and Brazil. In one of Chagnon’s early books, “Yanomamö: The Fierce People,” the author described a society permeated by violent warfare, which dominated all facets of life, including marriage, sex, and politics. He continues his research with the tribe and is an advocate for their welfare. Chagnon’s research has been a subject of controversy, since writer Patrick Tierney accused Chagnon and colleague James Neel of harming the Yanomamö in an article Tierney published in 2000. Tierney accused Chagnon and Neel of introducing a measles epidemic to the Yanomamö tribe. However, according to most of Chagnon’s anthropology colleagues, the accusation was completely untrue. In fact, in an article pub-