Lewis Thomas Prize

The Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, named for its first recipient, Lewis Thomas, is an annual literary prize awarded by Rockefeller University^[1] to scientists deemed to have accomplished a significant literary achievement: it "recognizes scientists as poets".^[2] The award was established in 1993 and is endowed with a nominal US$5,000 purse. The university gives the prize annually to scientists whose books bridge the gap between the laboratory and the wider world, in the spirit of Lewis Thomas' collection of essays The Lives of a Cell. The Thomas Prize honors "the rare individual who bridges the worlds of science and the humanities – whose voice and vision can tell us about science's aesthetic and philosophical dimensions, providing not merely new information but cause for reflection, even revelation as in a poem or painting," Nobel laureate Torsten N. Wiesel, M.D., president of the University remarked in 1996.

The prize-giving ceremony, in the form of a lecture, is held in the spring of the following year, giving rise to some conflicting reports of dates even in the University's news releases. The subsequent recipients of the prize, awarded first for the year 1993 to Thomas, have been:

François Jacob (for 1994)^[3]
Abraham Pais (for 1995)
Freeman Dyson (for 1996)^[4]
Max Perutz (for 1997)^[5]
Ernst Mayr (for 1998)^[6]
Steven Weinberg (for 1999)
E. O. Wilson (for 2000)
Oliver Sacks (for 2001)^[7]
Jared Diamond (for 2002)
Richard Fortey (for 2003)^[8]
Jean-Pierre Changeux (for 2004)^[9]
Thomas Eisner (for 2005)^[10]
Richard Dawkins (for 2006)^[11]
James D. Watson (for 2007)
Robert Sapolsky (for 2008)^[12]
Martin Rees (for 2009)^[13]
Kay Redfield Jamison (2012)^[14]
Frances Ashcroft (2013)^[15]
Atul Gawande (2014)^[16]
Ian Stewart and Steven Strogatz (2015)^[17]

Information about the latest Lewis Thomas Prize

Lectures and events at The Rockefeller University.

Notes

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