U.S. ACADEMY OF SCIENCES TO OUST MEMBERS FOR SEXUAL HARASSMENT

The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is moving for the first time to expel sexual harassers from its membership, Meredith Wadman reported for Science, saying NAS is adjudicating complaints that could lead to the ejection of astronomer Geoffrey Marcy and evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala.

The process is unfolding two years after the prestigious, 158-year-old academy changed its bylaws to allow expulsion of members. Until then, membership had been for life. Rescinding membership is the most drastic penalty under the new rules, which also allow for lesser sanctions.

With the potential moves against Marcy and Ayala, “We are watching social change happening in front of our eyes,” says Nancy Hopkins, an NAS member and emeritus biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT.) “It has been a long time coming.”

Scientists are elected to NAS by existing members and serve as advisers who develop reports for the US government. NAS’s 2,342 US members are on average 72 years old and 81% are men.

In June 2019, NAS changed its bylaws to allow a member to be ousted if an employer, funder, or other institution documented violations that breach NAS’s Code of Conduct; that code bars “all forms of discrimination, harassment and bullying,” as well as plagiarism and other offenses. But no one came forward to complain about an alleged sexual harasser.

In September 2020, François-Xavier Coudert, a computational chemist at CNRS, the French national research agency, read a news article in Nature noting that at the time the academy had received no such complaints.

Anyone can file a complaint, but Coudert says the idea of bringing the allegations himself “felt weird because I am not … based in the US and I know none of these people.” But after he called out NAS on Twitter, President Marcia McNutt responded: “FILE A COMPLAINT already.”

He did so on 21 September, in an email he provided to Science, alleging that four NAS members were guilty of sexual harassment: Ayala; Marcy; Sergio Verdú, an information theorist formerly at Princeton University, and; Inder Verma, a cancer biologist formerly at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. (Others later also filed complaints with NAS.) Marcy was kicked out of the University of California at Berkeley and Ayala was terminated by the University of California at Irvine.

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