Dr. John Trump, President Donald Trump's uncle, is one of 47 brilliant scientists and engineers who grew up in New York City and received the National Medal of Science. These honorees account for a remarkable 9% of the 506 recipients.
The prestigious award has been given by presidents beginning in 1962 for five scientific disciplines: biology, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and computer sciences; and Physical Sciences. Congress added the prize for Behavioral and Social Science in 1980.
Prof. Trump (1907-85) was an electrical engineer who taught at MIT for many years, and he was educated in NYC's public schools, Brooklyn Polytechnical Institute, Columbia and MIT. During World War II, he was one of the leading scientists who helped develop radar, and he also co-founded a company after the war that manufactured electrical devices that successfully treated certain types of cancer.
Unfortunately, since Nov. 2014, neither President Barack Obama nor President Trump has awarded this prestigious honor.
One deserving recipient in 2020 is Dr. Stanley Plotkin, one of America's top vaccinologists and the principal author of the standard medical textbook on vaccines. Dr. Plotkin, a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, New York University and Downstate Medical School in Brooklyn, helped design vaccines for rabies, rubella and other infectious diseases.
At 88 years old, he is no longer active in the laboratory, but he has been involved in President Trump's "warp-speed" campaign to create a vaccine against the coronavirus.
Bronx Science (my alma mater) leads the nation with nine winners of the National Medal of Science: Bruce Ames, Charles Yanofsky and Robert Lefkowitz for Biology; Stuart Rice and Alan Bard for Chemistry; Leonard Kleinrock and Barry Mazur for Mathematics & Computer Science; and Steven Weinberg and Peter Goldreich for Physics.
Manhattan's Stuyvesant High School (my brother's alma mater) ranks second locally with six winners, and Brooklyn's James Madison High School (my father's alma mater) is third with three medalists.
Forty-three of NYC's National Science medalists graduated from public schools, while Brooklyn-reared Dr. Anthony Fauci, a 2005 recipient, attended Regis, the elite all-boys Catholic high school on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
Incredibly, 13 female scientists who graduated from an NYC high school are National Science medalists: Barbara McClintock, Mildred Cohn, Rosalyn Yalow, Maxine Singer, Elizabeth Neufeld, Evelyn Witkin, and Lucy Shapiro for Biology; Gertrude Elion and Jacqueline Barton for Chemistry; Mildred Dresselhaus for Engineering; Fay Ajzenberg-Selove and Esther Conwell for Physical Sciences; and Anne Anastasi for Psychology.
McClintock, Yalow and Elion are also Nobel laureates in Medicine, and 16 male winners of the National Medal of Science are also Nobelists.
Remarkably, 47 graduates of an NYC high school won the Nobel prize in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine or Economics, and Bronx Science again leads with eight (7 in Physics, 1 in Chemistry.) Forty-three are graduates of a public high school, and two Physics Nobelists, Murray Gell-Mann and Rainer Weiss, graduated from Columbia Grammar & Prep, the first-rate private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which Barron Trump attended until the American people wisely relocated his parents and him to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Jan. 2017.
The colleges attended by the largest number of NYC's winners of the National Medal of Science are: City College of New York, 8; Brooklyn College, 6; Columbia, 5; Hunter, Cornell and Harvard, 4 each.
City College (my alma mater), Brooklyn and Hunter are senior institutions of the City University of New York, as is Queens College, which has one Medal of Science recipient. Thus, 19 of the 47 local winners of the National Medal of Science attended these once nationally renowned, tuition-free institutions. (The colleges were destroyed academically by the adoption of "open admissions" in 1969, which was the insane policy promulgated by Mayor John "Limousine Liberal" Lindsay, one of NYC's worst mayors.)
Bernie Sanders, a graduate of James Madison HS ('59), attended Brooklyn College for one year, and a classmate at the latter institution recalled that the Vermont senator, with consummate hypocrisy, "was constantly complaining about the teachers and that the school wasn't academically rigorous enough." The neo-Marxist Sanders then spent three years at the private and also academically superb University of Chicago, majoring in left-wing political agitation.
Recommendations for National Medal of Science are presented to the president by a panel of experts, who work under the auspices of the National Science Foundation. The panel's chairwoman since 2016 is Dr. Jacqueline Barton, recipient of the Chemistry National Medal of Science in 2010, and a graduate of Riverdale Country School. Steven Mnuchin, the fantastic Secretary of the Treasury, is also a graduate of this excellent private school in the northwest Bronx.
Finally, in one week, President Trump must have on his desk at least 10 nominees for each of the six disciplines for the National Medal of Science. He should select at least four from each scientific field to compensate for the regrettable oversights in not awarding this essential prize during the last six years.