with election to the NAS
Two Yale researchers -- Michael Donoghue, the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and Dr. Steven Hebert, the C.N.H. Long Professor and chair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at the School of Medicine -- were elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
Election to membership in the NAS is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a U.S. scientist or engineer. Yale has 64 NAS members.
Donoghue, one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, is also a professor of geology and geophysics and curator of botany at the Peabody Museum. He does research on understanding phylogeny with a focus on plant diversity and evolution. He has a long-term interest in the flowering plants Viburnum and Dipsacales, and in the origin and early evolution of such species.
Donoghue's work also involves a number of conceptual and theoretical issues, specifically the nature of species, phylogenetic nomenclature, patterns in the distribution of homoplasy, character evolution and combining data from various sources. He has published articles on such issues as methods for assessing the direction of evolution, the analysis of large data sets and identifying shifts in the diversification rate. He helped build and still coordinates development of a relational database of phylogenetic knowledge called TreeBASE.
Hebert is responsible for discoveries that have had a fundamental impact on understanding of the regulation of salt balance by the kidney. His group identified a critical channel that regulates potassium excretion. Loss-of-function mutations in this channel cause Bartter's Syndrome Type II, an inherited disorder that results in excessive loss of sodium and potassium into the urine. Hebert's group has the only viable mouse model of this disease.
Hebert's group identified two sodium chloride transporters that are exclusively expressed in kidneys and that are the target sites for the most important clinically used diuretics. Changing the activities of these salt transporters alters salt and water balance and thereby controls blood pressure. His group also identified a calcium-sensing receptor that contributes to the maintenance of body calcium balance. This discovery led to development of a medication, Amgen's Sensipar, for treatment of both primary and secondary hyperparathyroidism. The latter affects most of the more than one million patients worldwide with end-stage kidney disease.
This year the NAS elected 72 new members and 18 foreign associates from 14 countries in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. The academy is a private organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare. It was established in 1863 by a congressional act of incorporation signed by Abraham Lincoln that calls on the NAS to act as an official adviser to the federal government in any matter of science or technology.
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