Process of Selection
Report on the Process of Selection
Dr. Makoto Asashima
Chair, Selection Committee for the International Prize for Biology
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:
On behalf of the Selection Committee for the 26th International Prize for Biology, it gives me great pleasure to report on this year’s selection process.
The Selection Committee consisted of twenty members, including myself. Four of our members were highly authoritative overseas researchers who were specially commissioned to serve on the committee.
The field chosen for the prize this year was the “biology of symbiosis.” The committee distributed a total of 1,957 nomination forms to Japanese and foreign universities, research centers, academic associations, individual researchers, and international academic organizations involved in this field of biology, and received a total of 55 recommendations in response. As some of these recommendations named the same individuals, the actual number of individuals recommended was 46, from 16 countries throughout the world.
The Selection Committee met a total of four times and very carefully reviewed all the candidates. Ultimately, the committee decided to recommend Dr. Nancy Ann Moran of the United States of America to the Prize Committee as the recipient of the 26th International Prize for Biology.
Dr. Moran was born in 1954 and is of American nationality. She obtained her doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1982, and has since led a highly productive research career in the area of the biology of symbiosis at the University of Arizona and Yale University. She is currently William H. Fleming Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University.
Using a versatile approach that draws on molecular biology, genomics, and experimental and theoretical biology, Dr. Moran has contributed greatly to the advancement of the biology of symbiosis through her extensive and outstanding work on the intimate coevolutionary relationships between insects and the endosymbiotic bacteria that live within them. Some of the most noteworthy of her wide-ranging achievements include demonstrating the evolutionary origins of obligate bacterial symbionts in aphids and other insects and elucidating the coevolutionary process involved, and revealing the effects of bacterial symbionts on their hosts’ ecology and environmental fitness.
In particular, Dr. Moran has succeeded in using a population genetics approach to explain theoretically the special patterns of genome evolution, such as rapid molecular evolution, reduced genome size, and biased nucleotide composition, that are seen in various bacterial symbiont lineages. This breakthrough has been acclaimed for offering an integrated understanding of the reductive genome evolution seen in many microbe groups besides bacterial symbionts of insects, including endoparasitic bacteria, and even extending to organelles. Thus, Dr. Moran’s research has provided a wealth of concrete evidence that symbiosis acts as an important source of evolutionary novelty by accelerating diversification in many groups of living things, and that it has contributed to ecological niche expansion; moreover, her work has established principles common to the diverse spectrum of symbiotic relationships. These achievements have had a major impact on the biological sciences as a whole, including evolutionary biology, ecology, microbiology, and genomics.
In making our selection, the major criteria used by the Selection Committee were the originality of the candidate’s research, its international significance, and its contribution to advancing progress in the selected field of biology. We found Dr. Moran’s work to more than amply satisfy every one of these criteria and, on this basis, we judged her to be the most highly suited candidate to receive this year’s International Prize for Biology.
The Committee on the International Prize for Biology accepted our recommendation of Dr. Nancy Ann Moran and has bestowed upon her the 26th International Prize for Biology.
With this, I conclude my report on the process of selection.
Thank you.
