Catholic academy appoints new scientists

Priest and monk Gregor Mendel - discovered basis of genetics

There's no way to argue that religion is in conflict with science, certainly with regard to the Catholic Church, whose scientific members have included the founder of the study of genetics (Mendel) and the "Father of the Big Bang theory" (Lemaître).

In 1603 the Church supported the opening of an academy to bring scientists together and to encourage the study of the glorious world God has created. This academy faded after the death of its founder, but was reestablished in 1847 by Pope Pius IX and reconstituted in 1936 by Pope Pius XI.

Today, the members of the academy are eighty women and men from many countries who have made outstanding contributions in their fields of scientific endeavour. Many are not Catholics. Three new members have just been appointed, one a Nobel laureate in physics. They are:

Chen Chien-jen, an epidemiologist credited with handling Taiwan’s outstanding response to Covid-19. He earned his doctorate in epidemiology and human genetics from Johns Hopkins University in 1982. His research has focused on the long-term health hazards of environmental agents, such as arsenic, and on cancer risks of various hepatitis viruses.

Susan Solomon, a chemist and professor of environmental studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She worked for decades at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, conducted research in Antarctica and was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. She is the founding director of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative, a university-wide coalition of experts working to address the challenges posed by climate change.

Donna Strickland, an optics physicist and professor at Ontario’s University of Waterloo; in 2018 she and Gérard Mourou won the Nobel Prize in physics for their development of chirped pulse amplification, a process for creating the intense laser pulses now used in industry and medicine, including for laser eye surgery. She has worked as a research associate at the National Research Council of Canada, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and at Princeton University’s Advanced Technology Center for Photonics and Opto-electronic Materials. In 1997, she joined the University of Waterloo, where her ultrafast laser group develops high-intensity laser systems for nonlinear optics investigations.

Since the conferences, deliberations and studies which it undertakes are not influenced by any one national, political or religious point of view, the academy constitutes an invaluable source of objective information upon which the Church can draw.

An objective assessment of new ideas arising in science is certainly required if monk Gregor Mendel's experience is anything to go by. In 1866 he published his conclusions from many years of experientation on the transmission of genetic traits only to be ignored: 

The science community ignored the paper, possibly because it was ahead of the ideas of heredity and variation accepted at the time. In the early 1900s, three plant biologists finally acknowledged Mendel’s work. Unfortunately, Mendel was not around to receive the recognition as he had died in 1884. (Source) 

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