INSIGHTS | PERSPECTIVESsciencemag.org SCIENCEPHOTO: CHUCK PAINTER/STANFORD NEWS SERVICEBy Gretchen C. Daily and Paul R. EhrlichD
onald Kennedy—public servant, uni-
versity president, and former Science
editor-in-chief—died on 21 April. He
was 88. A born naturalist, broad in-
tellectual, and leader, Don engaged
in controversial areas as diverse
as the safety of artificial sweeteners, the
overuse of pesticides and antibiotics, the
impacts of human population growth, the
teaching of evolution, the philosophical ba-
sis for valuing nature, and academic duty.
He served with brilliance, intense energy,
and effectiveness. His death is a great loss
to the United States and the world at this
crucial moment in history.
Born in New York City in 1931, Don re-
ceived all of his degrees (bachelor’s, mas-
ter’s, and Ph.D.) in biology from Harvard
University. He taught at Syracuse University
for 4 years and then moved in 1960 to
Stanford University, to which he devoted 32
years of his career. After leaving the labora-
tory bench, he took leadership roles at the
university, in government, and finally at the
journal Science.
In graduate school, Don explored the re-
lation between brain and behavior. He de-
vised a strategy for working on the simple
nervous systems of invertebrate animals
such as crayfish and lobsters—a choice
that he liked to boast was superior to my
(P.R.E.’s) choice of butterflies, in that Don
could eat his specimens. He helped deter-
mine how restricted networks of neurons
give rise to sensory perception and behav-
ioral acts, such as swimming and flying. His
presumption that the same rules of wiring
neurons together apply to crayfish and hu-
mans has been justified time and again.
Don’s research program advanced princi-
ples that later became widespread and part
of modern systems neuroscience. His an-
thropocentric colleagues, mostly in medical
schools, resisted his paradigm, complaining
that scientists should be studying “real ani-
mals.” His former student Ron Hoy remi-
nisces that, in response, Don sardonically
referred to his bottom-up methods based
on invertebrates as the study of “virtual ani-
mals.” He showed that stimulating just one
or a few command neurons produces a com-plex sequence of movements. His laboratory
was also instrumental in cell and network
visualization techniques, using fluorescent
dyes to define the functional connectivity
within behavioral circuits.
In 1973, I (P.R.E.) and psychiatrist David
Hamburg brought Don in to help organize
Stanford’s Program in Human Biology. Don
soon took charge of the program and pro-
ceeded to use his uncommonly effective per-
suasive powers to convince me to teach for
the program for almost a decade, despite my
intention of staying only a few years. It was
hard to say no to Don; he exuded genuine
warmth, both with friends and upon first en-
counter, drawing people in with a light touchon the arm. Jeanne Kennedy, his first wife,
recalls how “he could see the best in some-
one, who they really wanted to be ... and make
them feel as if they were that best version.”
Don served as commissioner of the Food
and Drug Administration from 1977 to 1979
before returning to Stanford as provost
and then becoming its eighth president
from 1980 to 1992. He led the university’s
Centennial Campaign, which brought in
nearly $1.3 billion, the largest sum ever
raised for higher education at the time. His
enduring investments strengthened under-
graduate teaching and financial aid, over-
seas study, and public service—including the
launch of the Bing Stanford in Washington
Program, an undergraduate internship in
the U.S. capital. Later, Don weathered a
challenging disagreement with the federal
government over research reimbursement.
Stanford was ultimately vindicated, but the
publicity took a heavy toll.In his professor days, Don was a legend-
ary teacher and research mentor, inspiring
large cohorts of undergraduates, graduate
students, and postdocs, who themselves
became leaders in science. He continued
his mentoring as university president.
I (G.C.D.) will never forget his addressing
my freshman class, asking plainly, “Do you
feel completely out of place?” and contend-
ing, “Every one of you should be uncomfort-
able! That’s what’ll make you grow!” He
extended an open invitation to students to
join him on his 6 a.m. runs and share what
was on their minds. He would give students
advice such as “Great plan, but you’ll never
make a three-point shot standing right un-
der the basket.”
Don’s interests ranged from the practi-
cal to the esoteric, but he always looked at
the big picture. He wrote on wide-ranging
subjects, from nuclear war and pandem-
ics to “what we don’t know.” Perhaps most
unusually, in their book Humans, Nature,
and Birds, he and coauthor Darryl Wheye
explored the sweeping 30,000-year history
of the depiction of birds in art.
During his tenure as editor-in-chief of
Science from 2000 to 2008, Don greatly im-
proved its coverage of ecology, evolution,
and conservation at a time of rapidly inten-
sifying human impacts on the biosphere. In
doing so, he helped move problems such
as land transformation, biodiversity loss,
disruption of the nitrogen cycle, climate
change, and ocean acidification to the top
of the scientific agenda. He had contagious
enthusiasm and boundless curiosity about
every field the journal covered, but he was
particularly excited when a paper touched
on one of his personal passions. One day
he called me (P.R.E.) and said, “We’ve just
gotten a manuscript reporting ivory-billed
woodpeckers in Arkansas.” We started plan-
ning an expedition to see them, but the re-
port of that now-extinct species turned out
to be a false alarm, depriving us both of one
final joint field adventure.
It is sadly ironic that coronavirus disease
2019 (COVID-19) killed Don. His grasp of
the complex historical, demographic, envi-
ronmental, epidemiological, economic, so-
cial, and political dimensions of pandemic
risk was incomparable. He would have been
on the front lines, advancing a coherent
and effective response by the United States.
Don’s approach to every challenge was first
and foremost based on science and evi-
dence. He leavened this razor-sharp insight
with a healthy sense of humor and human-
ity that earned him respect and admiration
and made him beloved by those whose lives
he touched. j10.1126/science.abc7807RETROSPECTIVEDonald Kennedy (1931–2020)
Eminent public intellectual who served science and society
Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA
94305, USA. Email: [email protected]; [email protected]1062 5 JUNE 2020 • VOL 368 ISSUE 6495
Published by AAAS