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Charles DeLisi, Marion Wiesel honored with Presidential Citizens awards

By David J. Craig

At a White House ceremony on Monday, January 8, Charles DeLisi, BU's Arthur G. B. Metcalf Professor of Science and Engineering, and Marion Wiesel, writer, translator, and the wife of Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, BU's Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, took their places among an illustrious group of political leaders, entertainers, and sports figures to receive one of the nation's highest civilian honors.

Charles DeLisi, ENG dean emeritus and BU's Arthur G. B. Metcalf Professor of Science and Engineering, receives the Presidential Citizens Medal from President Bill Clinton at the White House on January 8. Photo courtesy of the White House

President Bill Clinton personally presented each Presidential Citizens Medal, calling the award "a symbol of our gratitude as a people for those who have performed exemplary deeds of service to others." Archibald Cox, who served as Watergate special prosecutor and was a visiting professor at BU's School of Law between 1984 and 1996, also was among 28 individuals receiving the award. Hank Aaron, Muhammad Ali, and Elizabeth Taylor received medals for their philanthropic work.

"I am honored to recognize these talented and dedicated individuals who, in remarkable ways, have risen to America's highest calling -- active citizenship," said Clinton in presenting the awards. "In giving freely of themselves and of their time, they have undoubtedly inspired others to do the same."

As director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Health and Environmental Research Programs in the mid-1980s, DeLisi conceived of, and marshaled federal funding for, what became the Human Genome Project. Officially launched in 1990, the groundbreaking international genetics research program led to the sequencing last year of the entire human genome. The project has led to the identification of genes involved in several untreatable diseases, including cystic fibrosis. Based on that knowledge, researchers now are working to develop new therapies and cures.

"Just as Lewis and Clark set forth to explore a continent shrouded in mysterious possibility, Charles DeLisi pioneered the exploration of a modern-day frontier, the human genome," said Clinton. "DeLisi's imagination and determination helped to ignite the revolution in sequencing that would ultimately unravel the code of human life itself. At once scientist, entrepreneur, and teacher, Charles DeLisi is also, in the truest sense, a humanitarian, a man whose life work has been life itself."

ENG Dean Emeritus DeLisi, who also directs BU's Bioinformatics Program, says he hopes his award will inspire other science administrators to pursue undertakings as ambitious and as politically controversial as the Human Genome Project. Many members of the scientific community, DeLisi recalls, initially resisted his idea, partly because they feared that a large, government-defined research project would siphon federal dollars away from smaller, investigator-initiated research.

"A project as large as this one is very difficult to get started because it represents a style that had been foreign to biomedical research, which had traditionally been exclusively hypothesis driven, in contrast to genomics, which has a discovery-driven component," says DeLisi. "I think the Citizens Medal recognizes how difficult an effort this was, and hopefully it will encourage risk-taking in the future."

DeLisi's proposal for the Human Genome Project was progressive, he says, also because in the mid-1980s research in molecular biology "had become very reductionistic," focusing on "simple systems, and looking at one molecule at a time under a variety of conditions.

"Now we're studying thousands of molecules at one time, and looking at the cell as a system," he says. "This is crucial because even if very few molecules are perturbed or changed, or even if only one molecule is changed, it can have profound ramifications for how the whole cell behaves. We can't understand behavioral consequences without looking at the system as a whole."

A teacher of hope

Marion Wiesel's "mission of hope against hate, of life against death, of good over evil," according to Clinton, earned her the Presidential Citizens Medal.

	Clinton presents the Presidential Citizens Medal to Marion Wiesel, a writer, translator, and the wife of Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, BU's Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, at the White House on January 8. Photo courtesy of the White House

Wiesel was six years old in 1938 when the Nazis occupied her native Vienna, and she spent several years fleeing across Europe with her mother. At one point she was confined to a French internment camp rife with starvation and disease.

"Out of that searing experience," Clinton said, Wiesel "summoned the courage to commit her life to teaching others, especially children, about the human cost of hatred, intolerance, and racism."

In addition to translating several of her husband's books from French to English, Wiesel wrote a documentary film about children murdered in the Holocaust called Children of the Night, and edited To Give Them Light, a book that showcases Roman Vishniac's photos of Jewish life in eastern Europe just before World War II. With money from Elie Wiesel's 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, the Wiesels established the philanthropic Wiesel Foundation to teach children the importance of considering the suffering of others.

The making of an X-president

Archibald Cox is best known for his unsuccessful battle with the Nixon White House when, as Watergate special prosecutor, he attempted in 1973 to force the president to surrender tape recordings of White House conversations. Cox was eventually fired in a series of dismissals by the Nixon administration known as the Saturday Night Massacre.

In awarding Cox the Citizens Medal, Clinton pointed out that his entire career has been marked by a "sense of high purpose."

"Fighting for labor rights in the '50s, civil rights in the '60s, and during Watergate, rising that fateful night to defend our Constitution," Clinton said, "Cox has come to embody the highest ideals of integrity and courage in public life."

The Presidential Citizens Medal was established in 1969 and to date has been given to 120 people.

19 January 2001
Boston University
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