2000 Council On Ideas Members

M. CHERIF BASSIOUNI, S.J.D.; LLD (Honoris Causa)
Multiple 1999 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee for his seminal work in establishing an International Criminal Court (ICC), and his unceasing efforts in documentation of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia as Chairman of the Security Council's Commission to Investigate Human Rights Violations in the Former Yugoslavia (1992-1994). Bassiouni is increasingly recognized worldwide as “the driving force behind the establishment of an international criminal court.” In 1998, he chaired the Drafting Committee of the U.N.'s Diplomatic Conference on the Establishment of the ICC. He has also chaired and served on various commissions and committes of the United Nations. Author and editor of 60 books and more than 200 scholarly articles on U.S. and international criminal law and human rights (published in Arabic, English, French, Italian and Spanish), Bassiouni has been Professor of Law at DePaul University since 1964 and has been a visiting professor of law and lecturer at the world's major universities. He is admitted to practice in Illinois and Washington, D.C. before the United States Supreme Court, most U.S. Courts of Appeals and the United States Court of Military Appeals. His many awards and medals include the 1956 Order of Millitary Valor, Egypt; the 1976 and 1977 Order of Merit, Italy; the 1984 Order of Scientific Merit, Egypt; the 1990 Grand Cross Order of Merit of Austrian Republic; the 1990 Special Award of the Council of Europe; and the Adlai Stevenson Award of the United Nations Association.

MURRAY GELL-MANN, Ph.D.
Recipient of the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles, he is currently Distinguished Fellow and co-chairman of the Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute (which he helped to found) as well as the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, where he joined the faculty in 1955. He has been a consultant to the Los Alamos National Laboratory since 1956. Gell-Mann's seminal contributions to physics include his “eightfold way” scheme, which brought order out of the chaos created by the discovery of some 100 kinds of particles in collisions involving atomic nuclei, and the theory of quarks, the fundamental building blocks of nuclear particles. Gell-Mann shared the 1989 Ettore Majorana Science for Peace Prize and was one of the first group selected by the United Nations Environment Program for its Honor Roll of Environmental Achievement. He has received many other honors, including the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute and the John J. Carty Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as honorary degrees from Cambridge, Oxford, Yale, Columbia and the University of Chicago. He was for many years a Citizen Regent of the Smithsonian Institution and he has been a director of the J.D. and C.T. MacArthur Foundation since 1979. He is a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and belonged to a similar body advising President Nixon. Twice invited to speak at the World Economic Forum, Gell-Mann is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society and a foreign member of the Royal Society ofLondon. He is the author of The Quark and the Jaguar and his recent research at the Santa Fe Institute has focused on “plectics,” the study of simplicity and complexity.

NIKKI GIOVANNI
Poet, essayist, educator and highly sought after lecturer, Giovanni is also acclaimed for her recorded conversations with prominent writers James Baldwin and Margaret Walker. Believing that change is necessary for growth, her early poetry is renowned for its call of urgency for Black people to realize their identities, while in later works, she also focuses on family and personal relationships as well as her great concern for humanity. Author of more than 20 books of poetry, including Blues: For All the Changes, Love Poems, The Genie in the Jar and The Sun is So Quiet, as well as several anthologies including Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate and Grand Mothers: Poems, Reminiscences and Short Stories About the Keepers of Our Traditions, Giovanni was the subject of the PBS special, Spirit to Spirit: the Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, produced and broadcast in 1987. It was her 1972 recording of the album Truth is on its Way, an original combination of poetry and gospel music which reinforced her reputation as a national speaker and reader of her own poetry. Truth is on its Way sold over 500,000 copies, making it a certified gold record. This commercial success would also impact an emerging genre, the poetry in motion that would come to be known as rap music. Professor of English since 1989 at Virginia Tech, she was recently honored there as a University Distinguished Professor. Visiting professor at a half dozen universities, she is the recipient of more than a dozen honorary doctorate degrees. Among her many awards are the 1998 NAACP Image Award, the 1996 Langston Hughes Award and Woman of the Year by Ebony Magazine, Mademoiselle and the Ladies Home Journal.

STANLEY KARNOW
Stanley Karnow, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Vietnam: A History and In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, Karnow is an acknowledged foreign affairs expert. His other awards include three Overseas Press Club Awards, and six Emmies, as well as DuPont, Peabody and Polks Awards for his role as chief correspondent for the PBS series, Vietnam: A Television History. Karnow has reported from Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia for Time, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, the London Observer, the Washington Post and NBC News. He was associate editor of the New Republic, and columnist for King Features and the international edition of Newsweek. He has also been a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Smithsonian and many others. Karnow has traveled on assignment with Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon, whom he accompanied on his historic trip to China in 1972. He was in Vietnam when the first Americans were killed in 1959 and covered the war until its conclusion. A graduate of Harvard, he attended the Sorbonne and the Ecole des Sciences Politiques in Paris; and was a Nieman Fellow and Kennedy Fellow at Harvard. Karnow is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Society of Historians and the Century Association. During World War II, he served with the U.S. Army Air Corps in the China-Burma-India theater of operations.

ANNA C. ROOSEVELT, Ph.D.
Awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Explorers Medal and the Gold Medal of the Society of Woman Geographers for her work, Roosevelt is an internationally respected anthropologist. Over the past 20 years she has carried out field research on long-term human-environment interaction in the tropics with funding from the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities and other foundations. Her innovative work in human ecology and evolution challenges earlier paradigms of human nature. Roosevelt is “a leading archaelogist” according to a New York Times profile, “Sage, brave, and hard,” according to a Chicago Tribune headline, director of “a series of remarkable excavations,” according to the New York Times Review of Books. Currently Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she directs the Lower Amazon Project in Brazil and the Congo River Project in the Central African Republic. Author and editor of Amazonian Indians from Prehistory to the Present, Moundbuilders of the Amazon, Ancient Lakes, Cultural and Biological Diversity and three other books, she has written 65 articles for journals such as Science and Nature. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of the distinguished Order of Rio Branco and Bettendorf Medal from Brazil, Roosevelt has served as a chair of the Anthropology Section of the New York Academy of Sciences, a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Lecturer and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.