The Battelle Memorial Institute, which began operations in 1929 at its corporate site in Columbus, Ohio, is the largest multinational, public purpose, not-for-profit research organization in the world. Its 7,500 natural scientists, engineers, social scientists, and support personnel are engaged in a broad range of research which embraces the physical, life, and social/behavioral sciences. Battelle operates major research centers in Columbus, Ohio; Frankfurt, Germany; Geneva, Switzerland; and Richland and Seattle, Washington. Battelle's research volume in 1980 was $811 million, which included projects in 75 countries throughout the world. A major objective of Battelle is to benefit mankind by the advancement and utilization of science through technological innovation and educational activities and dissemination of knowledge through publications.

Until the late 1960s, Battelle was known primarily for its research in the physical and life sciences (including the basic research and development of xerography in the mid-1940s). In 1971 the Battelle Human Affairs Research Centers (HARC) was created to do basic and applied research in the social and behavioral sciences. HARC is a multidisciplinary social science organization that conducts research and educational activities directed toward the solution of significant societal problems. Its staff of over 1 50, which is located in Seattle and Washington, D.C. and includes political scientists, policy analysts, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, economists, international affairs and defense specialists, urban planners, and statisticians, is one of the largest non-academic groups of social scientists in the United States.

At the 1980 APSA meeting in Washington, a group of approximately 25 political scientists and others, out of a much larger network of contributors and sympathizers, agreed to form an Association for Politics and the Life Sciences dedicated to the advancement of an integrated biosocial perspective in our discipline. Although this short article is intended primarily to announce that fact and detail plans for the immediate future, we feel that this might also be an appropriate occasion to review briefly the history and rationale behind this intellectual activity and describe some of the objectives of the Association.

The study of the relationship between biology and politics (sometimes called “biobehavioral political science” and sometimes also “biopolitics”) drew its initial impetus in the latter 1960s and early 1970s from emergent developments in a number of other disciplines, particularly (a) ethology (the naturalistic study of animal behavior and adaptation), (b) psychophysiology (specifically, efforts to correlate various physiological characteristics and “indicators” with various mental and behavioral states), (c) psychobiology (including neurological and endocrine influences on social behavior), (d) behavior genetics (involving both human and non-human animal research), (e) psychopharmacology (especially the chemical manipulation of behavioral states), (f) sociobiology (the application of modern Darwinian theory to the explanation of social behaviors), and (g) ecology (the study of the relationships between organisms and their environments, which gained visibility when the so-called “environmental crisis” erupted).

This award, The 1981 National Capital Area Political Science Association Pi Sigma Alpha Award, presented to a political scientist who has made a substantial contribution to strengthen the relationship between political science and public service, appropriately goes to one who has, more than anybody else I know, worked to strengthen the relationship between political science and public service, Evron Kirkpatrick.

Kirk's own career reflects that relationship. He studied political science at the University of Illinois where he earned a B.A. and M.A. and learned all that he knows. Then he went on to Yale in order to bring enlightenment to that area and to teach them what we had taught him at Illinois and for which they so gratefully gave him a Ph.D.

Kirk is a teacher, one of the best. He has taught at Minnesota, Howard, and Georgetown, and he has never stopped teaching throughout his demanding career.

I am delighted to be here and am greatly honored by your award. All the more honored because of my distinguished predecessors who have received it: Ernest Griffith, Francis Wilcox, Alan (Scotty) Campbell, and Donna Shalala. I always have believed that the knowledge we gain as scholars should provide a basis for others or for ourselves to play an active, effective and sound role in government and politics.

This belief is exemplified in a statement that for years I have included in the printed program of our Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association:

“There is the statesmanship of thought and there is the statesmanship of action … the man who has the time, the discrimination, and the sagacity to collect and comprehend the principal facts and the man who must act upon them must draw near to one another and feel that they are engaged in a common enterprise.”