Philadelphia, November 9, 2022 – Three pioneering scientists who relied on the ordinary to produce extraordinary achievements have been named as recipients of the 2022 John Scott Awards, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science awards, bestowed annually in memory of the scientific legacy of Benjamin Franklin.

The groundbreaking research of Drs. Nancy Bonini, Gary Beauchamp and Barry Arkles share a common feature: Each has delved into their respective science through a portal that could be considered ordinary or commonplace.

For Dr. Nancy Bonini, it was the novel use of the model organism Drosophila – the common fruit fly – to gain insight into genes, mechanisms, and risk factors relevant to degenerative brain diseases like ALS, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s Disease. For Dr. Gary Beauchamp, the starting point was the study of the chemical senses – taste and smell – to fuel important findings on identifying disease in animals and humans. And for Dr. Barry Arkles, it was the use of one of the Earth’s most common materials, silicon, to pioneer critically important applications for a range of uses including contact lens materials, heat shield coatings on the Space Shuttle, and super-strong lightweight plastics.

All will be honored with the John Scott Award, endowed in 1815 by Scottish chemist and pharmacist John Scott in honor of Ben Franklin. The Scott trust that funds the $10,000 award to each recipient is managed by the Board of Directors of City Trusts and is presented to “ingenious men or women who make useful inventions” that have contributed to the “comfort, welfare and happiness of mankind.”

“The John Scott Award continues a legacy of ingenuity and innovation that is rooted here in Philadelphia in the scientific achievements of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, who was John Scott’s idol,” said Bernard W. Smalley, President of the Board of City Trusts. “This year’s awardees share Dr. Franklin’s passion for learning more about the world around us and using this information, developed over decades of intensive research, as the basis for truly game-changing scientific achievements. We are honored to have them join a distinguished list of previous John Scott Award winners who include some of the greatest names in scientific research.”

Previous recipients of the Scott Award include 17 Nobel Prize winners – actually, 18 since the recent announcement that Dr. K. Barry Sharpless, a 2001 Scott Award winner, has been selected for his second Nobel prize. Other Scott and Nobel winners include 2016 Scott Award recipients Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna (who were awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), Marie Curie, Guglielmo Marconi, R. Buckminster Fuller, Baruch Blumberg, and Kary Mullis.

Awardee Profiles

Dr. Nancy M. Bonini used Drosophila – the fruit fly – for her groundbreaking work on degenerative brain diseases. Bonini humbly acknowledges the work with Drosophila before her, but it is her lab at the University of Pennsylvania – the Bonini Lab, which was established in 1994 – that paved the way for research using a genetic approach with Drosophila to study neurodegeneration in the human brain.

“I’m so proud of the fly for its contributions toward what we know about diseases like Parkinson’s and Huntington's,” said Bonini. “We’ve added another tool in our collective scientific toolkit for exploring treatments and cures in the human body, and it just happens to be a fly.”

Dr. Bonini was first introduced to the fruit fly during her undergraduate studies at Princeton University as a biology major, but after taking a psychology course, she became fascinated with the human brain. “I was interested in how it worked on a molecular level,” said Bonini. “I had questions as to how the genetic mechanisms in your brain worked, especially as it related to memory, recall functions, and age – occurrences that we all experience as humans.”

From Princeton, Dr. Bonini pursued studies in neuroscience, working under the tutelage of renowned geneticist Dr. Seymour Benzer at the California Institute of Technology before accepting a role as assistant professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. Calling the University a “candy box of research,” Dr. Bonini found herself following projects in biochemistry, molecular biology, and genetics. Inspired by the growing research of brain diseases and disorders and the use of mice in studies, she thought of Drosophila as a possible additional approach for defining mechanisms.

In collaboration with geneticists, Dr. Bonini presented normal and mutated polyglutamine (polyQ) proteins, which are associated with neurodegenerative disorders like ALS and Huntington’s disease, to Drosophila. Those that received the mutated protein displayed effects rapidly.

“In the human brain, neurodegenerative disorders take decades, in one’s 60s or 70s, but with Drosophila – the fruit fly - we saw the impact in 10 days,” said Dr. Bonini. “We were able to follow the pathways, processes, and mechanisms by which the mutated protein impacted the brain in detail, and then use fly genetics to find ways to prevent the degeneration.”

With its expedited results, Drosophila became a remarkable model for human diseases and opened the door to new research on brain degradation, including concussions, stress response, injury, age, and other neurodegenerative diseases. Her lab continues to make significant contributions using the fly as a model, which has earned Bonini numerous accolades over her career including a David and Lucile Packard Award, the John Merck Scholars Award, an NIH R35 Outstanding Investigator award, and recognition from the Huntington’s Disease Society of America and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

“I’m deeply honored to receive the John Scott Award and to be honored alongside amazing and innovative scientists, but the work does not end here,” said Bonini. “I remain excited to follow how others continue to embrace the approach and apply the fly to our understanding of additional disorders.”

Dr. Gary Beauchamp describes as “eclectic” a distinguished scientific career that has included leadership research on the importance of smell and taste in identifying and treating disease in humans and animals; the critical role that taste and habit play in reducing the consumption of salt and sugar; and ground-breaking research on the health benefits of EVOO (Extra Virgin Olive Oil) as a key ingredient in the well-documented healthfulness of the Mediterranean Diet.

“I would say that my work has been about demonstrating that the chemical senses - taste and smell – are much more important to health than we might otherwise believe, especially in the wake of COVID,” Beauchamp said. “The idea that taste and smell are critical to health may seem surprising to us, but our pets (and other animals) have always known it.

“Animals can detect certain diseases by smell, and it’s likely that humans can, too, although there remains a lot of research to be done in this area,” Dr. Beauchamp said. “But there is good evidence to suggest that it exists. We know for example that mice can detect lung cancer in other mice. There are indications that ovarian cancer can be detected by smell, too, a disease that today is often hard to diagnose.

“Think about the tremendous potential this could unlock in diagnosis and early treatment of human disease,” said Dr. Beauchamp. “To be clear, we’re not there yet, but we could be there in five or 10 years.”

Dr. Beauchamp, whose career at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia spans 51 years since his arrival as a postdoctoral fellow in 1971, has also partnered with the USDA to study the impact of taste (and habit) in the consumption of things like salt and sugar. From 1990-2014, he served as Director of the Monell Center, and today continues his research as President Emeritus.

“We started with the notion that people like the things they’re used to, and if that’s true then we should be able to ‘move people around’ and change their consumption habits over time,” he said. To test this theory, Dr. Beauchamp and a team of colleagues crafted low-salt diets for a “control group” of human subjects to consume over a three-month period. The results were a game-changer: “We showed that if people could stay on the diet for two or three months, they would eventually come to accept and actually prefer low-salt choices. It became the basis for the USDA’s recommendations on reducing salt in the American diet, which has made a big difference in reducing the impact of heart disease and other related diseases.”

Currently, Dr. Beauchamp is leading research aimed at reducing the level of sugar in human diets. “Sweet is the most powerful built-in preference that we have. In fact, humans are really built to like sweet things, going all the way back to the time when sweet was a basis for selecting calorie-rich plants as a way to survive,” he said.

Another body of research began more than 20 years ago when, during a trip to Sicily, Dr. Beauchamp tasted a sampling of Extra Virgin Olive Oil and discovered that it produced the same burning sensation in his throat that occurred during earlier lab tasting of ibuprofen. When he returned to the U.S. with EVOO fresh from the olive farm, he offered it to a Monell colleague whose first reaction was: “Why did you put ibuprofen in the olive oil?”

Their research went on to highlight the anti-inflammatory properties of EVOO as a key ingredient in the healthfulness of the Mediterranean Diet – all of which was triggered by the burn in the throat that came from tasting EVOO.

Dr. Beauchamp’s work has been shared in dozens of published papers and recognized with numerous awards from the National Institutes of Health, the Olfactory Research Fund, the Flavor & Extract Manufacturers Association, the Society of Flavor Chemists, and the American Society for Nutrition.

“I’ve known about the Scott Award for many years,” said Dr. Beauchamp, “and when I think about its connection to Benjamin Franklin, well, as a scientist I’m not anywhere close to Dr. Franklin. I am surprised and humbled by this Award.”

Chemist, inventor, and entrepreneur, Dr. Barry Arkles founded three specialty materials manufacturing companies, published over 150 scientific papers, and was awarded nearly 100 U.S. patents. Dr. Arkles is focused on developing new materials based on silicon and organometallic materials for innovative applications.

“I always had an interest in silicon,” said Arkles, who studied chemistry and earned his doctorate in biochemistry at Temple University. “Silicon is one of the most common elements in the Earth’s crust. It’s an innocuous element that is literally everywhere, but it didn’t have a lot of uses that were common to the everyday person. My goal was to harness silicon chemistry to enable the creation of new devices in medical technology and semiconductors.”

Dr. Arkles’ earliest achievements with silicon came with his work in a summer job at LNP Engineering Plastics (now known as GE Advanced Materials), where he created new materials that allowed the fabrication of the Kodak Carousel slide projector and the Polaroid SX70 camera, the first autofocusing camera. He quickly became one of the youngest members of the original company ownership, years before founding his own research and development companies.

He later collaborated with a medical company to develop hydro-gel contact lenses – more commonly known as “soft” contact lenses that use silicon polymers to allow oxygen to penetrate the lens so that the cornea can “breathe” and increase its length of wear. Today, nearly 85 percent of all breathable soft contact lenses are made with materials developed through Dr. Arkles’ work with silicon.

Dr. Arkles worked with NASA in the aftermath of the horrific 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle explosion to develop hydrophobic heat shield coatings for space shuttles that would repel water and moisture as they left the humidity of Cape Canaveral on their launch into space. Other achievements during Dr. Arkles’ distinguished career include enhancement of semi-conductors for cellphones and the development of super strong lightweight plastics for a wide variety of consumer uses.

“There was always a problem that needed to be solved, and for me, I’d lean towards silicon first to see if it could provide a viable solution,” said Arkles. “Even as I moved into leadership and ownership of my own companies, I made sure to create environments that encouraged listening to other people’s challenges and problems and then using your strengths – in my case, silicon – to try to solve them.

“My contributions in materials science are usually not recognized directly but rather by the devices they have enabled,” said Arkles. “I am especially excited, honored, and delighted to receive the John Scott Award.”

The 2022 John Scott Awardees will receive their medals at a reception to be held on November 10th at 5:30 p.m. at the American Philosophical Society’s Benjamin Franklin Hall, located at 427 Chestnut Street in Center City.