The American Academy of Arts and Sciences last week announced its newly elected fellows and foreign honorary members. The 2003 class of 187 fellows and 29 foreign honorary members includes four college presidents, three Nobel Prize winners and four Pulitzer Prize winners.

Five Johns Hopkins scholars have been elected to join the class. They are President William R. Brody; Alexander Szalay, a professor of astronomy in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences; Peter C. Agre, a professor of biological chemistry in the School of Medicine; and Philip Beachy and Carol W. Greider, both professors of molecular biology and genetics in the School of Medicine.

This brings to 37 the number of Johns Hopkins scholars in the academy.

Other new members this year are Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the United Nations; journalist Walter Cronkite; philanthropist William H. Gates Sr., co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; recording industry pioneer Ray Dolby; artist Cindy Sherman; and Nobel laureate physicist Donald Glaser.

The academy was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people." George Washington and Ben Franklin were elected in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the 20th. Drawing on the expertise of its membership, the academy conducts thoughtful, innovative, nonpartisan studies on international security, social policy, education and the humanities.