Meier, like Sontag, has won a five-year fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

Nusslein-Volhard, the director of genetics at the Max Planck Institute, has done groundbreaking research on the embryos of fruit flies.

Her work has offered new insight into different elements of modern developmental biology. In an October 1991 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Nusslein-Volhard wrote that she and other researchers at the institute discovered many of the genes in the fruit fly embryos that affect the ultimate form of the fly.

Nannerl O. Keohane

Keohane was born in Arkansas on September 18, 1940. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1961. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, she then studied at Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar for two years and received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1967. She has taught at Swarthmore College and Stanford University.

Keohane is currently the president of Wellesley College, where she also teaches political science. She will become the eighth president of Duke University on July 1. She is the author of Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightment (1980) and co-editor of Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology.

Pandit Ravi Shankar

Shankar, 73, has had an illustrious career as a sitar player and composer.

His international reputation and association with Western musicians like Yehudi Menuhin and former Beatle George Harrison (with whom Shankar appeared at the Woodstock festival in 1969) have contributed to increasing the popularity of Indian music in the West.

Reached last night in his hotel room, Shankar said that "considering the prestige of Harvard as an institution, [the degree] is definitely a great honor."

"I wonder if this makes me a better musician, though," he added.

Susan Sontag

Sontag studied at the University of Chicago and received master's degrees from Harvard in English literature and philosophy. She has received Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. She also won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1978.

Sontag has written fiction, two plays, four films and a variety of essays. Her essays include "Illness as Metaphor," published in 1978, and "AIDS and its Metaphors," published in 1989, both of which try to create a deeper view of the concept of illness.

Oluwole Akinwande Soyinka

Soyinka is a Nigerian dramatist, novelist and poet who became the first African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.

Soyinka, who writes in both English and Yoruba, has been described by the New York Times Book Review as "unquestionably Africa's most versatile writer and arguably her finest."

He has achieved international acclaim with two novels, two volumes of poetry, several plays and a series of notes from his prison experiences titled The Man Died. In 1979 he directed Death and the King's Horseman in Chicago, which enhanced his reputation in the West