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CORVALLIS - Oregon State University will bestow honorary doctorates this June to a Nobel Prize recipient, a pioneer in the communication engineering industry, and one of the leading voices of ethics in science.

The selections were approved Friday during the monthly meeting of the Oregon State Board of Higher Education. The degrees will be presented on June 15 in Corvallis at OSU's annual commencement ceremony.

Receiving degrees will be Paul Crutzen, who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; Barrie Gilbert, inventor of the widely used "Gilbert mixer" and other communication technologies; and Daniel Callahan, founder and for 25 years president of The Hastings Center.

"These three people are at the absolute top of their respective fields," said Roy Arnold, provost and executive vice president of OSU. "Many of the issues they have been involved with are especially relevant to the Pacific Northwest and work being done at Oregon State University."

Crutzen, a Dutch atmospheric scientist, was one of the first researchers to warn of the global devastation that a nuclear war would bring, and helped coin the phrase "nuclear winter." For those efforts, he was tabbed the 1985 Scientist of the Year by Discover magazine. His Nobel Prize was the result of years of research on ozone depletion - work that began a decade before the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole.

He is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.

Gilbert has been called the world's foremost engineer in integrated circuits and his far-reaching inventions encompass the fields of medicine, transportation and communication. His Gilbert mixer is used in almost all forms of modern communication systems, including cellular phones, satellite communications, computer modems, radio telescopes for reaching far into space, and even garage door openers.

He is the manager of Northwest Laboratories at Analog Devices in Beaverton, Ore.

Callahan is one of America's leading voices in efforts to bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences. In 1969, he founded the Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences - later renamed the Hastings Center - and transformed it from a one-room entity to a world-renowned biomedical research center. The center deals with issues such as AIDS, death and dying, genetic engineering, organ transplants, and reproductive technology.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In 1996, OSU granted its only honorary doctorate to former Oregon Sen. Mark O. Hatfield.