Participants Biographies
physicist, educator, writer, received his Ph.D. from UCSD in 1967. Currently, Benford is a professor of physics at the UC Irvine, where he has been a faculty member since 1971. Benford conducts research in plasma turbulence theory, and in astrophysics. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and has served as an advisor to the Department of Energy, NASA and the White House Council on Space Policy.Gregory Benford - Paul Billings - Daniel Kevles - Peter Sloterdijk - Gregory Stock
GREGORY BENFORD
Gregory Benford,
In 1989, Benford was host and scriptwriter for the television series A Galactic Odyssey, which described modern physics and astronomy from the perspective of the evolution of the galaxy. The eight-part series was produced for an international audience by Japan National Broadcasting.
Benford is the author of over a dozen novels, including JupiterProject, Against Infinity, Great Sky River, and Timescape. A two time winner of the Nebula Award, Benford has also won the John W. Campbell Award, the Australian Ditmar Award, and the United Nations Medal in Literature.
Paul R. Billings received his MD and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University in 1979. He completed his clinical training in Internal Medicine and Medical Genetics at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1983. He is a Founding Fellow of the American College of Medical Genetics, a member of the American College of Physicians and a member of the Board of Directors of the Council for Responsible Genetics. Dr. Billings has been a member of the faculties at Harvard Medical School, the University of California at San Francisco and Stanford University.
Dr. Billings is a co-founder of GeneSage and the editor-in-chief of GeneSage’s GeneLetter which seeks to provide genetic information, services and products to improve the lives of health care providers and the patients they serve. He is on leave as Deputy Network Director and Chief Medical Officer of the Heart of Texas Veterans Health Care System, and is an expert in clinical genetics, the genetics of common diseases and the impact of genetic technology on society.
Dr. Billings has published over 100 scholarly articles and book chapters in addition to his book, DNA on Trial: Genetic Identification and Criminal Justice. He was a member of the Joint NIH/DOE Task Force on Genetic Information and Insurance, has been a technical advisor to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and the NIH/FDA Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, and has testified on many occasions to the United States Congress and to state legislatures on issues involving human genetics.
Daniel J. Kevles received his B.A. in physics and Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. Since 1964 he has been a member of the Caltech faculty, where he is the Koepfli Professor of Humanities and directs the Program in Science, Ethics, and Public Policy.
He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University. He is a member of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the History of Science Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Society of American Historians.
Kevles has written extensively about issues in science and society past and present. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. Kevles is the author most recently of The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character (W.W. Norton, 1998), which won the Watson and Helen Miles Davis Prize of the History of Science Society. His previous books include In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Harvard University Press, 1995), which received a Page One Award for its serialized version in The New Yorker; The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 1995), which earned the National Historical Society Prize; and, as coeditor with Leroy Hood, The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project (Harvard University Press, 1992).
In a rare Los Angeles visit Peter Sloterdijk, the German philosopher and cultural critic, will present his recent projects. Sloterdijk is a brilliant writer on all aspects of the human conditions, from the beginnings of life formation to recent gene manipulation. In the English-speaking world he is best known for his Critique of Cynical Reason (1987) which established him as a leading voice for a generation of post-modern intellectuals. Fiercely independent of both leftist and conservative viewpoints, Sloterdijk diagnosed the malaise of modern society and its cynical mindset, and argued for a return to Greek kynicism in its original meaning as a strategy of resistance.
In his writings of the last decade Sloterdijk has explored fundamental questions about the origin of life, the concept of soul and how we define the human body in an age of gene technology. Recently he has set off a storm of debate in Europe with his theses Regeln für den Menschenpark ( Rules for the Human Park) on the possibilities of manipulating life.
Peter Sloterdijk, born in 1947, is Professor for Asthetics and Philosophy at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karslruhe. He holds a doctorate in German literature from the University of Hamburg and is an expert on the autobiographical literature of the Weimar Republic.
Gregory Stock, director of the UCLA Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at the UCLA School of Medicine earned a Ph.D. in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University and an MBA from Harvard.
In his 1993 book, Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism, he examined the evolutionary significance of humanity's rapid technological progress. As co-editor of Engineering the Human Germline: An Exploration of the Science and Ethics of Altering the Genes We Pass to Our Children -published by Oxford University Press in January 2000 -- Stock delved into the difficult scientific and moral issues surrounding human genetic modification. His latest book, Redesigning Humans, will be published next year by Houghton Mifflin.
Stock regularly lectures on issues of science and technology, and discusses these topics on radio and television in both the United States and Europe. He has written several best sellers on human values, including the best selling Book of Questions, which has now been translated into 15 languages.
UCLA Program on Medicine, Technology and Society