Bill McKibben & Marcy Darnovsky: Will Your Grandchildren Be Genetically Modified

Join Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Enough, and Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society in a discussion of the social and political implications of the new human biotechnologies. Humans 2.0: Will Your Grandchildren Be Genetically Modified? will be free and moderated by Michael Pollan of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism and author of The Botany of Desire.

Humans 2.0: Will Your Grandchildren Be Genetically Modified?
A conversation about the social and political implications of the new human biotechnologies

Tuesday, September 28, 2004, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

University of California, North Gate Library, Hearst at Euclid Avenue, Berkeley
Wheelchair accessible.
Directions: http://journalism.berkeley.edu/directions.html

This is a free event.

About the speakers:

Bill McKibben's first book, The End of Nature, was also the first book for a general audience about global warming. Excerpted in the New Yorker, it is now available in 20 languages. His other eight books include The Age of Missing Information and Hope, Human and Wild, as well as his most recent: Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. His work appears regularly in Harpers, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, Outside, and a variety of other national publications. A scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, he has been the recipient of Lyndhurst and Guggenheim Fellowships, and was the 2000 winner of the Lannan Prize for Nonfiction Writing. A graduate of Harvard College, his work has been collected in annual volumes of America's Best Nature Writing, Science Writing, Spiritual Writing, and Travel Writing, as well as in the Oxford and Norton anthologies of nature writing. His tenth book, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Region, Vermont's Champlain Valley and new York's Adirondacks, will be published in April. He is currently at work on a book about economy and scale.

Dr. Marcy Darnovsky is Associate Executive Director at the Center for Genetics and Society, a public interest organization working to encourage responsible uses and effective societal governance of the new human genetic and reproductive technologies. She has taught courses on the politics of science, technology, and the environment at the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State University, and on the sociology of gender at Hayward State University. She has written widely on subjects including the U.S. environmental movement and the politics of human genetic technology, and has worked as an activist in a range of progressive political movements.

Michael Pollan, contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and author, has done a range of work in journalism, environmentalism, and architecture. Pollan, originally from Long Island, earned his college degrees at Bennington College, Oxford University (Mansfield College), and Columbia University, where he received a masters in English in 1981. He served for many years as executive editor for Harper's Magazine and writes a column on architecture for House & Garden. His first book, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education (1991), and his most recent, The Botany of Desire (2001), are among Pollan's many works that examine the intersections between science and culture. Shorter work by Michael Pollan has been anthologized in collections such as Best American Essays and the Norton Book of Nature Writing.Pollan has given lectures on environmentalism, gardening, and nature at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the New York Public Library, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the New York Botanical Garden, the New York Horticultural Society, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and Dumbarton Oaks.