Speaker and Moderator Biographies

Dr. Cook-Deegan received his M.D. from the University of Colorado and undertook postdoctoral basic research on the molecular biology of oncogenes. He is the author of The Gene Wars: Science, Politics, and the Human Genome (Norton, 1994).

John M. Deutch is an Institute Professor at MIT. He served as Director of Central Intelligence from May 1995-December 1996. From 1994-1995, he served as Deputy Secretary of Defense and as Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology from 1993-1994. Dr. Deutch served on numerous presidential committees, including the President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee (1980-81), the White House Science Council (1985-89), the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (1990-93), the President’s Commission on Reducing and Protecting Government Secrecy (1996), and the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (1997-present). He is Chair of the Commission to Assess the Organization of the Federal Government to Combat the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (1998-present).

Dr. Deutch holds a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from MIT. He has published over 140 technical publications, as well as a number of publications on technology, international security, and public policy issues.

Herbert N. Foerstel currently serves on the Board of the National Security Archive, located at the George Washington University. From 1979 until his retirement in 1996, Mr. Foerstel was Head of Engineering and Physical Sciences Library and Head of Branch Libraries at the University of Maryland. In his book Surveillance in the Stacks: The FBI’s Library Awareness Program (1991), Mr. Foerstel made public the details of the FBI’s efforts to conduct surveillance of unclassified science libraries across the country. The FBI visited his library in 1988, asking librarians to report anyone with a "foreign-sounding name or foreign-sounding accent" and to keep track of the science materials they requested. Mr. Foerstel worked with the Maryland legislature to pass a law prohibiting librarians from revealing the borrower records or reference questions of any library user. He also testified on the issue before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights.

Mr. Foerstel’s subsequent books include: Secret Science (1993) and Free Expression and Censorship in America: An Encyclopedia (1997). His most recent book, Freedom of Information and the Right to Know, is forthcoming. Mr. Foerstel has masters degrees in library science from Rutgers University and in mathematics from the Johns Hopkins University.

Mark S. Frankel has been director of the AAAS Scientific Freedom, Responsibility and Law Program since 1990 where he develops and manages the Association's activities related to professional ethics, science and society, and science and law. He also serves as Associate Director of the AAAS Program of Dialogue Between Science and Religion, founded in 1995. From 1986-1990, he was head of the Association's Office of Scientific Freedom and Responsibility. He is staff officer for the AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility and the AAAS-American Bar Association National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists, editor of the quarterly publication, Professional Ethics Report, and coordinates the activities of the AAAS Professional Society Ethics Group. Before joining AAAS, Dr. Frankel was Director of the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL, 1980-86.

Dr. Frankel has a Ph.D. in political science from George Washington University. He has been or currently is a principal investigator for numerous AAAS projects including research integrity and scientific misconduct, the impact of national security restrictions on scientific research and communication, the use of scientific and technical information in the courts,and the ethical and legal implications of genetic testing and of human germ-line therapy.

Alan R. Goldhammer is Executive Director, Technical Affairs for the Biotechnology Industry Organization. As director, he coordinates regulatory and technical affairs for the association’s members, maintaining liaisons among regulatory agencies and industry representatives. He is also regulatory affairs consultant to the International Food Biotechnology Council, a Washington-based organization that has developed scientific criteria for assuring the safety of foods produced through biotechnology.

Dr. Goldhammer has a Ph.D. in biological chemistry from Indiana University and he held an NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University. Before joining the Biotechnology Industry Organization, he was a senior staff fellow in the Clinical Endocrinology Branch at the National Institutes of Health.

Mary L. Good is the Donaghey University Professor at the University of Arkansas Little Rock and serves as the managing member for Venture Capital Investors, LLC, a group of Arkansas business leaders seeking to foster local economic growth through support of technology-based enterprises. Previously, Dr. Good served four years as the Under Secretary for Technology for the Technology Administration in the Department of Commerce. She was appointed to the National Science Board by President Carter in 1980 and reappointed by President Reagan in 1986. She was Chair of that Board from 1988 until 1991, when she was appointed by President Bush to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. From 1988-1993, Dr. Good served as senior vice-president of technology at Allied Signal, Inc. She serves on the Boards of Biogen, IDEXX Laboratories, and Lockheed Martin Energy Research Corporation.

Dr. Good received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Her professional honors include the Priestly medal from the American Chemical Society and the National Science Foundation’s Distinguished Public Service Award. She is president-elect of the AAAS.

Peter G. Gosselin is national economics correspondent for the Los Angeles Times in Washington, DC. Until recently, he worked for The Boston Globe where he was at various times economics correspondent in New York, chief domestic policy writer in Washington and an investigative reporter in Boston. He has an MBA from Columbia University, is a two-time winner of the Polk Award for his investigations, and was a Bagehot Fellow at Columbia.

Mr. Gosselin began covering issues at the intersection of science and business while in Boston in the late 1980s. Among his stories: a case study of problems with commercialization of medical research at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and Harvard Medical School, and coverage of Boston University’s controversial decision to invest a significant portion of its endowment in a small biotechnology startup.

Alan C. Hartford is a Clinical and Research Fellow in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Hartford holds a M.D. from Harvard Medical School and a Ph.D. in political economy and government from Harvard University. He has held Fellowships from the American Cancer Society, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Society for Therapeutic Radiation Oncology. His research interests include econometric modeling, brachytherapy implant technologies, and interstitial fluid pressure measurements in experimental and clinical systems.

David G. Kern is currently Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University where, for ten years he directed both the university’s Program in Occupational Medicine and the Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island’s Division of General Internal Medicine. Dr. Kern received his medical degree from Boston University and masters degrees in occupational health and physiology from Harvard School of Public Health.

Dr. Kern became embroiled in a clash between corporate secrecy in science and academic freedom in 1997, after he announced plans to report that workers at the Microfibres, Inc. textile plant in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, were developing an unusual lung disease. Microfibres, Inc., which had asked Dr. Kern to study it workers, pointed to a confidentiality agreement between the hospital and the company and threatened to sue. As a result, Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island fired him and Brown University’s administration criticized him for violating the confidentiality agreement. The university formally concluded that Dr. Kern’s academic freedom was violated, but declined to support him. In addition to his dismissal from the hospital, Dr. Kern also will lose his university position.

In recognition of Dr. Kern’s efforts to publicize the outbreak of a previously unrecognized form of occupational lung disease and carry out his responsibilities to his patients and exposed workers, the American College of Occupational Medicine will bestow him with the Health Achievement Award in Occupational Medicine in April 1999. Dr. Kern will also receive the Humanist Award from the Ethical Society of Boston in March 1999.

Nelson Y. S. Kiang is Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Techhnology and a trustee of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. Dr. Kiang earned his Ph.D. in biopsychology from the University fo Chicago and began his career in auditory research at MIT as a staff member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. He served as the first director of the Eaton-Peabody Laboratory of Auditory Physiology at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and eventually as the Eaton-Peabody Professor in Health Sciences and Technology, within the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. Dr. Kiang held posts as Professor of Physiology in the Department of Otology and Laryngology at the Harvard Medical School and as neurophysiologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Since 1997, Dr. Kiang has served as chair of the Academic and Institute Committee of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Zhejian University, Hangzhou, China; as advisory professor for the Life Science School, Fudan University, Shanghai, China; as honorary advisor to the Chinese Medical Association; and as honorary chair of the American Chinese Medical Association. He is currently a member of the AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility.

Susan E. Lederer is Associate Professor of Humanities at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine. A historian of American medicine, she is the author of Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in American before the Second World War (Johns Hopkins, 1995), and numerous articles on the history of human and animal experimentation in twentieth-century America. From 1994-95, she served on the Presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. She is currently working on a cultural history of blood transfusion and organ transplantation in twentieth-century America.

Irving A. Lerch has been Director of International Affairs with The American Physical Society since 1992. He retired as Professor and Director of Radiation Oncology Physics at New York University in 1993 after 18 years on the faculty. From 1973-76 he was on the staff of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria, under assignment by the Department of Energy which had recruited him from the faculty of the University of Chicago. Dr. Lerch serves on the UNESCO Physics Action Council and is Chair of the Council's Working Group on Telecommunications Networks for Science. He is a member of the US Liaison Committee to the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, a former board member of the American Center for Physics, and has served on the advisory board of the International Science Foundation.

Dr. Lerch received his Ph.D. in medical physics. His principal research interests include radiation metrology and dosimetry, radiobiology, radiofrequency induced hyperthermia, mathematical biology, the physical characteristics of radiological imaging and low-energy x-ray spectroscopy. Dr. Lerch is current Chair of the AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility.

Scott McIntosh is a Special Counsel to the Appellate Staff of the Civil Division, Department of Justice. As a member of the Appellate Staff, Mr. McIntosh is responsible for representing the federal government in civil litigation before federal Courts of Appeals around the country. He engages in litigation involving a variety of statutory and constitutional issues, including First Amendment issues. He currently is responsible for representing the government in several pending cases involving the constitutionality of the government’s encryption export controls, including the Bernstein case in the Ninth Circuit and the Junger case in the Sixth Circuit.

Before joining the Department of Justice, Mr. McIntosh worked in private practice and clerked for Justice Harry A. Blackmun. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School.

Martin Michaelson is an attorney with Hogan & Hartson in Washington, DC. His practice is in the representation of colleges and universities, higher education associations, medical centers, research institutes, and other clients located throughout the United States. He returned to Hogan & Hartson in 1989 following six years of service at Harvard University, as University Counsel and previously Deputy General Counsel. Before joining Harvard, Mr. Michaelson was with Hogan & Hartson for ten years, with emphasis on federal regulatory matters, including counseling, litigation, and legislative work.

Mr. Michaelson is a graduate of the University of Chicago and Boston College Law School. He has spoken and written widely on legal risk management at, and regulation of, universities.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is U.S. Senator from New York, a position he has held for the past 23 years. Prior to his election to the Senate, Senator Moynihan held cabinet or sub-cabinet positions under Presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford, 1961-1976. From 1966-1969, he served as director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Since 1971, he has been a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was chair from 1971 to 1972 of AAAS's Section on Social, Economic, and Political Sciences and was elected to the Association's Board of Directors in 1972. Among the many public service positions that he has held throughout his distinguished career, Senator Moynihan has been Ambassador to India (1973-1975), United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations (1975-1976), chair of the Committee on the Environment and Public Works (1992-1993), and chair of the Committee on Finance (One Hundred and Third Congress). Senator Moynihan led the bipartisan Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, created by Congress in 1994. The commission reviewed guidelines by which the federal government classifies and declassifies information as well as the system for issuing security clearances.

Senator Moynihan is a graduate of Tufts University and holds a M.A. and Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He is author of numerous books, the latest is Secrecy: The American Experience (Yale University Press, 1998).

Laura Nader is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her current work focuses on how central dogmas are made and how they work. She is author of Harmony Ideology: Justice and Control in a Zapotec Mountain Village (1991) and Naked Science: An Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge (Routledge, 1996). She also contributed an essay on the impact of the Cold War on anthropology for the volume The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (Noam Chomsky, editor; New Press, 1997).

Dr. Nader holds a Ph. D. from Radcliffe/Harvard University. Her expertise is in social anthropology, comparative ethnography of law and dispute resolution, conflict, controlling processes, comparative family organizations, the anthropology of professional mind-sets, and ethnology of the Middle East, Mexico, Latin America, and the contemporary U.S.

Lita L. Nelsen is Director of the Technology Licensing Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to joining MIT, she spent 20 years in industry, primarily in the fields of membrane separations, medical devices, and biotechnology, at such companies as Amicon, Millipore, Arthur D. Little, Inc., and Applied Biotechnology. Ms. Nelsen has served on Office of Technology Assessment, National Institutes of Health, and National Academy of Sciences panels dealing with biotechnology commercialization and university technology transfer. In 1992, she was President of the Association of University Technology Managers.

Ms. Nelsen has masters degrees in chemical engineering and in management from MIT. She is widely published in the field of technology transfer from universities.

Drummond Rennie is Adjunct Professor of Medicine at the Institute for Health Policy Studies, University of California, San Francisco. He is also Deputy Editor (West) for the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Prior to his move to the Bay area, Dr. Rennie was Senior Contributing Editor for JAMA from 1983-1988, Chair of the Department of Medicine at West Suburban Hospital Medical Center in Oak Park, Illinois (1981-1988), and on the faulty of Rush Medical College (1982-1988). From 1977-1981, he was Deputy Editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and has been a consultant to the Pan American Health Organization on Ecological Affairs since 1978.

Dr. Rennie holds a medical degree from Cambridge University and he conducts research on human physiological conditions at high altitudes. Dr. Rennie has written widely on peer review, fraud, and professional ethics issues in science, particularly the biomedical sciences. He is the author of Peer Review in Scientific Publishing (Chicago: Council of Biology Editors, 1991).

Boyce Rensberger is director of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The program awards fellowships to mid-career science writers to study for a year at MIT and Harvard. Mr. Rensberger came to MIT in 1998 after having been a science writer or science editor for 32 years, beginning in 1966 at The Detroit Free Press. His career has included long stints at The New York Times (1971-1979) and The Washington Post (1984-1998). At The Post, he created the paper's monthly science and history supplement, "Horizon: The Learning Section." Rensberger also was head writer of a PBS science series for children, "3-2-1- Contact!" He was senior editor of Science 81-Science 84 magazine, a popular monthly published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Mr. Rensberger received a B.S. in zoology and journalism from the University of Miami and an M.S. in mental health communications from Syracuse University. Mr. Rensberger has written four popular science books, most recently Life Itself: Exploring the Realm of the Living Cell.

Christ D. Richmond is an Office of Naval Research Graduate Fellow with Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the technical coordinator for the DARPA-sponsored Sixth Annual Adaptive Sensor and Array Processing Workshop hosted by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He also is a member of the technical committee for the Nineth IEEE Signal Processing Society Workshop on Statistical Signal and Array Processing.

Dr. Richmond received his Ph.D., E.E., and S.M. degrees from MIT in electrical engineering. He is a recipient of the 1994 Alan Berman Research Publications Award.

Ronald L. Rivest is the Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is an Associate Director of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, a member of the lab's Theory of Computation Group and a leader of its Cryptography and Information Security Group. He is also a founder of RSA Data Security, now a subsidiary of Security Dynamics. Dr. Rivest is an inventor of the RSA public-key cryptosystem and has extensive experience in cryptographic design and cryptanalysis. He has served as Director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, the organizing body or the Eurocrypt and Crypto conferences, and as a Director of the Financial Cryptography Association.

Dr. Rivest received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. In addition to cryptography and computer and network security, he has also worked extensively in the areas of computer algorithms, machine learning, and VLSI design.

Howard K. Schachman is Professor of the Graduate School, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, and Research Biochemist to the Virus Laboratory, at the University of California, Berkeley. He has served on numerous professional bodies, including the Board of Scientific Consultants of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (1988-97), the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Cancer Center’s Division of Cancer Biology and Diagnosis (1989-92), and the National Academy of Sciences panel on Scientific Responsibility and the Conduct of Research. Dr. Schachman is a past president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology and the current chair of the Public Affairs Committee for the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Since 1994, he has been special advisor to the director of the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Schachman’s Ph.D. is in physical chemistry from Princeton University. He is currently a member of the AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility.

Alan N. Schechter is Chief of the Laboratory of Chemical Biology of the National Institutes of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. He is currently a member of the NIH Director’s Committee on Scientific Conduct and Ethics and the AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility. Dr. Schechter is co-author of the NIH’s "Guidelines for the Conduct of Research" and "Guidelines for Training and Mentoring." He holds teaching positions at George Washington Medical School in Washington, DC, and at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Dr. Schechter received his medical degree from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Since the mid-1970s, his research has focused on developing treatments for the genetic diseases of hemoglobin.

Charles M. Vest became President of MIT in 1990. President Vest is Vice Chair of the Council on Competitiveness, and serves as a member of the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), the Massachusetts Governor's Task Force on Economic Growth and Technology, and the National Research Council Board on Engineering Education. Prior to coming to MIT, he served as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Vest earned his M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan. As president of MIT, he has set three strategies for maintaining and enhancing the Institute’s excellence: identifying the most critical emerging directions in education and research, providing a strong financial base for MIT's programs, and improving the value and efficiency of services in support of these programs.

Sheila E. Widnall is Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Widnall returned to her faculty position at MIT after stepping down as Secretary of the Air Force, a position she held from 1993-1997. She has served as Associate Provost at MIT, as a member of the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government, and as past president of AAAS in 1988. Currently, Dr. Widnall is Vice President of the National Academy of Engineering. She is associated with an industry, government, and MIT partnership called the Lean Aerospace Initative that explores ways of reducing the costs and production time for military aerospace products while improving performance quality.

Dr. Widnall received her M.S. and Sc.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT. Her research includes interest in helicopter and jet noise, the aerodynamics of high-speed ground transportation, aircraft-wake studies, and turbulence.