Speaker Biographies
Ron Bailey is an award-winning science correspondent for Reason and the author of the new book Liberation Biology: The Moral and Scientific Case for the Biotech Revolution (Prometheus, 2005). Prior to joining Reason in 1997, Mr. Bailey produced several weekly national public television series, including Think Tank and TechnoPolitics, as well as several documentaries for PBS television and ABC News. In 1993, he was the Warren T. Brookes Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. From 1987–1990, Mr. Bailey was a staff writer for Forbes, covering economic, scientific, and business topics. He is the editor of Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death (Prima Publishing, 2002), Earth Report 2000: Revisiting the True State of the Planet (McGraw Hill, 1999), and The True State of the Planet (The Free Press, 1995). He is the author of ECOSCAM: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse (St. Martin’s Press, 1993).
Lester Crawford is senior counsel at Policy Directions Inc., which he joined in January 2006. Between 2002 and 2005, Mr. Crawford served as deputy commissioner, acting commissioner, and commissioner at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). He also served as administrator of the Food Safety and Inspection Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) from 1987 until 1991. He received the Award of Merit from the FDA in 1983 and the Presidential Rank Award from President Reagan in 1988 while he was at the USDA. Mr. Crawford is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine in the UK. Mr. Crawford is the author of over a hundred scientific publications and is the co-author of four books.
Jon Entine is an adjunct fellow at AEI and a scholar-in-residence at Miami University in Ohio. He is the author of numerous articles and commentaries on business ethics that have appeared in a wide variety of journals and anthologies. He is the editor of Let Them Eat Precaution: How Politics is Undermining the Genetic Revolution in Agriculture (AEI Press, 2006) and Pension Fund Politics: The Dangers of Socially Responsible Investing (AEI Press, 2005). Before launching his writing career, Mr. Entine was a network television news writer and producer from 1975 to 1994, winning more than twenty awards, including two Emmys for specials on reform movements in China and the former Soviet Union. As senior producer of documentaries at NBC News, he produced and co-wrote with Tom Brokaw “Black Athletes: Fact and Fiction,” which won the award for best feature film at the Forty-Fifth Annual International Sport Film Festival in 1990 and provided the inspiration for his book Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk about It (Public Affairs, 2000).
Claire Fox is the founder and director of the Institute of Ideas (IoI), a public policy think tank in London that organizes conferences and salons and publishes books on social and cultural issues ranging from science to education. Ms. Fox launched the IoI in 2000 while she was co-publisher of the controversial and groundbreaking current affairs journal LM (formerly Living Marxism). The IoI has since worked with a variety of prestigious institutions in Britain and abroad. Ms. Fox is a panelist on BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze and comments regularly on developments in culture, education, and the media on TV and radio, and writes for Britain’s leading newspapers and a range of specialist journals. Ms. Fox previously worked as a mental health social worker and as a lecturer in English literature.
Charles Paul Freund is a senior editor of Reason, a monthly magazine on politics and culture. Mr. Freund joined Reason in 1996 and has written extensively on such subjects as the political manipulation of culture, the ideological use of imagery and language, modern techniques of persuasion, and the process of disseminating ideas. His work frequently appears in the Washington Post, where he served as assistant editor of the weekly Outlook section from 1988 until 1992, and in The New Republic, where he wrote a weekly column from 1986 until 1988. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Village Voice, Esquire, Columbia Journalism Review, American Photographer, Film Comment, American Film, and in newspapers throughout the United States. A long-time documentary filmmaker, Mr. Freund has received such honors as The Golden Eagle and a Special Jury Prize from the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Frank Furedi is a professor at the University of Kent in Canterbury. He is the author of Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right (Continuum Press, 2005) and Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone: Confronting 21st Century Philistinism (Continuum Press, 2004). Mr. Furedi’s research is oriented toward the study of the impact of precautionary culture and risk aversion in Western societies. At present, he is completing a book on the rise of the fear market in contemporary society. The book, provisionally titled An Invitation to Terror, studies the role of competing groups—politicians, the media, advocacy organisations, and business—in the controversies that surround health, food, technology, terrorism, and disasters. Mr. Furedi comments on radio and television and has published articles in the New Scientist, The Guardian, The Independent, The Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph, The Express, the Wall Street Journal, The Times (London), Toronto Globe and Mail, the Christian Science Monitor, and Harvard Business Review, among others. His other books include Therapeutic Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Anxious Age (Routledge, 2004), Culture of Fear (Continuum, 2002), and Paranoid Parenting (Chicago Review Press, Inc., 2001).
Tony Gilland is the science and society director at the Institute of Ideas (IoI) in London, where he has organized many symposia on scientific and medical controversies. Since directing the Institute's groundbreaking conference “Interrogating the Precautionary Principle” at the Royal Institution in 2000, Mr. Gilland has written extensively on the problem of risk aversion and defensiveness about scientific experimentation. At IoI, he is the science editor for the “Debating Matters” series. Mr. Gilland frequently contributes to publications, radio programs, and public events on the many controversies surrounding science today.
James K. Glassman is a resident fellow at AEI, where he specializes in economics and financial markets. In addition, he is host and cofounder of TechCentralStation.com, an online journal started in February 2000, which concentrates on matters of technology and public policy. Mr. Glassman’s most recent book, The Secret Code of the Superior Investor (Crown, 2002) was named one of the top-ten investing books of 2002 by Barron’s. Between July 1993 and July 2004, Mr. Glassman wrote an internationally syndicated weekly column on investing for the Washington Post and from 2004 to 2006 was a columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service. He was also host of two weekly television programs, Capital Gang Sunday on CNN and TechnoPolitics on PBS. From 1987 to 1993, he was editor and part-owner of Roll Call. Prior to that, he had a long career in magazine publishing—as president of the Atlantic Monthly, executive vice president of U.S. News & World Report, and publisher of the New Republic.
Philip Howard is the vice-chairman of Covington & Burling and a prominent civic leader in New York. He is the author of The Death of Common Sense: How LawIs Suffocating America (Random House, 1995) and The Collapse of the Common Good: How America's Lawsuit Culture Undermines Our Freedom (Ballantine, 2002). Mr. Howard is also a periodic contributor to the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and speaks before judicial, government, and professional organizations around the country. Mr. Howard was special advisor to the Securities and Exchange Commission on regulatory simplification, worked on environmental and management reforms with Vice President Al Gore's reinventing government program, and advised the Republican leadership on regulatory reform. He also worked on overhauling civil service and other bureaucratic institutions with several governors, including Zell Miller in Georgia, Bill Weld in Massachusetts, and Jeb Bush and Lawton Chiles in Florida.
Robert Pollock has been a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board since 2005. He joined the Journal in 1995 as an editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal Europe in Brussels. He moved to the domestic Journal in 2000 and has held positions as an assistant editorial features editor, an editor of the weekly Manager's Journal column, and an editorial page writer. In 2003, Mr. Pollock was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the editorial writing category for “his clear, compelling editorials on the Food and Drug Administration's delay in approval of new cancer drugs.” In 2002, he was named runner-up in the inaugural Frédéric Bastiat Prize for Journalism awards held in London.
Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at AEI. She has been a professor of philosophy at Clark University since 1981. She specializes in ethics and contemporary moral theory and has published many scholarly articles in such journals as The Journal of Philosophy and the New England Journal of Medicine. She is coauthor with Sally Satel of One Nation under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance (AEI Press, 2005) and editor of Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life (AEI Press, 2000), one of the most popular ethics textbooks in the country. She became known to the wider public as the author of Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (Touchstone Books, 1995). Her book The War against Boys (Touchstone Books, 2001), has received widespread attention and praise and was excerpted for a cover story in The Atlantic Monthly. It was included in a list of the New York Times’ “Notable Books of the Year.” Ms. Sommers has published articles in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and USA Today, and has appeared on Nightline, ABC Evening News, Crossfire, 20/20, Politically Incorrect, and The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Alan Wolfe is professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. His most recent books include Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It (Princeton University Press, 2005), The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Practice Our Faith (Free Press, 2003), and An Intellectual in Public (The University of Michigan Press, 2003). He is the author or editor of more than ten other books, including Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice (W.W. Norton and Company, 2001) and One Nation, After All (Penguin Books, 1998). Both were selected as New York Times “Notable Books of the Year.” His current project is a book dealing with the question of whether American democracy still works. Mr. Wolfe is a contributing editor to The New Republic and Wilson Quarterly and often writes for Commonwealth, the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, and other magazines and newspapers. He served as an advisor to President Clinton in preparation for his 1995 State of the Union address and has lectured widely at American and European universities.
