Stanford University
300 Pasteur Drive, Stanford, CA 94304
USA
Join Dean Lloyd Minor in welcoming
Michael Specter
Staff Writer, the New Yorker
Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and focuses on science, technology, and public health. Since joining the magazine, he has written about the global AIDS epidemic, avian influenza, malaria, the world’s diminishing freshwater resources, synthetic biology, the debate over the meaning of our carbon footprint, and editing DNA with CRISPR technology. He has also written profiles of Lance Armstrong, Richard Branson, the ethicist Peter Singer, Dr. Oz, the anti-GMO activist Vandana Shiva, Sean (P. Diddy) Combs, and Miuccia Prada. Since September, Specter has been a visiting scholar at Bio-X where he is working on a book about editing genes.
Specter came to The New Yorker from the New York Times, where he was a roving foreign correspondent based in Rome. From 1995 to 1998, Specter served as the Times Moscow bureau chief. From 1985 to 1991, Specter worked at the Washington Post, where he covered local news before becoming the Post’s national science reporter and, later, the newspaper’s New York bureau chief. In 1996 he won the Overseas Press Club’s Citation for Excellence for his reporting from Chechnya. He has twice received the Global Health Council’s annual Excellence in Media Award, first for his 2001 article about AIDS called “India’s Plague,” and secondly for his 2004 article “The Devastation,” about the ethics of testing H.I.V. vaccines in Africa. He also received the 2002 AAAS Science Journalism Award for his article “Rethinking the Brain,” which is about the scientific basis of how we learn. In 2010, his book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives received the Robert P. Balles Annual Prize in Critical Thinking.
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