Sunday 13 December 2009

Who is the President of The Galton Institute?




Geneticist of the Galton Laboratory, University College London and head of The Galton Institute (aka. The British Eugenics Society) Steve Jones

Steve Jones
was born in 1944 in Aberystwyth, Wales, and has degrees from the University of Edinburgh and University of Chicago . Much of his academic research has been concerned with snails and the light their anatomy can shed on biodiversity and genetics. He is professor of genetics at Galton Laboratory of University College London, and has had visiting posts at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, the University of California at Davis, University of Botswana, Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, and Flinders University in Adelaide.

Steve Jones is probably best known to the general public as a regular broadcaster and writer of popular books on scientific issues. He gave the 1991 Reith Lectures on "The Language of the Genes" has written and presented a Radio 3 series on science and the arts, "Blue Skies", and a TV series on human genetics, "In the Blood". He also appears on other radio and TV programmes, such as Today, Question Time, Late Review and Newsnight , and writes a regular column in The Daily Telegraph , "View from the Lab". His books include Genetics for Beginners (Icon Books), The Language of the Genes (HarperCollins), In The Blood (HarperCollins), Almost like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated (Anchor Books), Y: the Descent of Men (Little, Brown), and (LittleBrown) ... He was one of the signatories to a letter supporting a holiday on Charles’ Darwin’s birthday , published in The Times on February 12, 2003, and also sent to the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary. In April 2007 he chaired the BHA Voltaire Lecture "Are religion and science incompatible?", given by Lord Taverne.

His many awards include: the Rhone-Poulenc book prize and the Yorkshire Post first book prize in 1994; the Royal Society Faraday Medal for public understanding of science in 1997; the BP Natural World Book Prize in 1999 and 2000; the Institute of Biology Charter Medal in 2002; and the Irwin Prize for Secularist of the Year in 2006.

And here's his mate at The Humanist Society, Dicky Dawkins giving a science class, which is actually quite funny...

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