Leon Gortler is a professor of chemistry at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He holds AB and MS degrees from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Harvard University where he worked with Paul Bartlett. He has long been interested in the history of chemistry, in particular the development of physical organic chemistry, and has conducted over fifty oral and videotaped interviews with major American chemists.

Ted Everson, the director of clinical communications at Vital Issues in Medicine (VIM), a medical education company, earned a PhD in history and philosophy of science and technology from the University of Toronto and an MS in medical genetics from the University of British Columbia. During his tenure at CHF he founded the biotechnology program, which included focused scholarship on industry development. He is the author of The Gene: A Historical Perspective (2007), “Genetic Engineering Methods” in The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Technology (2004), and “Genetics and Molecular Biology” in History of the Exact Sciences and Mathematics (2002).

Sally Smith Hughes graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963 with an A.B. in zoology. She received her M.A. in Anatomy from the University of California, San Francisco, in 1966. In 1972, she earned her Ph.D. in the history of science and medicine from the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, University of London. She served as postgraduate research histologist with the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco from 1966–1969, and as science historian for the History of Science and Technology program at the Bancroft Library from 1978–1980. Dr. Hughes was the Othmer Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in 1997. She is presently research historian and principal editor on medical and scientific topics for the Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley. She is author of The Virus: A History of the Concept, and is currently interviewing and writing in the fields of AIDS and molecular biology and biotechnology.

Lara Marks was educated at Sussex University and Oxford University, where she earned a doctorate in the history of medicine. Marks has held full-time research and teaching posts at Queen Mary College, London University; London School of Hygiene; and Tropical Medicine and Imperial College, London. She currently holds a visiting post at Cambridge University, and she is a senior research partner for Silico Research Limited, an independent organization that studies the life sciences industry. Marks’s publications include Sexual Chemistry: An International History of the Contraceptive Pill (2001) and “Assessing the Risk and Safety of the Pill: Maternal Mortality and the Pill,” a chapter in Risk and Safety in Medical Innovation (2006).

Leo Slater was the 2001–2002 John C. Haas Fellow and a senior research historian at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, where he also served as Director of Historical Services from 1997 to 2000. A former research chemist at the Schering-Plough Research Institute, he received his doctorate in History from Princeton University in 1997.

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