Jonathan Weiner’s latest book is Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality. He is the author of five other books, including The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Jonathan has also written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, and many other magazines and newspapers. His writing has been supported by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and NASA. He has taught at Princeton University, as McGraw Professor; at Arizona State University, as Rhodes Chair Professor; and at Rockefeller University, as Writer In Residence. Since 2005, Jonathan has taught at Columbia Journalism School, where he is the Maxwell M. Geffen Professor of Medical and Scientific Journalism.

Photo credit - Piotr Redlinski

Past Events

• Science & Story: The Art of Communicating Science Across All Media

  2011 Festival

  Bringing the drama of science to life for a broad audience is a vital cultural challenge. In a series of vibrant programs, hear how some of the foremost interpreters of science are using their narrative crafts to shift science to its rightful place at the cultural center.

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Blog Posts

• The Great Escape: Science’s Oldest Dream

  When you hang around with great biologists, you hear conversations that change your sense of what it means to be alive. In the 1990s I happened to be present at a lab in California when a legendary molecular biologist began musing about a new interest: the possibility of a cure for aging. The biologist’s name was Seymour Benzer, and he was in his seventies. As a young man, he’d helped start the revolution in molecular biology, along with a few other brilliant upstarts like James Watson and Francis Crick. He still ran a big, buzzing research lab at Caltech. And soon enough, he made a significant discovery. In 1998, he found a gene that allowed a fruit fly to outlive all of the other flies in the fly bottle. It was a mutant Methuselah. Read »