BIO

Professor Oren Harman is Senior Research Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and teaches at the Graduate Program in Science Technology and Society at Bar Ilan University. He was trained in history and biology at the Hebrew University, Oxford, and Harvard, and is a historian of science and a writer. His books include The Man Who Invented the Chromosome (Harvard, 2004), Rebels, Mavericks and Heretics in Biology (Yale, 2008), Outsider Scientists (Chicago, 2013), Dreamers, Visionaries and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences (Chicago, 2018), Evolutions: Fifteen Myths That Explain Our World (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018), Handbook of the Historiography of Biology (Springer, 2020) and the children's book Darwin's Missing Notebooks (Lama Books, 2024). His book The Price of Altruism (W.W. Norton, 2010) (Bodley Head/Random House, 2010) won the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Book of the Year in Science and Technology, was nominated for the Pulitzer prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

 

Professor Harman has written widely for popular and professional audiences on genetics, evolution, history and philosophy of science, altruism, biography, and science and mythology. He has been a frequent contributor to The New Republic and Haaretz Magazine, and is the co-creator of the Israeli Oscar-nominated documentary series "Did Herzl Really Say That?". Oren's work has been featured in The New York Times, The London Times, Nature, Science, The Economist, Forbes, Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Review of Books, RADIOLAB. It has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Rothschild Foundation, the Israel Science Foundation, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He lectures widely, and has been a guest of the Marine Biological Laboratories, Woods Hole; the Pasteur Institute, Hong Kong; the European Molecular Biology Laboratories, Heidelberg; the Humanities Center, Yale University; The Royal Society of Arts, London; the Department of History of Science, Harvard University; the Evolution Department, Freie University; Amrita University, India; the Edinburgh Book Festival; the World Science Festival, the Oxford Literary Festival, Berwin's Salon. Oren grew up in New York and Jerusalem where he lives with his wife, Yael, and their three little children.