GEORGE WALD was born in New York City in 1906, the son of Jewish immigrant parents. An award-winning biologist, he taught at Harvard University for forty-three years and was known as an outstanding teacher. In 1966, TIME magazine listed him in a cover story as “one of the ten best teachers in the country.” Wald’s long career of research on vision culminated in his discovery of how Vitamin A works in the retina, leading to the understanding of the chemical basis of vision, for which he shared the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Haldan Keffer Hartline and Ragnar Granit. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1950, to the American Philosophical Society in 1958, and in 1963–64 he was a Guggenheim Fellow, spending the year at Cambridge University. He also received honorary degrees from the University of Berne, Yale University, Wesleyan University, New York University, McGill University, Clark University, and Amherst College. Wald spoke out on many political and social issues, and his fame as a Nobel laureate brought national and international attention to his views. He was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. In 1997, Wald died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of ninety.
LEWIS AUERBACH was the producer CBC Ideas 1967 to 1971. He later worked at TV Ontario, the Science Council of Canada, the CRTC, the Auditor General of Canada, and as a private consultant. As a volunteer he was Board Chair at Tamir, which provides housing in Ottawa for the mentally challenged; at Options Bytown, which provides supportive housing for otherwise homeless, and the Harvard Club of Ottawa. He also has served on the Boards of the Great Canadian Theatre Company, the Hospice at Maycourt, and Oxfam. Currently he sits on the Board of the Forum for Research and Policy in Communications and the Harvard Alumni Association. He lives in Ottawa.
ELIJAH WALD is a writer and musician based in Philadelphia. As a musician, he has recorded two solo albums and worked with Dave Van Ronk, Eric Von Schmidt, and the African American string band master Howard Armstrong. He is widely published as a journalist and has written a dozen books, including Dylan Goes Electric, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, and Dave Van Ronk's memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, which inspired the Coen Brothers' movie Inside Llewyn Davis. (Also Exploding the Gene Myth in collaboration with Ruth Hubbard.) He has an interdisciplinary PhD in ethnomusicology and sociolinguistics, has taught at UCLA and Boston College, has won numerous awards including a 2002 Grammy, and currently performs in a duo with his wife, clarinetist Sandrine Sheon.
