PARTICIPANTS  

	Paul Abramson is recognized as one of the leading authorities on human sexuality in the U.S. He is professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and is the foremost practitioner of forensic sexuality, which includes his work as an expert witness in large-scale, public policy litigation involving sex. He is the author of many books, including With Pleasure: Thoughts on Human Sexuality and Sexual Nature, Sexual Culture.
	W. French Anderson is Director of the Gene Therapy Laboratories at the University of Southern California (USC) where he is also professor of biochemistry and pediatrics. He is recognized as the leading pioneer of gene therapy — he is called the "Father of Gene Therapy" -- perhaps the most revolutionary medical advance in recent times. Dr. Anderson was featured in a major story in TIME magazine; he is editor-in-chief of Human Gene Therapy and he has a gold medal in karate.
	Francisco Ayala was recently profiled in a major story in The New York Times as the "Renaissance Man of Evolutionary Biology." He is professor of biology and philosophy at the University of California at Irvine, where he specializes in evolutionary genetics, using DNA to track the path and flow of evolution. He has published 12 books and 650 articles. He is past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
	Gregory Benford is both a recognized physicist and world-renowned science-fiction novelist. He is professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine, where he specializes in plasma physics and astrophysics. He is also a consultant to NASA. He has written over 30 science fiction books, including If the Stars are Gods and COSM, and is considered perhaps the most scientifically accurate science fiction writer.
	Barry Beyerstein is professor of neuropsychology at Simon Fraser University in Canada. He is a leading skeptic, on the Executive Council of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), and a frequent contributor to The Skeptical Inquirer.
	Edward de Bono is the pioneer and leading authority in the teaching and stimulation of creativity. During the past 30 years, he has written over 30 books on creativity, including his path-breaking Lateral Thinking. His systems for teaching creativity have been adapted by school systems and corporations in many countries around the world.
	Todd Boyd is a professor of critical studies in the School of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California. He is an internationally recognized expert on film and popular culture and is considered a "public intellectual" on matters of race, class and gender. His recent book is Am I Black Enough For You: Popular Culture from the ‘Hood and Beyond.
	Warren Brown is professor of psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he is director of the Travis Research Institute and the Neuropsychology Laboratory. His book, Whatever Happened to the Soul, which denies an independent, dualistic nature to the soul, is considered a significant contribution to contemporary Christian thought.
	Charles Buchanan is professor of physics at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where he is responsible for the interdisciplinary teaching of physics with the biological and social sciences in a program called, "Science and the Human Condition." He is an experimental physicist involved in high-energy particle physics.
	Vern Bullough is a medical historian who specializes in the history of sex, sexual practices and taboos, and the diverse groups of "sex workers.". He has been professor at several universities (Buffalo, USC, Cal State at Northridge) and has written over 50 books, including Sexual Attitudes: Myths & Realities, Human Sexuality: An Encyclopedia, and Frontiers of Sex Research.
	Stephen J. Cannell is the most prolific producer and writer in television, having created or co-created 40 network television series, including The Rockford Files, Baretta, The A-Team, and Silk Stalkings, produced over 1000 hours of television, and personally written over 400 episodes. His production company, Stephen J. Cannell Productions, was the third largest studio in television productions. He is currently a major novelist, with six national best sellers to his credit. Remarkably, Steve is dyslexic, which he talks about openly and honestly.
	David Chalmers is considered one of the leaders in the emerging field of consciousness studies. He is professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona, where he co-heads the Center for Consciousness. His book, The Conscious Mind, takes a new position on the fundamental nature of consciousness.
	Bruce Chapman is founder and president of Discovery Institute, a public policy think tank in Seattle. From 1981-1983, he was Director of the United States Census Bureau in Washington, D.C. Later, he served as Deputy Assistant to President Reagan, from which position he directed the White House Office of Planning and Evaluation. In 1985, he was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Organizations in Vienna, Austria, serving until 1988. He received the State Department's Superior Honor Award at the end of his service.
	Patricia Smith Churchland is professor of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego, where she focuses on the foundations of neuroscience and psychology. She has written extensively on how empirical research in these sciences helps to solve, or to restructure, traditional problems in the philosophy of mind, and to explore the changes in our self-conception that such research may provoke. Books include: Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain; The Computational Brain; and The Mind-Brain Continuum.
	Mihaly Csikszentmihaly is considered the leading academic authority on both creativity and happiness. He has been professor and head of the department of psychology at the University of Chicago and now at the Claremont Graduate School. His books are world famous: FLOW: The Psychology of Optimum Experience, Finding Flow, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, and The Evolving Self.
	Arthur S. De Vany is professor of economics at the University of California at Irvine. He is a former professional athlete and a lifelong fitness buff whose theories of Evolutionary Fitness, a forthcoming book, are unusual.
	Edward Feigenbaum, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, is called the "Father of Expert Systems." He is professor of computer science at Stanford where he is co-scientific director of the Knowledge Systems Laboratory. A former chief scientist of the Air Force, he is the author of Computers and Thought which helped launch artificial intelligence.
	Timothy Ferris is the best-selling author of nine books, including Coming of Age in the Milky Way (winner of the American Institute of Physics Prize), The Mind’s Sky, and The Whole Shebang. He is emeritus professor at the University of California at Berkeley and is a frequent writer in national publications such as The New Yorker and Scientific American, and commentator for National Public Radio and PBS. He serves as a consultant to NASA on long-term space exploration policy.
	Wendy Freedman is an astronomer at the Carnegie Observatories where she is principal investigator for a major Hubble Space Telescope project assessing the distances to galaxies in order to determine the expansion rate of the universe. Her work is internationally recognized as providing the key observational data accurately defining the age of the universe.
	Robert Freeman is recognized as one of the world’s leading music intellectuals, educators and public spokesman for music education. He is Dean of the School of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, and has been chief executive of two major music schools, as President of The New England Conservatory of Music and as Director of the Eastman School of Music for 25 years.
	Francis Fukuyama is widely recognized as one of the leading geopolitical thinkers in the world. He writes and lectures about international political economy, culture, and social capital. His seminal article and book, The End of History and the Last Man, has been called the most important work of philosophical history since Marx and has stimulated enormous interest and controversy. He is professor of public policy at George Mason University and the author of TRUST: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, and The Great Disruption.
	George Geis is adjunct professor in the Anderson School of Management at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) where he specializes in strategies for the digital economy. He has written articles and books on technology, consults for major companies, tracks technology as president of Trivergence.com, and is quoted often in the national media.
	Rochel Gelman is Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University where she specializes in cognitive and language development, and learning theory. She has been a leader in the study of the thought processes of infants and young children, particularly showing that infants possess an understanding of numbers. She has been instrumental in training developmental psychologists to probe the secrets of infant and child mind.
	Barbara Marx Hubbard is a world-renowned futurist, citizen diplomat, social architect, and global politician. She is founder of the Center for Conscious Evolution and a founding board member of The World Future Society. She is the author of The Revelation: A Message of Hope for the New Millennium and Conscious Evolution.
	Rhoda Janzen has published over 150 poems and has won numerous prizes in poetry; she has been the University of California Poet Laureate twice. She is in the English Department at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) where she received the Distinction in Teaching Award for innovation in pedagogy.
	Saru Jayaraman is the national founder of WYSE: Women and Youth Supporting Each Other and is quoted frequently in the media on matters of women and other social issues. While an undergraduate at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), she was recognized as one of the top three students in the entire nation. She is now at Yale Law School.
	John Kao is an authority in the intersecting fields of corporate creativity, new media and entrepreneurial management. Both a psychiatrist and Harvard MBA, he taught the creativity courses at Harvard and Stanford Business Schools for 14 years. He is a multi-talented entrepreneur, the author of many books on creativity, including Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity, and is widely quoted in the business press.
	Steve Koonin is Vice President and Provost of the California Institute of Technology, considered the world’s leading science university, where he is also professor of theoretical physics. His research interests range from astrophysics to global climate change.
	Bart Kosko is a leading authority in the new field of fuzzy logic. He is professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California and the author of Fuzzy Thinking, Fuzzy Engineering, The Fuzzy Future, and the futuristic novel Nanotime.
	George Kozmetsky is a pioneer in the relationship between technology and society. He co-founded Teledyne, a major corporation, and the IC2 Institute, an important Think Tank at the University of Texas. He was dean of the business school at the University of Texas at Austin for 15 years, served as president of The Institute for Management Science, and assisted in the development of many technology companies, including Dell Computer. He has received numerous awards, including the National Medal of Technology for developing technology incubators.
	Robert Lawrence Kuhn is the creator, executive producer and host of Closer To Truth. With a doctorate in brain research and the author/editor of over 25 books, Dr. Kuhn is a public intellectual who speaks and writes on science, meaning, business, finance, China, and international affairs. He is Senior Advisor to Citigroup and a long-time advisor to the Chinese government on economic policy, mergers and acquisitions, science and technology, media and culture, and international communications.
	Ray Kurzweil is a world-renowned inventor, computer scientist and best-selling author. He founded four technology companies based on his revolutionary inventions in artificial intelligence, including reading machines for the blind, speech recognition, and music synthesis. He has been awarded numerous prizes, including MIT’s Inventor of the Year. His two books, The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Age of Spiritual Machines, have sparked great interest and controversy.
	Leon Lederman won the Nobel Prize in physics for contributing to the body of evidence that explains the fundamental structure of matter. He is Director Emeritus of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the founder of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, and the author of two best-selling science books, The God Particle and From Quarks to the Cosmos.
	Andrei Linde, professor of physics at Stanford University, is one of the authors of "inflationary cosmology," the startling explanation for how the universe began and the global structure of the universe. Developed while he was still in Russia, "inflation" is one of the most remarkable theories in the history of science, dramatically expanding our sense of Reality seemingly beyond all comprehension.
	John McWhorter is Associate Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley where his concentration is language change and language contact, with particular focus upon pidgin and creole languages.  He has written and spoken widely about the Ebonics controversy, the use of Black English in education, and affirmative action.  His books include The Word on the Street: Fact and Fable About American English, and Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.
	Marvin Minsky, professor of media arts and science at MIT, is one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence. He has made important contributions to machine perception, robotics, computational linguistics, and knowledge representation. He was the co-founder and long-time director of MIT’s world-renowned Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and is the author of important books on thinking such as The Society of Mind.
	Graham T.T. Molitor is vice president and legal counsel of The World Future Society and is the president of Public Policy Forecasting. He is the author of numerous articles and books on the future, including the Encyclopedia of the Future.
	Richard Mouw is president of Fuller Theological Seminary where he is also professor of Christian philosophy and ethics. He is the author of ten books, including The God Who Commands, Uncommon Decency: Christian Civility in an Uncivil World, and Consulting the Faithful.
	Nancey Murphy is professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary and a leading scholar in the relationship between science and religion. Her books include On the Moral Nature of the Universe and the award-winning Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning.
	Bruce Murray is professor of planetary science and geology at the California Institute of Technology. He was the Director of the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), NASA’s center for planetary and deep space exploration. He is also co-founder (with Carl Sagan) and president of The Planetary Society, the largest public participation organization about Space.
	Sherwin Nuland is clinical professor of surgery at Yale University, where he also teaches medical history and bioethics. His best-selling books, How We Die and How We Live, are remarkable portraits of life and death and have been called resonant works of moral philosophy.
	Cliff Penner is an internationally recognized sexual therapist, educator and speaker. Cliff & Joyce have written eight books including Men and Sex (winner of the Christian Booksellers Association Gold Medallion), 52 Ways to Have Fun, Fantastic Sex, and What Every Woman Wants Her Husband to Know About Sex.
	Joyce Penner  is an internationally recognized sexual therapist, educator and speaker. Cliff & Joyce Penner have written eight books including Men and Sex (winner of the Christian Booksellers Association Gold Medallion), 52 Ways to Have Fun, Fantastic Sex, and What Every Woman Wants Her Husband to Know About Sex.
	Dean Radin is considered one of the world’s leading parapsychology researchers, having done cutting-edge research at various institutions including the Conscious Research Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Princeton, SRI International, the University of Edinburgh, and for the U.S. government. He gives a comprehensive account of contemporary psi research in his best-selling book, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena.
	Marilyn Schlitz is Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a leading research and membership organization devoted to interdisciplinary and diverse studies of the mind. Trained as an anthropologist, she has conducted some of the most important research in parapsychology.
	John Searle, professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, is considered to be the leading living philosopher of mind. He is the author of numerous works, including The Mystery of Consciousness, The Rediscovery of the Mind, The Construction of Social Reality, and Minds, Brains and Science.
	Todd Siler is an artist whose artworks are held in numerous private and public collections worldwide, including major museums (Guggenheim, Metropolitan, Modern, Whitney, Israel). He is also a writer and educator who was the first visual artist to receive a doctorate from MIT (Psychology and Art). He has written two best-selling books, Breaking the Mind Barrier and Think Like A Genius. His company specializes in teaching creativity.
	Brian Skyrms is professor of philosophy and social science at the University of California at Irvine where he directs the program in History and Philosophy of Science. He specializes in game theory and decision making and is the author of many articles and books, including Evolution of the Social Contract.
	Gregory Stock is Director of UCLA’s Program on Medicine, Technology and Society where he focuses on critical technologies such as genetic engineer- ing. Trained in both biophysics and business, he is the author of Metaman:The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism, and edited the recent volume, Engineering the Human Germline: An Exploration of the Science and Ethics of Altering the Genes We Pass to Our Children. His books about human values, which include the best-selling The Book of Quest- ions, have sold some 3 million copies and been translated into 15 languages.
	Charles Tart is one of the leading figures in the fields of parapsychology and transpersonal psychology. He is professor at The Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and is the author of numerous articles and books on psychology and parapsychology, including Altered States of Consciousness, which has been called one of the 100 most important books in 20th Century psychology. He has studied various Eastern spiritual disciplines and holds a black belt in Aikido.
	Frank Tipler is professor of mathematics at Tulane University where his interests focus on cosmology, particularly the fate of the universe. His two books have stimulated much controversy: The Anthropic Principle, which states that this universe was required to bring forth conscious human life, and The Physics of Immortality, which presents a rather wild theory about the ultimate future state of the universe.
	Allan Tobin is Director of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Brain Research Institute where he is also professor of neurology. A leading researcher on epilepsy, Huntington’s Disease and juvenile diabetes, he is also the Scientific Director of the Hereditary Disease Foundation.
	James Trefil is professor of physics at George Mason University and the author of fifteen books, including Science Matters, Sharks Have No Bones, and Are We Unique? A regular contributor to Smithsonian Magazine, he is a commentator for National Public Radio.
	Neil deGrasse Tyson is Visiting Research Scientist in the department of astrophysics at Princeton University. He is also Director of the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He is the author of several popular books on science, including Just Visiting This Planet and Universe Down to Earth.
	Roy Walford is one of the leading authorities on the biology of aging and has promoted the concept of retarding aging and disease through dietary restriction. He has been professor of pathology at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Medical School for 30 years and was the physician inside Biosphere 2 for two years of sealed enclosure. He has published numerous articles and books on aging, including The 120-Year Diet and The Anti-Aging Plan.
	Fred Alan Wolf is a theoretical physicist and international lecturer on consciousness and the new physics. He is an award-winning author of eight books, including The Spiritual Universe, The Dreaming Universe, Parallel Universes, and Taking the Quantum Leap.