Professor of History at Stanford University and, by courtesy, of Medicine (Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine). Ph.D., Harvard University, History of Science M.S., Harvard University, History of Science B.S., Indiana University, Biology. His work centers around the history of scientific controversy, especially in 20th and 21st century science, technology, and medicine. He also works on the history of scientific rhetoric, tobacco and body history, Nazi science, expert witnessing, evolution and human origins, geology and gemstone aesthetics, and the cultural production of ignorance (agnotology). Some of his books are: Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (2008), Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition (2012), Packaged Pleasures – How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire (2014). He is author and co-editor together with Londa Schiebinger of Ignorance Unmasked: Essays in the New Science of Agnotology (Stanford University Press, 2025).
- Why We Have Built Ourselves This Way
