JOHN RENNIE DELIVERS HILL LECTURE ON SCIENCE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA

John Rennie, editor in chief of Scientific American, was selected to give this year’s Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture on Science, Society, and the Mass Media at the University of Tennessee. In his eight years at the helm of Scientific American, Rennie has modernized and reinvigorated that 157-year-old popular science journal, the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States.

Rennie’s lecture, titled “Naysaying the Nincompoops: On Being a Maven in a Misinformed Era,” was presented on March 4. He spoke about the necessity and challenge for science journalists and scientists to try to counter the prevalent misinformation about matters relating to science, whether they be utter nonsense (like TV psychics) or pseudoscience (like intelligent design creationism) or carefully packaged misrepresentations of real science (like global warming skepticism). He also assessed the claim of the Raellian cult that they have cloned a human being.

Rennie was born in 1959 in a Boston suburb. He received his B.S. in biology from Yale University in 1981, then worked for several years in a Harvard Medical School laboratory. In 1984 he set out to fulfill a lifelong dream--inspired by the works of Isaac Asimov--of a career in science writing. He covered biology, technology, and medicine for The Economist and a variety of other magazines and newsletters.

He joined the staff of Scientific American in 1989 as a member of the Board of Editors. Rennie was named editor in chief in 1994. In addition to his leadership of the monthly magazine, Rennie helped to launch the family science magazine, Scientific American Explorations, and Scientific American’s Web site (www.SciAm.com).

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(Source: news release)