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Marcia Angell, M. D., is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She stepped down as Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine on June 30, 2000. A graduate of Boston University School of Medicine, she trained in both internal medicine and anatomic pathology and is a board-certified pathologist. She joined the editorial staff of the New England Journal of Medicine in 1979, became Executive Editor in 1988, and Editor-in-Chief in 1999.

Dr. Angell writes frequently in professional journals and the popular media on a wide range of topics, particularly medical ethics, health policy, the nature of medical evidence, the interface of medicine and the law, care at the end of life, and the relations between industry and academic medicine. Her critically acclaimed book, Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case, was published in June, 1996, by W. W. Norton & Company. Her most recent book is The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It, published in August, 2004, by Random House. In addition, Dr. Angell is co-author, with Dr. Stanley Robbins and, later, Dr. Vinay Kumar, of the first three editions of the textbook, Basic Pathology. She also has written chapters in several books dealing with ethical issues.

Dr. Angell is a member of the Association of American Physicians, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences, the Alpha Omega Alpha National Honor Medical Society, and is a Master of the American College of Physicians and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1997, Time magazine named Marcia Angell one of the 25 most influential Americans.

Shannon Brownlee is a nationally known writer and essayist whose work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Slate, Time, Washington Monthly, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, among other publications. Her book, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, was published in 2007 by Bloomsbury Press and was named the best economics book of the year by the New York Times. The Christian Science Monitor called Overtreated, “fascinating, counterintuitive, and potentially revolutionary.”

A former senior writer at U.S. News & World Report, Brownlee is now a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan think tank in Washington, DC, where she focuses on issues surrounding health care policy, the pharmaceutical industry, and the nature of evidence in medicine. She lectures regularly at universities, medical schools, and public venues, and has served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and an instructor at the Santa Fe Science Writer's Workshop, and the Master’s in Arts Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. She holds a master of science in marine sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has won numerous awards, among them the Association of Health Care Journalists Award for Excellence, the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting, the National Association of Science Writers Science-in-Society Award, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.

A member of the Association of Health Care Journalists, American Society of Journalists and Authors, and National Association of Science Writers, Brownlee lives on the Chesapeake Bay with her husband and son. Her Web site is www.overtreated.com. You can find her most recent work at http://www.newamerica.net/people/content/404/all.

Jennifer Miller Croswell, M.D. received a BA in English literature from the University of Chicago, an MA in theatre history, literature, and criticism from the Ohio State University, and her MD from the University of Illinois at Chicago.  She admits this constitutes a somewhat checkered past, but notes that it has been an interesting ride, to say the least.  After several years of residency in general surgery at George Washington University, she transitioned in 2005 into the Department of Health and Human Services' Emerging Leaders Program, a two-year fellowship designed to recruit “the young and the (intellectually) restless” into the field of public health.  She now serves within NIH’s Office of Medical Applications of Research (OMAR) as a Senior Advisor to the NIH Consensus Development Program.  Her primary research interests include the development and implementation of evidence-based medical practices, issues surrounding the use of surrogate endpoints in clinical trials, and the balance of benefits and harms in preventive screening programs for the healthy public.

Paul Goldberg joined The Cancer Letter in 1986. He launched the newsletter's business section. His reporting on the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, FDA, and practitioners of unconventional therapy has been recognized by the Washington DC Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, the Gerald Loeb Awards, and the Newsletter and Electronic Publishers Foundation. He was a reporter for the Wichita (KA) Eagle and the Reston Connection. He authored a history of the Helsinki Watch group in the former USSR, called "The Final Act" (William Morrow, 1988), and co-authored, with Ludmilla Alexeyeva, "The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post- Stalin Era" (Little, Brown, 1990; and in paperback, University of Pittsburgh Press). Goldberg also translated from the Russian, "To Live Like Everyone," the memoirs of the late dissident Anatoly Marchenko (Henry Holt, 1989). He is a graduate of Duke University with a B.A. in economics (1981).

Barnett S. Kramer, M.D., M.P.H., Director of the Office of Medical Applications of Research at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Kramer is also editor-in-chief of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. He holds positions with the National Cancer Institute and the Department of Medicine of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. Dr. Kramer has extensive experience in cancer treatment studies, primary prevention studies, and clinical screening trials of lung, ovarian, breast, and prostate cancers. He received his medical training at the University of Maryland and Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, Mo., and has a master’s degree in public health from The Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health.

Lisa M. Schwartz, M.D., M.S., and Steven Woloshin, M.D., M.S., are general internists at the White River Junction Veterans Administration in Vermont (Lisa is Co-Director, Steven is a Senior Research Associate) and associate professors of medicine and community and family medicine at Dartmouth Medical School. Their work, which focuses on improving the communication of medical information to patients, physicians, journalists, and policymakers, has appeared in leading medical journals.

For the past several years they have focused on creating and testing practical ways to overcome two important barriers to good communication: (1) many people (patients, providers, journalists) are limited in their ability to interpret medical data; and (2) exaggerated and incomplete health messages are common. To this end they are developing and testing material to help people understand medical statistics, the benefits and harms of prescription drugs, and write an occasional series for the Washington Post entitled "Healthy Skepticism" (available at: http://www.vaoutcomes.org/washpost.php).

Gary Taubes is the author of Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease (Knopf, 2007). Taubes began writing and reporting on science and medicine for Discover magazine in 1982. As a free-lance journalist, he's written for Science, where he's been a contributing correspondent since 1993, for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Playboy and a host of other publications. Taubes has won numerous awards for his reporting including the International Health Reporting Award from the Pan American Health Organization and the National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Journalism Award, which he won in 1996, 1999 and 2001. (He is the only print journalist to win this award three times.) Since the mid-1980s, Taubes has focused his reporting on controversial science, on the excruciatingly difficult job of establishing reliable knowledge in any field of inquiry, and on the scientific tools and methodology needed to do so. His previous books include Nobel Dreams (Random House 1987), and Bad Science, The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion (Random House, 1993), a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Awards.

H. Gilbert Welch M.D., M.P.H.,  is a general internist who is the Co-Director of the VA Outcomes Group, White River Junction, Vt. and a Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Community and Family Medicine, Dartmouth Medical School. A graduate of Harvard, University of Cincinnati and the University of Washington, he has held a variety of jobs--a math teacher in a New England boarding school, a disc-jockey in a small town in Wyoming, a general practitioner in the Alaskan bush and a journal editor for a medical society headquartered in Philadelphia. For the 20 years he has been practicing medicine, Dr. Welch has also been asking hard questions about his profession. His research has focused on the problems created by medicine's efforts to detect disease early: physicians test too often, treat too aggressively and tell too many people that they are sick.   

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