Ralph I. Horwitz, M.D., is the Arthur Bloomfield Professor and chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford University. Dr. Horwitz received his M.D. from the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine; trained in internal medicine at McGill University and the Massachusetts General Hospital; and was a research fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at Yale. He is internationally known for his pioneering research that helped to establish the field of clinical investigation and outcomes research; for his innovative programs in the education of physicians and the training of physician scientists; and his visionary renewal of the social contract linking the practice of medicine to the civic responsibility of the profession of medicine. He is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Association of American Physicians (AAP). He recently completed a term as president of the American Board of Internal Medicine and member of the Council of the AAP.

Mary-Claire King, Ph.D., is the American Cancer Society Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. Dr. King was an undergraduate mathematics major at Carleton College. She completed her Ph.D. in genetics at the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrating in her dissertation that human and chimpanzees are 99 percent identical in protein and DNA sequences. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco and a faculty member at University of California, Berkeley prior to joining the University of Washington. Her current research focuses on the genetics of complex human traits, particularly inherited predisposition to breast and ovarian cancer.


Alan I. Leshner, Ph.D., is chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and executive publisher of its journal, Science. Previously, Dr. Leshner had been Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Deputy Director and Acting Director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Before that, he held a variety of senior positions at the National Science Foundation. Dr. Leshner began his career at Bucknell University, where he was Professor of Psychology. He received an A.B. in Psychology from Franklin and Marshall College and M.S. and Ph.D. in Physiological Psychology from Rutgers University. Dr. Leshner is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science; and a fellow of AAAS, the National Academy of Public Administration, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004, he was appointed by President George W. Bush to the National Science Board.

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