Topics: International Speakers Bureau, Inc. |
 Fee Range: $5,001 to $10,000 (fee note) |
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 Biography: INTRODUCTION 4/2/08AS Sonia Shah is an investigative journalist and critically acclaimed author whose writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, New Scientist, The Nation and elsewhere. Her 2006 drug industry exposé, The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients, has been hailed by Publishers Weekly as "a tautly argued study, a trenchant exposé meticulously researched and packed with documentary evidence", and as "important [and] powerful" by The New England Journal of Medicine. The book, which international bestselling novelist and The Constant Gardener author John Le Carré called "an act of courage', has enjoyed wide international distribution, including French, Japanese, and Italian editions. Her 2004 book, Crude: The Story of Oil (Seven Stories), was acclaimed as "brilliant" and "beautifully written" by The Guardian and "required reading" by The Nation, and has been widely translated, from Japanese, Greek and Italian to Bahasa Indonesia. Her "raw and powerful" (Amazon.com) 1997 collection, Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire, still in print after 10 years, continues to be required reading at colleges and universities across the country. Shah's writing, based on original reportage from around the world, from India and South Africa to Panama, Malawi, Cameroon, and Australia, has been featured on current affairs shows around the United States, as well as on the BBC and Australia's Radio National. A frequent keynote speaker at political conferences, Shah has lectured at universities and colleges across the country, including Columbia's Earth Institute, MIT, Harvard, Brown, Georgetown and elsewhere. Her writing on human rights, medicine, and politics have appeared in a range of magazines from Playboy, Salon, and Orion to The Progressive and Knight-Ridder. Her television appearances include A&E and the BBC, and she's consulted on many documentary film projects, from the ABC to Channel 4 in the UK. A former writing fellow of The Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation, Shah is currently writing a book on the history and politics of malaria for Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Shah was born in 1969 in New York City to Indian immigrants. Growing up, she shuttled between the northeastern United States where her parents practiced medicine and Mumbai and Bangalore, India, where her extended working-class family lived, developing a life-long interest in inequality between and within societies. She holds a BA in journalism, philosophy, and neuroscience from Oberlin College, and lives with molecular ecologist Mark Bulmer and their two sons Zakir and Kush. |
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Programs: The Body Hunters - Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients: Armed with documentary evidence based on years of original reportage from South Africa, India and elsewhere, Shah describes how the multinational drug industry has exported clinical trials to developing countries, where ethical oversight is minimal and desperate patients abound. Featured in top medical research institutions and the FDA, this is a must-see presentation on the dark underbelly of globalization, told in clear, accessible terms for anyone interested in global health, international politics, and human rights. Crude - The Story Of Oil: Shah tells the story of the black gold that eclipsed King Coal, won the Great War, propelled the West from industrial revolution to Plastic Age, and divided the world of nations into three camps: the powerful, the powerless, and the power-hungry. In powerful, accessible language and with visual aids, Shah weaves together the science, economics, politics, and social history of oil in a way that will forever change the way you look at the world's most coveted and contentious mineral. Malaria Resurgent: There is a disease that annually sickens over one-half billion people, killing 3 million. Because of global warming, increasingly aggressive resource extraction, and growing multi-drug resistance, every year, the disease fells 16 percent more than it did the year before. By the turn of the century, this disease will be the world's most deadly contagion. It isn't Ebola or SARS or avian influenza. It isn't multi-drug-resistant staphylococcus bacteria. It isn't AIDS. In this presentation, Shah describes the history and politics of the world's most wily parasite: malaria, the microbe that has plagued history and shaped our lopsided world for millennia. |
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