Education
Vassar College.
Vassar College.
He has also written for The Washington Post and The New York Times. Specter initially covered local news at The Washington Post in 1985 but then became a national science reporter for the Post and finally the New York City bureau chief In 1991, Specter transferred to the Times.
There, from 1994 to 1998, he was based in Moscow.
In 1995, he was appointed co-chief of the Moscow bureau of the Times. While in Russia, he covered stories such as the war in Chechnya, the 1996 Russian presidential elections, and the declining state of Russian health care.
In 1998, he became a roving correspondent based in Rome covering topics as varied as Europe"s demographic crisis, Michelangelo"s Florentine Pietà, and the spread of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome in Africa. His 2009 book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives (), explores the ways in which people in the United States and Europe have increasingly rejected scientific truths, backed by impressive data.
They instead are embracing what often seem to be more comfortable fictions about issues such as the value of organic food, vaccine safety, and personal genomics.
He recently delivered a talk titled "The danger of science denial" at TED 2010. At The New Yorker, he has written about the global Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome epidemic, avian influenza, malaria, scientific efforts to resurrect extinct viruses, synthetic biology, genetically modified food, efforts to mine the human genome to fight disease, and the world’s diminishing freshwater resources. Specter is a son of Howard and Eileen Specter.
He was previously married to Alessandra Stanley, now a television critic for The New York Times.
They have one daughter, Emma. Specter is a 1977 graduate of Vassar College.
In 1996, Specter was awarded the Overseas Press Club Citation for Excellence for his coverage of the War in Chechnya. In 2002, he won the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Science Journalism Award. He has also twice received the Global Health Council"s Annual Excellence in Media Awardfor his piece about Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome in India, “India"s Plague” (12/17/01) and for one about Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and the population crisis in Russia, “The Devastation,“. In 2009, Specter received the Robert P. Balles Annual Prize in Critical Thinking for his book Denialism. The yearly award is given by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry to the author of the published work that best exemplifies healthy skepticism, logical analysis, or empirical science.
