Background

William Broad was born on March 7, 1951, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States.

Education

William Broad earned a Master's Degree in the History of Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1977.

Career

William Broad joined The New York Times in 1983 and writes about everything from exploding stars and the secret life of marine mammals to the spread of nuclear arms and the inside story on why the Titanic sank so rapidly. Before that, he worked in Washington for Science, the magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Broad's media appearances include Larry King Live, The Charlie Rose Show, The Discovery Channel, Nova, The History Channel, and National Public Radio. His speaking engagements have ranged from the U.S. Navy in Washington, to the Knickerbocker Club in New York, to the Monterey Aquarium in California. He has also given talks at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City.

His first book, co-authored with Nicholas Wade, is Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science. In this work, the authors expose several cases of scientists who, for one reason or another, lose their purely scientific pursuit of the truth in favor of the more compelling drive to in some way prove a favorite theory of theirs or to make a name for themselves.

Two years later, Broad published his Star Warriors: A Penetrating Look into the Lives of the Young Scientists behind Our Space-Age Weaponry. The book relates the story of a small team of young scientists working at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories in California.

Continuing along the same theme, Broad, together with several colleagues from the New York Times, published Claiming the Heavens: The "New York Times" Complete Guide to the Star Wars Debate in 1988. The book answers very critical questions about President Reagan's Star Wars plan.

In his next book Teller's War: The Top-secret Story behind the Star Wars Deception, Broad turns his full focus on the Hungarian-born Teller, a scientist who continually went over the heads of scientific colleagues and into the corridors of Washington to lobby for some pet scheme: the hydrogen bomb in 1950, a weapons laboratory of his own in 1952, the so-called "clean bomb" in 1957.

In 1997, Broad turned to a less controversial topic with his book The Universe Below: Discovering the Secrets of the Deep Sea. In it, he reports that new discoveries have shown that life is much more abundant in the ocean than previously thought. The number of species found in the depths of the ocean might actually constitute more than all the creatures found on land, scientists are now surmising. The book explores these new developments, as well as the political debates that occurred during the Cold War surrounding the military's involvement in developing submersibles that were capable of searching the bottom of the ocean. At the end of the Cold War, the technology the U.S. Navy produced was declassified and put to use by private and scientific industries.

Broad's Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War was published in 2001. It is a joint effort by the New York Times staff members who made a study of bioterrorism. One of the members of the writing team, Judith Miller, was a victim of bioterrorism, having received a letter laced with anthrax following the attack on the World Trade Center. Germs made the New York Times bestseller list, eventually hitting the number one position. In the book, the three reporters cover the history of bioterrorism, such as a detailed account "of bioweapons programs, including the United States' largely secret experiments during and after World War II, the former Soviet Union's massive buildup after signing a ban on such weapons in 1972 and Saddam Hussein's push to develop a smorgasbord of deadly pathogens in Iraq.

Achievements

• In more than thirty years as a science journalist, William Broad has written hundreds of front-page articles and won every major journalistic award in print and film. He won two Pulitzer Prizes with Times colleagues, as well as an Emmy and a DuPont. He was a Pulitzer finalist in 2005 for articles written with Times colleague David E. Sanger on nuclear proliferation.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Betrayers of the Truth

    (Examines instances of scientific fraud in research areas ...)

    1982
  • The Science of Yoga: The Risks and Rewards

    (In this remarkable book about yoga, William Broad, a life...)

    2012
  • Star Warriors

    (Reveals the world and work of the physicists and mathemat...)

    1985
  • The Oracle

    (A gripping modern-day detective story about the scientifi...)

    2006
  • Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War

    (In Germs, three veteran reporters draw on top sources ins...)

    2001
  • The Universe Below

    (William J. Broad takes us on an adventure to the planet's...)

    1997

Personality

William Broad has practiced yoga since 1970.

Interests

• yoga

Connections

William Broad has three adult children and lives with his wife in the New York metropolitan area.