Steven M. Druker BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY |
Steven M. Druker is a public interest
attorney who founded the Alliance for Bio-Integrity, a non-profit organization
dedicated to promoting technologies that foster human and environmental health
and addressing the problems of those that do not. As executive director of the
Alliance, he organized a lawsuit against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) that forced it to divulge its files on genetically engineered (GE) foods.
This revealed that politically appointed administrators had covered up the
extensive warnings of their own scientists about the unusual risks of these
foods, lied about the facts, and then ushered these novel products onto the
market in violation of explicit mandates of federal food safety law. In
organizing the suit, he assembled an unprecedented coalition of eminent
scientists and religious leaders to stand with the Alliance as co-plaintiffs –
the first time scientists had sued a federal administrative agency on the
grounds that one of its policies is scientifically unsound.
He is a prominent commentator on the risks of GE foods, has been featured in
numerous articles in newspapers and magazines on five continents, and has
appeared on many nationally broadcast television and radio programs (such as
NPR’s The Connection and The Cleveland City Club; various BBC interviews; and
Australia’s equivalent of The Today Show). He’s been a featured speaker at
symposia at the British House of Commons and the National Congress of Brazil and
at press conferences sponsored by the Brazilian Medical Association, the Swedish
Consumers Association, and concerned members of the European Parliament.
He has served on the food safety panels at conferences conducted by the National
Research Council and the FDA; given lectures at numerous universities (including
the Biological Laboratories at Harvard, Tel Aviv University, and the University
of Copenhagen); and met with government officials world-wide, including the UK’s
Environmental Minister and the heads of food safety for France, Ireland, and
Australia. He also conferred at the White House Executive Offices with an
interagency task force of the President's Council on Environmental Quality.
On invitation, he published articles about GE food in The Congressional
Quarterly Researcher; Pacific World, a leading ecological magazine in New
Zealand; and The Parliament Magazine, an influential Brussels-based journal
covering EU policy issues. In May 2004, The Financial Times published his
comment on GE food and the deceptions of the U.S. government.
He has extensive academic background in the history and philosophy of science
and in human development and ethics – and has lectured extensively in these
fields at universities and for professional groups, including presentations at
the Center for Moral Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education,
the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and an institute of the American Bar
Association. He co-authored the introductory and final chapters of Higher Stages
of Human Development, published by Oxford University Press, and wrote a chapter
on ethical development for Transcendence and Mature Thought in Adulthood,
published by Rowman and Littlefield.
He majored in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, received a
special award for "Outstanding Accomplishment" in that field, was elected to Phi
Beta Kappa in his junior year, and graduated with “Great Distinction in General
Scholarship.” He also received his Juris Doctor from U.C. Berkeley and was
elected to both the Law Review and the Order of the Coif (the legal honor
society).