Alice  Dreger,  PhD    Author  of  Galileo’s  Middle  Finger:  Heretics,  Activists,  and  the  Search  for  Justice  in  Science,  a  New  York  Times  Book  Review  editors’  choice.    Represented  by:  Betsy  Lerner  Dunow,  Carlson  &  Lerner  Literary  Agency  

 Alice  Dreger  is  an  historian  of  medicine  and  science,  a  sex  researcher,  a  mainstream  writer,  and  an  (im)patient  advocate.  An  award-­winning  scholar  and  writer,  Dreger’s  latest  major  work  is  Galileo’s  Middle  Finger:  Heretics,  Activists,  and  the  Search  for  Justice  in  Science,  which  argues  that  the  pursuit  of  evidence  is  the  most  important  ethical  imperative  of  our  time.  Funded  by  a  Guggenheim  Fellowship  and  published  by  Penguin  Press,  the  book  has  been  praised  in  many  reviews,  including  in  The  New  Yorker,  Nature,  Science,  Forbes,  New  York  Magazine,  and  Salon.  It  was  named  an  “Editor’s  Choice”  by  The  New  York  Times  Book  Review,  where  Dreger  was  labeled  “a  sharp,  disruptive  scholar.”  The  Chronicle  of  Higher  Education  has  called  her  a  “star  scholar”  and,  in  a  feature  on  her  career,  described  Dreger’s  writing  as  “reliably  funny  and  passionate  and  vulnerable.”      Dreger  earned  her  PhD  in  History  and  Philosophy  of  Science  from  Indiana  University  in  1995.  She  has  embodied  the  idea  of  the  public  intellectual,  simultaneously  publishing  widely-­cited  major  original  work  in  scholarly  journals  and  high-­visibility  essays  in  the  mainstream  press.  She  has  served  as  a  regular  writer  for  the  health  sections  of  The  Atlantic  and  Pacific  Standard  and  for  the  blog  of  Psychology  Today,  and  her  op-­eds  have  appeared  in  numerous  other  venues,  including  The  New  York  Times,  The  Washington  Post,  Chicago  Tribune,  WIRED,  Slate,  The  LA  Times,  The  Guardian,  the  Wall  Street  Journal,  and  New  Statesman.  Her  live-­tweeting  of  her  son’s  sex  ed  class  in  April,  2015,  sparked  an  international  discussion  of  abstinence-­based  education  and  led  to  her  recently  publishing  The  Talk:  Helping  Your  Kids  Navigate  Sex  in  the  Real  World,  a  short  guidebook  for  parents  commissioned  by  Amazon  Kindle  Singles.    Besides  functioning  as  an  historian  and  writer,  in  the  medical  world  Dreger  has  served  as  a  patient  advocate  and  consultant  to  pediatric  specialists  undertaking  clinical  reform,  particularly  in  the  treatment  of  children  born  with  norm-­challenging  body  types,  including  intersex,  conjoined  twinning,  facial  anomalies,  and  short  stature.  Former  chair  of  the  Intersex  Society  of  North  America,  she  also  served  as  an  ethics  consultant  to  an  NIH-­funded  Translational  Research  Network  on  pediatric  intersex  care  and  co-­edited  a  medical  education  guide  on  LGBT  and  Differences  of  Sex  Development  (DSD)  for  the  Association  of  American  Medical  Colleges.  She  has  been  on  the  faculty  of  several  major  universities,  including  most  recently  (2005-­2015)  as  a  full  professor  in  Medical  Humanities  and  Bioethics  at  Northwestern  University’s  Feinberg  School  of  Medicine.  For  Cambridge  University  Press,  she  is  currently  co-­editing  with  Françoise Baylis a collection of first-person stories called Bioethics in Action.    Dreger’s  TEDx  lecture,  “Is  Anatomy  Destiny,”  has  been  viewed  over  one  million  times,  and  she  has  appeared  as  a  guest  expert  on  hundreds  of  media  programs,  including  on  Oprah,  Savage  Love,  Good  Morning  America,  and  NPR,  and  in  many  original  documentaries,  including  for  A&E,  ABC,  Discovery,  PBS,  and  HBO.  A  native  of  New  York,  she  now  lives  in  East  Lansing,  Michigan.