Welcome to Penguicast, July 2007, episode seven of the podcast of Penguicon, an open source software and science fiction convention. Presenting part two of two of "Life Extension: Good News, Bad News, Weird News" by Penguicon's 2007 Science Guest of Honor, Christine Peterson.
Christine Peterson writes, lectures, and briefs the media on coming powerful technologies, especially nanotechnology. She is Founder and Vice President for Public Policy, of Foresight Nanotech Institute, the leading nanotech public interest group. Foresight educates the public, technical community, and policymakers on nanotechnology and its long-term effects.
She serves on the Advisory Board of the International Council on Nanotechnology, the Editorial Advisory Board of NASA's Nanotech Briefs, and on California's Blue Ribbon Task Force on Nanotechnology.
In 2004 she chaired the 1st Conference on Advanced Nanotechnology: Research, Applications, and Policy. For many years she directed the Foresight Conferences on Molecular Nanotechnology, organized the Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes, and chaired the Foresight Vision Weekends.
She lectures on nanotechnology to a wide variety of audiences, focusing on making this complex field understandable, and on clarifying the difference between near-term commercial advances and the "Next Industrial Revolution" arriving in the next few decades.
Her work is motivated by a desire to help Earth's environment and traditional human communities avoid harm and instead benefit from expected dramatic advances in technology. This goal of spreading benefits led to an interest in new varieties of intellectual property including open source software, a term she is credited with originating.
Wearing her for-profit hat, she serves on the Advisory Board of Alameda Capital.
In 1991 she coauthored Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution, with K Eric Drexler, which sketches nanotechnology's potential environmental and medical benefits as well as possible abuses. Full text online: http://www.foresight.org/UTF/Unbound_LBW/index.html An interest in group process led to coauthoring Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work, with Gayle Pergamit. Full text online: http://www.foresight.org/SrAssoc/99Gathering/lta_toc.html
Christine holds a bachelor's degree in chemistry from MIT.
Our next episode will present "Routers and OpenWRT" by John Merrett. Thanks to the Precursors Project for the use of their music, which can be found at medievalfuture.com/precursors. Penguicast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license. This means copy it and give it to all your friends as long as you give credit and don't sell it or change it. Please visit the Penguicon website at penguicon.org. Send email or audio files of your feedback to info@penguicon.org.
