Jeanne Guillemin
Senior Fellow, MIT Security Studies Program
Professor of Sociology, Boston College
Professor Guillemin does
work in the area of medical anthropology. She has written extensively about
hospital technology and organization, based on field work and site visits
in the United States and abroad (see notably Mixed Blessings: Intensive Care
for Newborns Oxford University Press, 1986, 1991, with L. Holmstrom). Since
1986 she has been a full Professor at Boston College. Her teaching has ranged
from Introductory Anthropology to Inequalities in Health Care to a current
seminar on Risk and Danger.
Dr.Guillemin is
also currently a Senior Fellow at the MIT Security Studies Program. With
twenty years of experience in the investigation of biological weapons controversies,
she has published broadly about them in Science, Scientific American, The
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, and The New England Journal
of Medicine. She did her undergraduate work at Harvard University and received
her graduate degree in sociology and anthropology from Brandeis University
in 1973. She has been a Congressional Fellow (sponsored by the American Anthropological
Association) and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Hastings
Center for the Study of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences in New York.
She is an associate of the Harvard-Sussex Program, a major institute for
the study of biological and chemical weapons non-proliferation. In 2002-2003,
she will be a Dibner Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at the
Dibner Institute at MIT.
Her latest book is
Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak (University of California
Press, 1999, pb 2001). It is the definitive account of the 1992 team research
of the largest inhalational anthrax epidemic in recorded history, which in
1979 killed sixty-six people in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk. Guillemin’s
interviews with the families of victims were the basis for the epidemiological
map that proved an anthrax aerosol from a nearby military facility caused
the outbreak. Her Sverdlovsk data proved for the first time that the incubation
period for human inhalational anthrax can be as long as six weeks, which is
why people exposed to anthrax in 2001 were cautioned to take antibiotics for
sixty days. This author is an experienced speaker on biological weapons and
bioterrorism. She has appeared on national television and radio news programs,
including NPR, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, Nightline, Frontline, and the O’Reilly
Factor.
