Professor Deborah Blum Lecture

Cocktails and Cyanide

Professor Blum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and, most recently, the author of The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. As a science writer for the Sacramento Bee, she wrote a series of articles examining the professional, ethical, and emotional conflicts between scientists who use animals in their research and animal rights activists who oppose that research. Titled "The Monkey Wars", the series won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting. In The Poisoner's Handbook she explores the pioneering work of two unheralded scientists who paved the way for modern forensic detectives. Since 1997, Professor Blum has continued to write—usually on topics of science and its interrelationship with American culture—for publications that have included The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Discover, Psychology Today, Rolling Stone, The Utne Reader, and Mother Jones. A past president of the National Association of Science Writers, she is a member of the governing board of the World Federation of Science Writers.