Jim Gardner

Jim Gardner

Jim Gardner is an experienced popular science writer whose articles have appeared in Complexity (the scientific journal of the Santa Fe Institute), Nature Biotechnology, WIRED, The Wall Street Journal, New Perspectives Quarterly, World Link (the magazine of the World Economic Forum) and other leading publications in the United States and abroad.

Jim currently serves as the chief freelance book reviewer for The Sunday Oregonian
(circulation ~465,000) for popular science and technology nonfiction books. He is a graduate of Yale College, where he studied existential philosophy and theoretical biology as one of a dozen Scholars of the House and where he served as Feature Editor of Yale Scientific Magazine. Jim’s Scholar of the House thesis, which analyzed the co-evolution of literary form and content in French existentialism, was based primarily on a set of private interviews of Jean-Paul Sartre which Jim conducted in Paris in the fall of 1967 at Sartre’s invitation.

After college graduation and three years of service in a clandestine branch of US Army Intelligence in Europe, Jim attended Yale Law School where he served as Article Editor of the Yale Law Journal. During his editorial tenure, the journal published groundbreaking essays about the evolving interface of legal philosophy and science, including a prescient essay about the future of environmental jurisprudence by Professor Larry Tribe at Harvard Law School which Jim personally edited. Following law school graduation, Jim served as a law clerk for Judge Alfred T. Goodwin on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then for Justice Potter Stewart on the United States Supreme Court. During both clerkships, Jim was involved in the development and refinement of some of the key judicial doctrines of recent years in the fields of antitrust law and civil rights.

Following his judicial clerkships, Jim returned to Oregon and immediately sought election as a Democrat to the Oregon State Senate. He was elected an Oregon State Senator in 1978, receiving the highest percentage of votes received by any State Senate candidate in Oregon in the General Election and served in the State Senate for six years. During his tenure in the Senate, Jim was Chairman of the Education Subcommittee of the budget-writing Joint Committee on Ways and Means and Chairman of the Joint Committee on Trade and Economic Development. He was
consistently ranked as the outstanding member of the Oregon State Senate in polls conducted by The Oregonian and other newspapers.

Following service in the Oregon State Senate, Jim founded three organizations with which he remains affiliated:

• The Pacific Northwest law and lobbying firm of Gardner & Gardner, which represents a number of major high-tech companies and industries in the Pacific Northwest and Washington, D. C.;

• A consumer health television and Internet content production company called The Good Health Network (for which he serves as Chairman and CEO); and

• The Conference of World Regions, a non-profit organization (for which he serves as President) which operates as a joint venture of a number of leading regional, national and international organizations including the European Commission, the OECD, the World Bank, the US Council of State Governments, the US Council for International Business and many other organizations. One of the key missions of CWR is to improve the competence of elected officials around the world to deal with science and technology-driven policy issues, especially in the areas of biotechnology and e-commerce regulation. Jim is the author of one previous book, Effective Lobbying in the European Community (Kluwer 1991), which was well received in the United States, Europe and Japan. Jim’s many magazine, scientific journal and newspaper essays have appeared in a wide range of publications around the world, including those previously mentioned as well as International Economic Insights, Best of Business Quarterly, Look Japan, State Government News and other leading publications.

Jim is the author of three lead essays for Complexity, the principal scientific journal of the Santa Fe Institute:

• “The Selfish Biocosm: Complexity as Cosmology” (which appeared in the January/February, 2000, issue);

• “Genes Beget Memes and Memes Beget Genes: Modeling a New Catalytic Closure” (May/June, 1999, issue) (a groundbreaking analysis of possible future pathways of gene/culture co-evolution enabled by human germline therapy which provides the focus for a pending NIH-sponsored ELSI research project for which Jim will serve as the principal investigator); and

• “Mastering Chaos at History’s Frontier: The Geopolitics of Complexity” (which discusses the probable impact of new scientific paradigms emerging from complexity theory on the future evolutionary path of geopolitics).