James A. Shapiro, author of the recent book Evolution: A View from the 21stCentury, is Professor of Microbiology a the University of Chicago. He has a BA in English Literature from Harvard (1964) and a PhD in Genetics from Cambridge (1968). He grew up in the same Chicago neighborhood as Lynn Margulis. As an American Cancer Society fellow in Jonathan Beckwith’s laboratory at Harvard medical School, he and his colleagues used in vivo genetic manipulations to clone and purify the lac operon of E. coli, an accomplishment that received international attention. Since 1992, he has been writing about the importance of biologically regulated natural genetic engineering as a fundamental new concept in evolution science. He is editor of DNA Insertion Elements, Episomes and Plasmids (1977 with Bukhari and Adhya), Mobile Genetic Elements (1983), and Bacteria as Multicellular Organisms (1997 with Martin Dworkin).