Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author and Scientist to Speak at Pacific for BioFest

Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer-prize-winning author of “Guns, Germs and Steel,” will

be the keynote speaker at University of the Pacific’s BioFest, a celebration of the recently opened

Biological Sciences Center. Diamond will speak at the Faye Spanos Concert Hall on Pacific’s Stockton

campus at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 2. His speech is free and open to the public.

Diamond, a professor of geography and physiology at the University of California at Los Angeles, is a

best-selling author and a world-renowned evolutionary biologist. He has led numerous trips to New Guinea

to study the evolution of birds there and designed the comprehensive plans used today to preserve

wildlife areas in that country. He also wrote the best-selling book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to

Fail or Succeed.”

“Dr. Jared Diamond is one of the most interesting scientific minds in America today,” said Thomas Krise,

dean of the College of the Pacific, Pacific’s liberal arts and sciences school. “He has a genuine gift

for weaving the natural sciences and the humanities together in his writings to make the evolution of

animals, societies and civilization understandable to everyone.”

Diamond’s best-known work is the non-fiction, Pulitzer prize-winning “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” published

in 1998. That book asserts that the main international issues of our time are legacies of processes that

began during the early-modern period, in which civilizations that had experienced an extensive amount of

"human development" began to intrude upon technologically less advanced civilizations around the world.

That book was later turned into a three part, three hour 2005 PBS documentary called “Guns, Germs and

Steel” that aired in 2005.

In 2005, he published “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.” In that book, he explored why

ancient societies, including the Anasazi of the American Southwest and the Viking colonies of Greenland,

as well as modern ones such as Rwanda, have fallen apart. Not every collapse has an environmental

origin, but an eco-meltdown is often the main catalyst, he argued, particularly when combined with

society's response to the coming disaster.

Other books by Diamond include “The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal,”

published in 1992, and “Why is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality,” published in 1997.

Besides the Pulitzer Prize, Diamond was awarded the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science for “Guns, Germs and

Steel.” He also was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1999.

The Biological Sciences Center was completed last summer and opened in August with a small ribbon

cutting ceremony.

The two-story, 60,000-square-foot building features two large classrooms: a 178-seat auditorium, named

for the late alumna Barbara Bechtel Davies; and HEDCO Lecture Room, a classroom that seats 96 students.

The Center also has 10 additional teaching laboratories that provide space for faculty and students to

collaborate in research projects. The building cost about $27 million to complete. Donors to the

building include the Wayne and Gladys Valley Foundation, Kent Lathy, Tony and Virginia Chan, the

Lakeside Foundation, the HEDCO Foundation and Arnold Scott.

The Biological Sciences Department is the largest program in the College of the Pacific, serving between

800 and 1,000 students each year, including approximately 480 biology majors and pre-dental students and

300 pre-pharmacy students.

For more information about the Jared Diamond speech or the Biological Sciences Department at University

of the Pacific, call 209.946.2023.