Oren Harman

Oren Harman is an award-winning writer and historian of science. His book, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness, explores the evolutionary origins of altruism and the tortured polymath, George Price, who wrote an equation to help solve its apparent paradox. The book won the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the category of Science and Technology, was a New York Times Book of the Year, and has inspired theater plays and radio shows. Harman's first book was The Man Who Invented the Chromosome (Harvard University Press, 2004) about the English scientist Cyril Dean Darlington, who tried to use biology to understand human culture and history, and whose ideas foreshowed much of the influential field of evolvability. His latest book is Evolutions: Fifteen Myths That Explain Our World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) detailing in myth-like prose the great events in the history of our universe, from the Big Bang to the evolution of human consciousness. Harman is also the co-creator and editor of a trilogy of books that offer new prisms for understanding the growth and development of the life sciences: Rebels (Harvard, 2008), Outsiders (Chicago, 2013), and Dreamers (Chicago, 2018). Harman's books have been translated into many languages including Polish, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Turkish, and Malayalam.

Harman was subsequently awarded the Alon Award for academic excellence, and was elected in 2003 to the Young Academy of Sciences of Israel. Since 2008 he is Chair of the Graduate Program in Science, Technology and Society at Bar-Ilan University and serves as a Senior Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, where he hosts the "Talking About Science in the 21st Century" public lecture series. His fields of expertise include the history and philosophy of modern biology, evolutionary theory, altruism, 20th-century genetics, cultural history of science, historical biography, and science and mythology.

Oren Harman was born in Jerusalem on January 25, 1973. He grew up and was educated in Jerusalem and in New York City, where he attended the Collegiate School for Boys and excelled at soccer (he was dubbed "the little Israeli magician" by New York ''Newsday''). He graduated from Hebrew University Secondary School in Jerusalem. Following three years of service in an elite IDF military unit, Harman studied history and biology at Hebrew University, where he graduated summa cum laude. He then received M.Sc. and D.Phil. degrees with distinction from Oxford University, before spending two years at Harvard University, conducting research and teaching in the Department of History of Science.