Dr. Burke K. Zimmerman
Senior Consultant, Chemical & Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program (CBWNP)
Dr. Burke K. Zimmerman is a Senior Consultant, for the Chemical & Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program (CBWNP) of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey
Institute of International Studies (MIIS). He received his formal training in
physics and biophysics (AB, Harvard; Ph.D., Stanford), and was a research
scientist in his early career (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Johns Hopkins
Univ. School of Medicine, Baltimore). Beginning in the mid-1970s, he held key
science policy positions with the U.S. Congress and NIH before joining a leading
biotechnology company in 1982 (Cetus Corporation). Throughout the 1980s, he was
a consultant to and served in executive roles for several international
biotechnology initiatives, especially those designed to bring biotechnology to
bear on the problems of the lesser-developed regions of the world. Except for a
one-year visiting professorship at the University of California (San Francisco
and Berkeley) he lived in Europe from 1985 to 1999. During the latter part of
this period, he founded and directed an innovative research company in Finland
specializing in the design and development of novel vaccines and
immunotherapeutics.
Dr. Zimmerman is the
author of numerous articles and book chapters, which, in addition to research
papers, deal with a broad range of issues in science policy and bioethics. In
his book Biofuture: Confronting the Genetic Era (Plenum Press, New York,
1984, 305pp., foreword by Francis Crick.) he reviews for general reader the
extraordinary advancements in the biological sciences since 1970, and analyzes
and discusses "controversial" science and technology, the philosophy of
discovery and determinism in science as well as man's (in)ability to anticipate
the future.
