Mae-Wan Ho is a scientist at the forefront of a sweeping movement to define a different kind of science and at the same time to reclaim science for society.

She is currently director of the Institute of Science in Society, which she co-founded in 1999, and editor/art director of its quarterly magazine Science in Society, dedicated to making science work for the public good, and most of all, to sustain the world and all its inhabitants.

Since 1994, Mae-Wan has been scientific advisor to the Third World Network and has played a major role in informing policy-makers and the public during negotiations of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, an international agreement regulating the trade of genetically engineered products. She continues to play a prominent part in exposing what she calls “the bad science” of genetic engineering that’s driven both by a Darwinian perspective of the world and the mistaken view that organisms are hardwired in their genes.

In 2003, she initiated the Independent Science Panel (ISP) to oppose what she sees as the corporate takeover of science. As a contribution to the global debate over genetic engineering, the ISP drafted an influential report, The Case for a GM Free Sustainable World, which has been submitted to numerous governments as well as intergovernment agencies, and was translated into five major languages within two years.

In April 2005, she launched a Sustainable World Global Initiative for ISIS and the ISP, in which independent scientists will be joining forces with all sectors of civil society in a bid to make our food production system sustainable, that would also ameliorate the worst excesses of global warming and provide food security for all. This is an extremely ambitious undertaking prompted by her conviction that our “environmental bubble economy” built on the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources is leading to the imminent collapse of food production; yet our elected representatives are committed to the neo-liberal economic model that created the bubble economy (and global warming) in the first place; and lack the wisdom and the political will to make the necessary structural and policy changes.

Mae-wan obtained her bachelor and doctoral degrees in biochemistry in Hong Kong University before embarking on a long and unusually innovative and wide-ranging research career beginning in the University of California at San Diego (USA), then moved to Queen Elizabeth College, London University (UK), having won a distinguished US Fellowship of the National Genetics Foundation. She became a faculty member of the Biology Department at the Open University where she taught genetics, evolution, biochemistry and biophysics, and continued her research until she retired early in 2000.

As a scientist, Mae-Wan is best known for her pioneering work on the new physics of organisms and sustainable systems, and as a major critic of genetic engineering and the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. She is a much-published across many disciplines, books include international bestseller translated into many languages, Genetic Engineering Dream or Nightmare?, The Brave New World of Bad Science and Big Business (1998, 1999); The Rainbow and the Worm, The Physics of Organisms (1993, 1998, reprinted 1999, 2001, 2003); Living with the Fluid Genome (2003); The Case for a GM-Free Sustainable World (2003, 2004); Unravelling AIDS (2005).