Henry has served as an ACSH Science Advisor for many years and has written many articles as well. So, I’ve known Henry, but I never really knew about Henry.
Henry graduated from MIT and went on to the University of California at San Diego, where he received a Master's in Science and his M.D. He was a Clinical Fellow at Harvard’s Beth Israel Hospital and became a research fellow in the laboratory of geneticist Philip Leder at the National Institutes of Health.
In 1979, Henry moved over to the Food and Drug Administration as the medical reviewer for the first genetically engineered drugs, helping to bring genetically engineered human insulin and human growth hormones to the public. He served as a special assistant to the commissioner at FDA before becoming the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology.
In 1994, Henry left government service to become a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, writing about public policy toward science and technology, including pharmaceutical development, agricultural genetic engineering, regulatory reform, and new viral diseases
At Hoover, Henry wrote several books, including To America's Health: A Proposal to Reform the Food and Drug Administration and The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution, which was named one of the top 25 books in 2004 by Barron’s. He has written more journal articles than I can count, starting with “RNA-dependent RNA polymerase in influenza virions” for the National Academy of Sciences in 1971.
Understanding complex information and writing about it in a manner that is easily understandable to non-experts has garnered Henry praise — from Nature Biotechnology, naming him as one of the people making the "most significant contributions" to biotechnology to Scientific American, calling him one of their Worldview 100.
Henry has written in many peer-reviewed publications, including The Lancet, JAMA, and Science, and for the mainstream media, such as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Chronicle of Higher Education, National Review, New York Times, Guardian, and Financial Times. He is also a regular on John Batchelor’s syndicated radio program and a frequent guest on the Lars Larson radio program.
Henry is a great addition to ACSH’s team. I hope you enjoy his writing as much as I do.
Thom Golab
Thom Golab is the President of the American Council on Science and Health. Prior to becoming President in 2019, Mr. Golab joined ACSH as Vice President of Development in May 2017 and has served on the ACSH Board of Trustees since 2012.
