Stuart A. Newman is Professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy at New York Medical College, where he directs a research program in developmental biology. He received a B.A. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Chicago. Newman has contributed to several scientific fields, including cell differentiation, theory of biochemical networks and cell pattern formation, protein folding and assembly, and mechanisms of morphological evolution. He has has been a visiting professor at the Pasteur Institute, Paris, the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, the University of Tokyo, and was a Fogarty Senior International Fellow at Monash University, Australia. He is a member of the External Faculty of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Austria. He is co-editor (with Gerd B. Müller), of "Origination of Organismal Form: Beyond the Gene in Developmental and Evolutionary Biology" (MIT Press, 2003) and co-author (with Gabor Forgacs), of "Biological Physics of the Developing Embryo" (Cambridge University Press, 2005). He was a founding member of the Council for Responsible Genetics, Cambridge, MA and has testified before Congressional committees on issues ranging from patenting of organisms to human stem cells and cloning. He was also a consultant to the National Institutes of Health on policy regarding the use of human fetal tissue for research. In response to the growth in patenting of life forms and the emergence of technologies that threaten to blur the boundary between human and nonhuman organisms, Newman applied in 1997 for a patent on human-animal chimeras (mixed species organisms) as a challenge to existing patent policy.