Michael Specter (born 1955) is an American journalist who has been a staff writer, focusing on science, technology, and global public health at The New Yorker since September 1998. He has also written for The Washington Post and The New York Times. Since 2021 he has also taught writing and, along with a colleague, a course called “Safeguarding the Future” at MIT. He has previously served as an Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor of Environmental and Urban Studies at Bard College. Career Specter initially covered local news at The Washington Post in 1985 but then became a national science reporter for the Post and finally the New York City bureau chief. In 1991, Specter transferred to The New York Times. From 1994 to 1998, he was based in Moscow and was appointed co-chief of the Times Moscow bureau in 1995. While in Russia, he covered stories such as the war in Chechnya, the 1996 Russian presidential elections, and the declining state of Russian health care. In 1998, he became a roving correspondent based in Rome and covered topics as varied as Europe's demographic crisis, Michelangelo's Florentine Pietà, and the spread of AIDS in Africa. His 2009 book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, explores the ways in which people in the United States and Europe have increasingly rejected scientific truths, backed by impressive data. They instead are embracing what often seem to be more comfortable fictions about issues such as the value of organic food, vaccine safety, and personal genomics. Specter delivered a TEDtalk titled "The danger of science denial" at TED 2010. His original audiobook, Higher Animals: Vaccines, Synthetic Biology and the Future of Life, will be published by Pushkin Industries in March 2023. In it, Specter explores the ways biology — symbolized most recently by the rapid development of the wholly synthetic mRNA vaccines — is essentially become a form of information technology, but instead of using the common bits and bytes of the digital world, it uses an alphabet based on the genetic code of DNA. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Specter wrote and narrated Fauci, an audiobook published by Pushkin, about Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At The New Yorker, he has written about the global AIDS epidemic, avian influenza, malaria, scientific efforts to