Harvard Club of Cincinnati

2022

Walter Isaacson is the 2022 Mary S. Stern Lecture speaker, which will take place at the Aronoff Center for the Arts this Fall.

Tickets are on sale now.

Join the Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library for the annual Mary S. Stern Lecture featuring best-selling author, acclaimed historian and journalist, and professor of history at Tulane University, Walter Isaacson.

The talk will feature the topics found in Isaacson’s latest book, "The Code Breaker." Walter Isaacson shares with audiences how Nobel Prize-winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier babies. Driven by a passion for understanding how nature works, Doudna and her collaborators turned ​a curiosity ​about nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA.

The development known as CRISPR and the race to create vaccines for coronavirus will hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution. The past half-century has been a digital age, based on the microchip, computer, and internet. Now we are entering a life-science revolution. Isaacson shares with audiences how it opened a brave new world of medical miracles, while also exploring the moral questions and implications for the future.

Isaacson expertly examines the minds and lives of political, cultural, and medical icons and how their legacies can provide insight in modern times.

Walter Isaacson is a Professor of History at Tulane and an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg, a financial services firm based in New York City. He is the past CEO of the Aspen Institute, where he is now a Distinguished Fellow, and has been the chairman of CNN and the editor of TIME magazine. Isaacson’s most recent biography, The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (2021) offers a gripping account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier babies.

He is also the author of Leonardo da Vinci (2017), The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), Steve Jobs (2011), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), and Kissinger: A Biography (1992), and coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986). He is a host of the show “Amanpour and Company” on PBS and CNN, a contributor to CNBC, and host of the podcast “Trailblazers, from Dell Technologies.”