It was with great shock and sadness that we learned last week of the death of science writer, committed activist, and former CGS Fellow Ralph Brave. He was 54, and died just three weeks after being diagnosed with advanced stage lung cancer.

Ralph had a long history in progressive politics, including key roles with the Indochina Peace Campaign and Tom Hayden's Campaign for Economic Democracy during the 1970s. In the mid-1990s Ralph began researching and writing about the politics and policies of human biotechnology - the Human Genome Project, the history of eugenics in California and elsewhere in the U.S., the biotech industry's agenda in promoting questionable genetic technologies, and related topics. He was stunned by the alacrity with which leading figures in genetic science spoke of "re-engineering" the human species.

Ralph and CGS connected in 2001 and worked together closely over the years since then. In 2003 Ralph served for six months as the first CGS Fellow. He published extensively on the politics of genomics and the new eugenics in The Nation, Washington Post, Salon, Alternet, Sacramento News & Review, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore City Paper and elsewhere. We've posted a number of his pieces below.

Ralph accumulated a vast wealth of knowledge about developments and key players in the genetic and biomedical sciences, about the policies in place - and not in place - to regulate them, and about the cultural and political currents swirling around them. He interviewed James Watson and many other noted scientists, as well as bioethicists, policy makers, science fiction writers, and others. To all of this he applied his keen understanding of the ways of power, and his unfailing hopes for a better future.

In 2003 Ralph coordinated the visit of University of Virginia bioethicist and historian of eugenics Paul Lombardo to the California State Capitol, an effort that was instrumental in the resulting apologies by state officials for California's program of eugenic sterilizations. The story was carried by many national and international newspapers, and on television and radio.

In 2005 Ralph and his partner, UC Davis professor of design Kathryn Sylva, organized the exhibit The Hidden History of California Eugenics at Cal State Sacramento. It documented for the first time the sordid roles played by leading figures in California business, educational and scientific institutions in promoting eugenic policies, practices and ideologies in the early decades of the last century. Beginning then and into the 1970s, more than 20,000 Californians - many, if not most, mentally or physically disabled - were compulsorily sterilized under the banner of "sterilization for human betterment."

Ralph's second-to-last published article, which ran this past July in the Sacramento News & Review, was an exposé of a move by a powerful California land developer and the chair of the state's stem cell agency to promote a questionable human biotech research center in Yolo County.

We saw Ralph for the last time this past May, when CGS organized an event at UC Berkeley featuring Harvard professor of government Michael Sandel, who had just come out with his book on the dangers of human technological "enhancement," The Case Against Perfection. Ralph came down from Davis to interview Sandel before the talk. The photos on this page show the two of them together, with Ralph in true form, obviously pressing hard on some point of great consequence. These may be among the last photographs taken of Ralph engaged in the work he loved.

Ralph Brave, 1953-2007: Sacramento News & Review

Friends and colleagues of Ralph share their memories

Ralph Brave Supplemental Bibliography

Ralph in conversation with Michael Sandel, May 7, 2007:

Ralph Brave in print: