On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Dragana Kaurin, a human rights activist, researcher and founder of the Localization Lab. It's an organization that builds bridges between developers, organizations, end users and communities in need, resulting in more accurate and timely translations and unlocking access to the Internet for users all over the world. 

A fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University, Kaurin has helped make open source technology available to underrepresented communities in 220 languages, bringing equal access to information, better representation online, and growing our collective user base. Today she works specifically on civic tech for refugees to ensure that the design of technology can better help secure the rights of those seeking freedom. 

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Charles Graeber, an award winning science journalist and contributor to myriad publications including the New Yorker, National Geographic, MIT Technology Reviewand Wiredfor which he is a contributing editor. His new book, “The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer” probes the treatment that aspires to make cancer chronic instead of fatal and ultimately to beat it forever. 

Dr. James Gulley, director of medical oncology, chief of immunology at the National Cancer Institute and National Institutes of Health calls “The Breakthrough” a must read. “It not only provides good background and good understanding for patients, but it's also a wonderful read, easily picked up but not easily put down. I'd recommend it for any patient interested in immunotherapy of cancer.”  In Graeber’s own words, “Immunotherapy is the only approach to cancer that could actually curate it: a mutating answer to a mutating problem.” 

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Seth Fletcher, who follows a team of elite scientists on a historic mission to take the first picture of a black hole to help us answer deep questions about space, time, the origins of the universe, and the nature of reality. 

Scientific American editor, Seth Fletcher is author of “Einstein’s Shadow, a Black Hole, a Band of Astronomers, and the Quest to See the Unseeable.” He tracks the progress of assembling Event Horizon Telescope, a virtual radio observatory the size of the earth. “Over about 50 years, black hole studies have gone from obscurity to a thriving industry,” noted Nature's Richard Panek reviewing Fletcher's compelling behind the scenes story. As reported in Science News last year, “A single star careening around the monster black hole and the center of the Milky Way has provided astronomers with new proof that Einstein was right about gravity based on a confirm measurement in the region near a super massive black hole.”

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome University of California, Irvine professors, Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall.

Disinformation; misinformation, what is the science of how false beliefs spread? This is the critical understanding that my guest today argue is required to correct falsehoods and to ensure that they don't hijack and certainly don't monopolize the public interest.

O'Connor and Weatherall have authored the new Yale University Press volume “The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread.” They argue that throughout history, social factors specifically who you know, your network of friends and family most determined whether false beliefs spread and whether they can be debunked. The authors conclude, “The worry that we can never gain complete certainty about matters of fact is irrelevant.” And as the New York Times reviewed, “O'Connor and Weatherall show how industrial interests have repeatedly exploited any whiff of uncertainty to argue against government regulation.”

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome author and South Carolina U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel.

In 1957 we introduced the American people to then little known civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who had just returned from the Montgomery bus boycott. Along his side was Judge J. Waties Waring of South Carolina, US District Judge for the Eastern District. On the bench, Waring was a forceful defender of equality. His decisions laid the groundwork for desegregation as law, Brown v. Board of education and a constitution capable of protecting the enfranchisement and emancipation of all people. Sixty two years after that broadcast, the native South Carolinian US circuit judge who presides in Waring’s seat has discovered with great historical insight, the horrible crime that stimulated the judge’s commitment to civil rights. In his new book “Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of Harry S. Truman and J. Waties Waring” Judge Richard Gergel has penned a moving account of the judge, his conversion from apathetic to the moral conscience of southern jurisprudence.