Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond is best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee; Guns, Germs, and Steel; and Collapse, which have drawn from a variety of fields, including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. Originally trained in physiology, Diamond is a professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Other than his books, Diamond has also written numerous academic monographs. His book Guns, Germs, and Steel earned Diamond a global reputation, with the book winning a Pulitzer Prize and subsequently being translated into over twenty-five languages and selling millions of copies around the world.

Born in 1937 in Boston, where he grew up, Diamond has attributed some of his interests to his parents. His father was a pediatrician who trained medical students and physicians and was known for research on blood diseases of children. And his mother was a concert pianist, school teacher, and linguist. He has credited his father for his interest in science and his mother for his love of reading and writing.

Diamond attended a small middle and high school: Roxbury Latin School. In the school programs, students were given few choices or electives and were required to study Latin for the five years of the school's program. During his time there, Diamond chose to study Greek as well, rather than science electives. This increased his love of languages, which led Jared Diamond to learn his 12th language in his 60s.

From there, Diamond went on to study laboratory research science at Harvard University. While there, he continued his study of a minimum of science sources, and using his elective courses to study widely based on his wide interests. Only in his final year has Diamond said he faced a difficult choice between either attending medical school, as he had always expected to do, or else getting his Ph.D. to prepare himself for scientific research. He chose the Ph.D. route, and left to study and obtain his doctorate in physiology at Trinity College, at the University of Cambridge.

After earning his doctorate in 1962, Diamond returned to the United States where he pursued a career in physiological research, initially in the Biophysical laboratory at Harvard's Medical School, and then, from 1966, as a professor of physiology at UCLA Medical School. There, his research area was the cellular and molecular mechanisms of ion and non-electrolyte transport and permeation across biological membranes, especially across those of the gall bladder, an anatomically simple model system for organs like the kidney and intestine.

In 1964, Diamond went on his first trip to New Guinea, where he studied the birds of New Guinea and other Pacific Islands, at first an interest and passion which turned into another career path. He also studied and wrote on the impact of local environmental change on the populations of these birds. After this initial trip, a friend of Diamonds recommended him as a writer to Nature Magazine, which led to Diamond writing for Discover Magazine, and to writing for Natural History Magazine.

Jared Diamond during a trip to New Guinea.

In 1985, Jared Diamond was awarded a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation, which plunged Diamond into a depression. This was because, at forty-seven, he was accomplished but in the obscure niches of the movement of sodium in the gallbladder and the birds of New Guinea. This, in part, led to Diamond deciding to expand the scope of his work.

In his academic work, Diamond has become known for his breadth of interest, which beyond geography includes the biology of New Guinea birds, digestive physiology, and conservation biology. He has won various prizes and honors, including the US National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Science, and election to the US National Academy of Sciences. He is a director of the World Wildlife Fund/US and of Conservation International. As a biological explorer, Diamond's most widely publicized finding was his rediscovery, at the top of New Guinea's remote Foja Mountains, of the long-lost Golden-fronted Bowerbird, previously only known from four specimens found in a Paris feather shop in 1885.

Much of Jared Diamond's writing has been informed by a few questions that bothered him. The first came in his youth, while studying at the University of Cambridge, where he traveled through Europe, including to Germany, Yugoslavia, and Finland, and saw the effects of the Second World War, where he saw how different the lives and hopes of his peers were and how they were dictated by the country the individual was born in. The other was his initial travels to New Guinea, where he experienced the intelligence and understanding of the people, which led him to wonder why they had not developed along the same lines as Wester or Eurasian cultures and peoples.

These questions, and the considerations, especially influenced Diamond's first two books, The Third Chimpanzee, published in 1992, and Guns, Germs and Steel, published in 1997. Both books emphasized the importance or influence of geography on the ability for small tribes to develop or evolve. Since these books, he has gone on to explore the impact of the environment and geography on human cultures in other books. This has drawn some criticism, including some condemning Diamond of being a cultural imperialist. Diamond does not respond to much of the criticism of his work.