The Washington Post has called James Burke: “One of the most intriguing minds in the Western World.” He was educated at Oxford, and also holds several honorary doctorates for his work in the history of technology and social change.

His principal career has been in documentary television, initially for the BBC, where among many other things he was chief reporter on the Apollo missions (about which he made several documentaries) including presenting the live broadcasts of the Apollo 11 landing in 1969 alongside Patrick Moore and Cliff Michelmore. James will discuss his memories of that momentous occasion.

He has made a large number of award-winning films and documentary series, including Connections and The Day the Universe Changed. In America, for PBS he made a series on global warming, one on the neurophysiology of the brain, and one on Renaissance art (for the National Gallery). For Discovery, he made the series Connections Two and Connections Three.

He has written eleven books (published in 17 languages), three of them bestsellers. For six years he wrote a regular monthly column in Scientific American. He authored the online Britannica essay on Innovation.

Burke has been on the corporate and university lecture circuit for forty years. He is at present working on an interactive knowledge-web and researching his next book: The Culture of Scarcity.