max s. gerber(the latest shot)

  to conclude the der spiegel space story i visited with george whitesides at the headquarters of virgin galactic. george was born into the field. his father is a harvard chemist, and prior to become CEO and president of virgin galactic he was the chief of staff at NASA. they build their spaceships out in [...]

  ken bowersox, former astronaut, and astronaut hall of fame member was, up until recently, VP of astronaut safety and mission assurance at space exploration technologies (spaceX) in hawthorne, california. it seems he retired from the company at the very end of 2011. what he’s up to now, i’ve no idea, but in his life [...]

this past summer i was very pleased to do a series of portraits for der spiegel magazine on a story about the privatization of space flight. we drove up into the california desert to visit XCOR, a company that makes space ships. more importantly, they make space ships that ordinary people can hitch rides in. [...]

most days i read the paper (on my itelephone) while eating lunch, and most of the time i see an article on a scientific topic it’s written by nick wade. nick is a science and technology reporter for the new york times, as well as an author of many books. nick writes extensively on evolution, [...]

one of the nice things about taking pictures professionally is that over a long enough period of time you become acutely aware of the richness of things hidden right under your nose. you never know what’s going on in that nondescript building down the street, perhaps people are in there conducting psychological experiments. it’s a [...]

i probably watch more TV than is good for me. certainly my DVR has more of a backlog at any given point than i can comfortably manage. if i were a different kind of person i’d blame my parents – a showbiz family who, as i was growing up, not only had a television set [...]

steven pinker is a psychologist at harvard who specializes in the evolution of language. in an appearance on the colbert report he was asked to explain how the mind works in five words or less. his answer: brain cells fire in patterns. he is a charter member of the luxuriant and flowing hair club for [...]

most of us feel broken in some way. often this feeling is quiet and unseen, but even if we don’t admit it, even if it’s invisible, even if we’re totally wrong, in many of us there’s something that feels a bit incomplete. i don’t think this is bad. i think it builds character. it makes [...]

last week i was contacted by a woman named hilary gooding. hilary is a textile artist working on a project involving quilts of prominent scientists with the aim of displaying them in museums in the UK next year. hilary wanted to use one of my 2006 photographs of james d. watson (nobel laureate (with francis [...]

i was raised in an atheist jewish household in two of the biggest (and most liberal) cities in the country. my brother and i never even went to hebrew school. i like to say that we’re more jew-ish than jewish. we love matzo ball soup. we’re expert complainers. but no bar mitzvahs. i have no [...]