Meredith Wadman is a senior reporter at Science magazine in Washington, D.C. Her critically acclaimed book, The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease, tells the tale of WI-38, a fascinating cell line with a colorful and controversial history and a huge public health impact.
Before joining Science, Wadman was an editorial fellow at New America, a Washington, D.C. think tank. Prior to that, she was a Washington-based reporter covering the medical research community for Nature for 17 years. She has also written on biotech and on biomedical policy issues for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time and Fortune magazine. Her broadcast appearances include CNN, NPR’s 1A, Public Radio International’s The World, and Public Radio’s Science Friday.
Wadman earned a B.A. in human biology at Stanford University and began medical school at the University of British Columbia, in her native Vancouver, Canada. She completed her medical degree at Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She also earned a master’s degree at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City.
As a medical student, Wadman staffed public health clinics in rural Ghana, worked on the pediatric ward in an overwhelmed, underfunded hospital for blacks in apartheid-era South Africa and traveled in longboats to work in public health clinics in the jungles of Borneo.
Today, she lives in suburban Washington with her husband, Tim Wells.