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Jagdish Bhagwati, is University Professor at Columbia University and Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has been Economic Policy Adviser to Arthur Dunkel, Director General of GATT, Special Adviser to the UN on Globalization, and External Adviser to the WTO. He has served on the Expert Group appointed by the Director General of the WTO on the Future of the WTO and the Advisory Committee to Secretary General Kofi Annan on the NEPAD process in Africa, and was also a member of the Eminent Persons Group under the chairmanship of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso on the future of UNCTAD. Professor Bhagwati has published more than three hundred articles and has authored or edited over fifty volumes; he also writes frequently for *The New York Times*, *The Wall Street Journal*, and *The Financial Times*, as well as reviews for *The New Republic* and *The Times Literary Supplement*. Professor Bhagwati is described as the most creative international trade theorist of his generation and is a leader in the fight for freer trade. He is a Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research . He was advisor to India 's Finance Minister, now Prime Minister, on India 's economic reforms. He works with several NGOs in the US and India. He was chosen as the first recipient of the Asian NGOs' Award, the Suh Sang Don Award. A native of India, Professor Bhagwati attended Cambridge University where he graduated in 1956 with a first in Economics Tripos. He then continued to study at MIT and Oxford returning to India in 1961 as Professor of Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, and then as Professor of International Trade at the Delhi School of Economics. He returned to MIT in 1968, leaving it twelve years later as the Ford International Professor of Economics to join Columbia.

David Ferry is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English at Wellesley College and a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Boston University. *Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations* won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Bingham Poetry Prize from Boston Book Review, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for The New Yorker Book Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Ferry's other awards include the Sixtieth Fellowship of The Academy of American Poets, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, the Teasdale Prize for Poetry, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Award, and the William Arrowsmith Translation Prize from *AGNI magazine*. In 1998 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently completing his new book, to be called *Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations*.

Paul Lerou, MD, is Instructor in Pediatrics (HMS) and Newborn Medicine (BWH) at Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His research interests include derivation of human pluripotent stem cells and pre-implanation embryonic development. Specifically, he is interested in studying the maintenance of genomic stability in human pluripotent stem cells. His lab is developing both live and fixed cell imaging techniques to study mitotic progression. They are also collaborating with Andrea Ballabeni, post-doctoral fellow in Marc Kirschener's lab, to perform biomolecular analysis of the pluripotent stem cell cycle.

Norman Cousins attended Columbia University. His journalistic career began in 1934, when he joined the staff of the *New York Evening Post*. The following year he moved to *Current History*, which first employed him as a book critic, subsequently as managing editor. *Current History* had its offices in the same building as the *Saturday Review of Literature*, and Cousins became friendly with members of its staff, notably Amy Loveman, Henry Seidel Canby, Christopher Morley, William Rose Benet, Harrison Smith, and editor George Stevens. In 1940 Cousins became the *Saturday Review*'s executive editor, and two years later, after Stevens's resignation, he took over the editorship and presidency.

Harold Clurman has been called the most influential figure in the history of the American theater. Between 1935 and 1980, he directed over forty plays, including Jean Giraudoux's *Tiger at the Gates*, Eugene O'Neill's *Touch of the Poe*t, and Arthur Miller's *Incident at Vichy*. He authored seven books, and from 1953 until his death in 1980 he was a drama critic for *The Nation*. As the passionate and talented leader of the Group Theatre, Clurman invigorated American theater with his political and artistic idealism. Though the Group Theatre lasted only ten years, it produced twenty plays and brought an excitement to the American stage that still remains. After the closing of the Group Theatre, Clurman brought his vision to Broadway, where he was instrumental in teaching some of the most skilled and successful actors of the time. He worked to insure the theater's growth by elevating its productions to the level of any other of the great arts. Working with writers such as Eugene O'Neill, Carson McCullers, and Arthur Miller, he created theater that was at once serious and popular, and uniquely American. In recognition of his great influence and commitment to the arts, he was awarded the rare honor of having a Broadway theater named after him. Today, twenty years after his death, Harold Clurman is considered one of the most respected and influential members of the American theater

Gyorgy Kepes, an influential designer, photographer, painter, educator, writer and aesthetic theorist, died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts at age 95. Mr. Kepes was best known as the founder of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, an organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology dedicated to creative collaboration between artists and scientists. Established in 1967, the center was the culmination of Mr. Kepes's long-held view that traditional art forms could no longer adequately speak to the problems of the modern world, a world too much conditioned, he believed, by chaos and alienation. It was a decade when many artists became intrigued by the possibilities of cross-fertilization between art and technology -- most famously Robert Rauschenberg and his Experiments in Art and Technology, or E.A.T.

Lee Strasberg, born Israel Lee Strassberg, was an actor, director, producer and most importantly acting instructor and teacher. He was born in what is now known as Budaniv, Ukraine on November 17, 1901. His family later immigrated to New York and he later became a naturalised citizen of the United States. During his lifetime he joined with Harold Clurman to form the Group Theater in 1931, it lasted till about 1941. Through the Actors Studio formed sometime in 1947 he trained a large number of film personalities including Marlin Brando, Eli Wallach, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe, Robert DeNiro, James Dean, Patricia Neal and several others. He appeared in front of the camera just 7 times. Of these his most famous role was of 'Hyman Roth' played in the film *The Godfather II*, in which he portrays an elderly Jewish mob boss. Strasberg, died in February 1982.

Shearing was born in 1919 in the Battersea area of London. Congenitally blind, he was the youngest of nine children. His father delivered coal and his mother cleaned trains at night after caring for the children during the day. His only formal musical education consisted of four years of study at the Linden Lodge School for the Blind. While his talent won him a number of university scholarships, he was forced to refuse them in favor of a more financially productive pursuit playing piano in a neighborhood pub for the handsome salary of $5 a week! Shearing joined an all-blind band in the 1930's. At that time he developed a friendship with the noted jazz critic and author, Leonard Feather. Through this contact, he made his first appearance on BBC radio. In 1947, Mr. Shearing moved to America, where he spent two years establishing his fame on this side of the Atlantic. The Shearing Sound commanded national attention when, in 1949, he gathered a quintet to record *September in the Rain* for MGM. The record was an overnight success and sold 900,000 copies. His U.S. reputation was permanently established when he was booked into Birdland, the legendary jazz spot in New York. Since then, he has become one of the country's most popular performing and recording artist. In 1982 and 1983 he won Grammy Awards with recordings he made with Mel Torme. Mr. Shearing was the subject of an hour-long television documentary entitled The Shearing Touch presented on the Southbank Show with Melvyn Bragg on ITV in the UK. Three presidents have invited Mr. Shearing to play at the White House.. Ford, Carter and Reagan. He performed at the Royal Command Performance for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. He is a member of the Friars Club and the Lotos Club in New York and the Bohemian Club in San Francisco. His awards and honors are many. In May 1975, he received an honorary degree of Doctor of Music from Westminster College in Salt Lake City. In May of 1994, Hamilton College in upstate New York awarded him another honorary doctorate in music. DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana presented him with an honorary doctorate of music on June 1, 2002. He received the prestigious Horatio Alger Award for Distinguished Americans in 1978 and a community recreational facility in Battersea, south London, was named the George Shearing Centre in his honor. In May of 1993, he was presented with the British equivalent of the Grammy, the Ivor Novello Award for Lifetime Achievement. In June of 1996, Mr. Shearing was included in the Queen's Birthday Honors List and on November 26, 1996 he was invested by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his service to music and Anglo-US relations. He was presented the first American Music Award by the National Arts Club, New York City, in March of 1998. Mr. Shearing's biography, *Lullaby of Birdland*, published by Continuum, was released February 2005. In conjunction with the autobiography release Concord Records released a composite of Shearing recordings in a 2-CD set entitled *Lullabies of Birdland.: A Musical Autobiography* which was immediately followed up with *Hopeless Romantics* with Michael Feinstein. Concord then released the collectors set Mel Torme & George Shearing *The Concord Years*. Mr. Shearing's popularity continues to rise.

The celebrated and communicative English-born American conductor, Leopold Stokowski, was born into a Polish and Irish mother, but was raised as an Englishman. His famous, vaguely foreign, accent somehow appeared later in his life. The young Stokowski was a precocious musician, and as a child learned to play the violin, piano, and organ with apparently little effort. At the age of thirteen, he became the youngest person to have been admitted to the Royal College of Music. By eighteen, Leopold Stokowski had been appointed organist and choirmaster at St. James', Piccadilly. He attended Queen's College, Oxford, receiving a Bachelor of Music degree in 1903. He moved to the USA in 1905, but returned to Europe each summer for further musical studies in Berlin, Munich, and Paris. When a conductor fell ill in Paris in 1908, he made his debut as an emergency substitute. The impression he made led to a position with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in which he quickly achieved notable success. However, a more tempting prospect faced him when he was asked to take over the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1912. It was during his long and fruitful association with this ensemble that Stokowski established himself as one of the leading musicians of his day. Following his tenure in Philadelphia, Leopold Stokowski directed several other ensembles, including the All-American Youth Orchestra, the NBC Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, the Houston Symphony Orchestra, and the American Symphony Orchestra, which he organized in 1962. He continued to make concert appearances and studio recordings of both standard works and unusual repertoire well into his nineties. He made his last public appearance as conductor in Venice in 1975, remaining active in the recording studio through 1977.