Jack Cohen (biologist)

Jack Cohen is a reproductive biologist at the University of Warwick, England. Cohen has worked as a consultant for both science fiction television shows and science fiction novelists on how to construct plausible aliens. His collaborators and associated works include Anne McCaffrey for the Dragonriders of Pern; the Legacy of Heorot collaboration of Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes; and several works by Terry Pratchett and David Gerrold which he helped design the Chtorr ecology.

He has also collaborated with fellow University of Warwick researcher Ian Stewart to write deep books on epistemology, and the science of the Discworld.

His former students include Sir Paul Nurse winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Medicine, and Dr Arthur Jones, a proponent of intelligent design.

Jack Cohen is a member of the high IQ society Mensa. He was one of the small group of British Mensans who persuaded science fiction author Isaac Asimov to visit the United Kingdom in June 1974.[1]

For his many services to the series The X-Files, he was affectionately lampooned in the series in the form of UFO author Jose Chung.

In 1999 Terry Pratchett made both Jack and Professor Ian Stewart "Honorary Wizards of the Unseen University" at the same ceremony at which the University of Warwick gave Terry Pratchett an honorary degree.

His hobbies, according to profiles in the front of his books, include boomerang-throwing and keeping strange animals.

Books

• The Science of Discworld, with Ian Stewart and Terry Pratchett
• The Science of Discworld II: The Globe, with Ian Stewart and Terry Pratchett
• The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch, with Ian Stewart and Terry Pratchett
• Figments of Reality, with Ian Stewart (non-fiction)
• The Collapse of Chaos, with Ian Stewart (non-fiction)
• Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life, with Ian Stewart. The American and second editions were published as What Does a Martian Look Like? The Science of Extraterrestrial Life
• Wheelers, with Ian Stewart (fiction)
• Heaven (fiction), with Ian Stewart, ISBN 0-446-52983-4, Aspect (May 2004)
• Reproduction, Butterworths (1977)
• Spermatozoa, Antibodies and Infertility (1978) with W. F. Hendry
• Living Embryos (1981) with B. D. Massey
• Animal Reproduction: parents making parents (1984) with B. D. Massey
• The Privileged Ape (1989)
• Stop Working and Start Thinking (2000) with Graham Medley

Select Quotations

• From What Does a Martian Look Like? The Science of Extraterrestrial Life

"[S]cience is the best defense against believing what we want to." (Cohen himself actually gives credit for this quote to his co-author, Stewart).

External links

• Press release about Terry Pratchett "Wizard Making" of Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart at the University of Warwick