Daniel Charles is an independent writer and radio producer. His most recent book is Master Mind: The rise and fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel laureate who launched the era of chemical warfare, (HarperCollins, 2005). He also wrote Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food (Perseus, 2001), a widely praised account of how genetically engineered crops came to be, and how they became controversial. From 1993 to 1999, Charles was a technology correspondent for National Public Radio. He still contributes occasionally to NPR's news magazines.
Charles has written about a wide swath of advanced technology, including telecommunications, energy, agriculture, computers, and biotechnology. He has frequently focused on technological history, exploring the origins of bicycles, electronic networks, chemical insecticides, and the Global Positioning System. He has reported from India, Russia, Mexico, and various parts of Europe.
Before joining NPR, Charles was a U.S. correspondent for New Scientist, a major British science magazine. His freelance work has been published by Science, The Nation, The Christian Science Monitor, and other publications.
He studied economics and international affairs at American University in Washington, DC, graduating in 1982. In 1982-83, he studied in Bonn, Germany, under a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service. He was a guest researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg in 1986. In 1989-90, he was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is fluent in German.
Charles lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Brigid McCarthy, and their two daughters.