Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel, The Fates of Human Societies, will give the James S. Plant Lecture at Hamilton College on Thursday, Sept. 29, at 8 p.m. in Wellin Hall as part of the College's science center dedication weekend "Celebrating Science at Hamilton College." The lecture will be followed by a book signing and reception and is free and open to the public. The new $56 million science center is the largest construction project in the College's history.

The James S. Plant Distinguished Scientist Lecture series was established in 1987 through a bequest from Dr. Plant, class of 1912 and an eminent child psychiatrist, to bring to the campus outstanding scientists as guest lecturers.

Diamond in 1996 published Guns, Germs, and Steel (Norton), which chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and dismantles racially based theories of human history. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1998. In 2004 he published Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, his companion piece to Guns, Germs, and Steel. A major museum exhibit on Collapse will tour North American museums in 2005, to be followed by a three-part national television special on Guns, Germs, and Steel. Currently a professor of geography and physiology at UCLA, Diamond is also the author of two other best-selling books, The Third Chimpanzee and Why Is Sex Fun?

He has received many prestigious awards, including a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, the Conservation medals of the Zoological Society of San Diego (1993), the Carr Medal (1989), and Japan's International Cosmos Prize (1998), as well as the USA's highest civilian award in science -- the National Medal of Science -- for his landmark research and breakthrough discoveries in evolutionary biology. In 2001 Diamond was awarded the prestigious Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, England.