Laura Spinney is an author and science journalist. She has published two novels in English, The Doctor (Methuen, 2001) and The Quick (Fourth Estate, 2007). Her third book of non-fiction, Rue Centrale, came out in 2013 from Editions L’Age d’Homme (in French and in English), and her fourth, a tale of the Spanish flu called Pale Rider, was published by Jonathan Cape in June 2017. Derborence: Where the devils came down, her translation of Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz’s best-loved novel, was published by Skomlin (formerly Onesuch) Press in 2018. Her literary agent is Natasha Fairweather of Rogers, Coleridge & White in London. She also writes on science for National Geographic, The Economist, Nature, New Scientist and The Telegraph among others. She lives in Paris.

Udodiri Okwandu is a graduate student in the History of Science, with a secondary in African and African American Studies and a Presidential Scholar at Harvard University. She is interested in the history of medicine and public health, history of gender and sexuality, and critical race theory in the United States. She is particularly interested in the ways in which scientific and medical inquiry have been deployed by the state to manage and control marginalized populations. Orginally from Southern California, Udodiri completed her undergraduate studies in 2017 at Harvard College where she graduated cum laude with an AB in the History of science (with a focus in Mind, Brain, and Behavior) and a minor in Global Health and Health Policy. Her senior thesis, which won the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize, an award which recognizes outstanding scholarly work or research by students selected by a committee of faculty from Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, examined the medicalization and racialization of Civil Rights protests in the 1960s, contextualizing it with the rise of law and order political ideology.