Andrew Moss

February 23, 2009

I was at Stanford 1966-69 as a graduate student in mathematical statistics, founded the graduate students’ union (AFT Local 1816), was in SDS and worked as a writer and editor for the Peninsula Observer. Everybody I knew became a Maoist in 1968-9 but I didn’t, having been raised among Communists in London in the 1950s (my best friend was named Joe, after Stalin).

I dropped out, went to San Francisco where I still am, worked for Ramparts Press, became a freelance writer, went broke, and went back to graduate school in Berkeley in 1974. I became an epidemiologist, ended up at UCSF and stayed there till 2006, working on AIDS, tuberculosis, injecting drug use, the homeless and so forth. (I like public health, you can do useful things and still get paid pretty well.)

I retired in 2006, have been working occasionally for the Human Rights Center at Berkeley, learning Chinese, and writing again. I’m interested in the way ideas from the sixties are popping up, both among us, reexamining our own craziness (and occasional rightness), and among the young, discovering them for the first time.

Andrew Moss
504 Liberty St
San Francisco 94114