PROGRAM GUESTS

Larry King is a member of the Broadcasters' Hall of Fame and host of CNN's Larry King Live. He is one of the most respected and honored personalities in the television industry. His father died of a heart attack and his mother found work in Manhattan's garment district. He was traumatized by his father's death and neglected his studies, but dreamed about becoming a broadcaster. At age 23, he took a bus to Miami with the hope of starting a radio career, but only got a job sweeping floors at a station. His first break came when a disc jockey suddenly quit, and he was asked to replace him. King soon attracted the attention of larger radio stations and in 1978, made his debut with The Larry King Show, where his unique and often controversial style quickly attracted a large, faithful following of millions. In 1985, he agreed to a similar program for CNN that is now the only live worldwide phone-in television talk show.

The Honorable Stephen Breyer is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. A shy child, he retreated into the world of books and developed an insatiable curiosity about ideas. He graduated from high school as a top debater with numerous academic accolades, went on to graduate from Stanford University and studied for two years at Oxford. At Harvard Law School he discovered economics and focused on what would develop into an intellectual passion: how government regulation affects private commerce. He began a career that straddled academia and politics, teaching law and government at Harvard and working for the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington. For nearly 154 years, he served as a federal appeals court judge. In 1994, he was nominated by President Clinton to serve as a Supreme Court Justice.

Tom Clancy is known the world over as "King of the Techno Thriller," a genre he virtually invented. This best-selling author has mesmerized millions with his tales of espionage and high-tech derring-do. A former small-town insurance broker, he read about a mutiny aboard a Soviet frigate and was inspired to write his first book, the No. 1 best-seller The Hunt for Red October. His subsequent successes include Patriot Games, Red Storm Rising, Clear and Present Danger, Without Remorse, Debt of Honor and The Sum of All Fears.

PROGRAM GUESTS CONTINUED

Francis S. Collins, MD., Ph.D. is Director of the National Center for Human Genome Research. He had already earned a doctorate in chemistry from Yale University when he became fascinated by medical genetics and appied to medical school. While teaching at the University of Michigan, he developed techniques fro mapping and identifying genes that cause human diseases. He identified the genes for cyctic fibrosis, and Huntington's Disease. The Human Genome Project is a 15-year multi-billion-dollar effort to locate and map every gene in human DNA in "one of the most important undertakings in the history of biological research."

Lawrence J. Ellison is the founder and Chairman of Oracle Corporation, the nation's largest producer of software for corporate databases. The son of Russian immigrants, raised on the South Side of Chicago, he studied math and physics at the University of Chicago. He taught himself computer programming and headed to Silicon Valley. He helped create the first clones of IBM mainframe systems and co-founded Oracle, where he set new standards for database management. Over the next two decades, he brought Oracle's annual revenues to $4 billion. This leader of the "information technology revolution" envisions electronic access to the world's information with "multimedia databases" that will serve as centers of global commerce and learning, encompassing in digitized form, not only the texts of the world's books but also the film and television libraries of Hollywood.

Coretta Scott King is the founder of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, Georgia. Born and raised in Alabama, she earned her undergraduate degree in music and education. She went to Boston to study as a concert singer at the New England Conservatory of Music, where she met martin Luther King, Jr., who was studying for his doctorate in theology at Boston University. They were married in 1953. She went on to appear as a speaker before church, civic, college and peace groups. She conceived and performed in Freedom Concerts that presented the history of the civil rights movement, and carried around the world her husband's advocacy of peace and justice through nonviolent action. Since Dr. King's assassination, she has dedicated her life's work to preserving the legacy of what the human rights movement accomplished under his leadership, by creating a living memorial to Dr. King, (visited annually by more than three million people) which has been a pivotal force in building interracial coalitions to educate and promote full employment and genuine economic opportunity for all.

Michael R. Milken is a legend in the world of finance. Mr. Milken graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley, and received his master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School where he was a Joseph Wharton Fellow. Over the last generation Mr. Milken was instrumental in financing hundreds of companies and creating millions of jobs around the world in industries ranging from cable and telecommunications to home-building and health care. As a co-founder of the Milken Family Foundation, Michael Milken has helped create such innovative programs as Mike's Math Club, the Festival for Youth, and the Milken Scholars Program. He is also chairman and founder of CaP CURE -- now the world's second largest source of funding for prostate cancer research. As co-founder and chairman of the Milken Institute for Job and Capital Formation, Mr. Milken formulated the Institute's mission to advance studies of the global economy and the determinants of economic growth.

Elie Wiesel is a Professor of Humanities at Boston University. A writer, educator, philosopher, and the spiritual archivist of the Holocaust, he is a native of Romania. He and his family were deported by the Nazis to the Auschwitz concentration camp when he was 15 years old. His mother and younger sister perished there and later, he and his father were transported to Buchenwald. After World War II, he studied in Paris and became a journalist, yet remained silent about what he had endured as an inmate in the death camps. He was persuaded to end that silence and subsequently wrote Night, a memoir of his battle for survival, and of his battle with God for a way to understand the wanton cruelty he witnessed. The book was heralded as a masterpiece of Holocaust literature. This messenger to all humanity is the recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal and the Nobel Prize for Peace.