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Esther Dyson

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American investor and technology writer (born 1951)
Esther Dyson
Born (1951-07-14) July 14, 1951 (age 75)
Zürich, Switzerland
NationalityAmerican
EducationHarvard University (BA, economics, 1972)
OccupationInvestor, journalist, philanthropist
Known forRelease 1.0; PC Forum; ICANN; Wellville
RelativesFreeman Dyson (father)
Verena Huber-Dyson (mother)
George Dyson (brother)

Esther Dyson (born July 14, 1951) is an American investor and writer on technology. In 1983 she bought the small research firm where she worked, renamed it EDventure Holdings, and for more than twenty years wrote most issues of its monthly newsletter, Release 1.0, while running PC Forum, an annual conference of the personal computer industry. From 1998 to 2000 she was the first chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body that sets policy for the Internet's system of domain names.

She later turned to space travel and to health. In 2008 and 2009 she trained in Russia as the backup to a paying passenger on a flight to the International Space Station, and from 2014 to the end of 2024 she led Wellville, a nonprofit project in five American communities. She invests in young companies in technology, health care and space, was one of the first ten volunteers in George Church's Personal Genome Project, and is an early investor in Molecular Reality Corporation.

Early life and education

Dyson was born in Zürich on July 14, 1951.[1] Her father was the English-born physicist Freeman Dyson and her mother the Swiss mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson; her younger brother, George Dyson, became a historian of technology.[a][2] She studied economics at Harvard University, wrote for The Harvard Crimson, and graduated in 1972.[3]

Career

Reporter and analyst

In 1974 Dyson joined Forbes as a fact-checker and soon became a reporter. Three years later she moved to Wall Street, first to New Court Securities, where she followed young companies such as Federal Express, and then to Oppenheimer, where she covered software companies.[4]

Release 1.0 and PC Forum

In 1982 she joined Rosen Research, a firm that published an industry newsletter and that year started an invitation-only conference, the Personal Computer Forum, later PC Forum. In 1983 she bought the company from its founder, Ben Rosen. She renamed it EDventure Holdings and renamed the newsletter, until then the Rosen Electronic Letter, Release 1.0.[4] The new title used the software industry's term for a first version. Dyson wrote most issues herself until 2006, and PC Forum ran every year from 1982 to 2007.

From 1989 she traveled often in the former Eastern Bloc, and EDventure added a second newsletter, Rel-EAST, about the technology industries of Central and Eastern Europe.[4] In 2006 she joined the board of the Russian search company Yandex as an independent director. On March 7, 2022, Yandex announced that she and another independent director had resigned with immediate effect and that their seats would be left vacant.[5]

In 2004 Dyson and her business partner sold EDventure Holdings to CNET Networks. She left CNET in January 2007. PC Forum met for the last time that year.

Internet governance

In the middle of the 1990s Dyson chaired the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group for the Internet. In 1997 she published a book, Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age, on what the network would change in ordinary lives; a revised edition, Release 2.1, followed in 1998.[4]

In October 1998 she became one of the nine initial directors of ICANN, the nonprofit created that year to take over the coordination of the Internet's names and numbers from contractors of the United States government, and its chairman.[3] On July 22, 1999, Dyson testified before the House Commerce Committee at a hearing titled "Domain Name System Privatization: Is ICANN Out of Control?".[6] Her board had planned two groups of elected directors, one chosen by ICANN's supporting organizations and one by an "at-large" membership of individual Internet users. When ICANN opened that membership in 2000, more than 158,000 people registered between February 25 and July 31, using a system that had been built for fewer than 10,000, and many who tried to register near the deadline could not.[7] The members elected five directors that October. They took their seats on November 16, 2000, the day Dyson's term as chairman ended.[8] In 2004 she sat on ICANN's At-Large Advisory Committee, and in 2012 she opposed the organization's large expansion of generic top-level domains.

Writing

In July 1995 Wired published Dyson's essay "Intellectual Value", on what would happen to intellectual property once a network made copying nearly free. She expected much content to be given away "in order to attract attention or create desire for follow-up services that can be charged for", with software and text acting as advertising for support, filtering, aggregation and training, and wrote that the economics of the Net would operate as if content were free even where it was not.[9] Her columns have since appeared in Project Syndicate and other outlets. She has been a trustee of the Santa Fe Institute and the Eurasia Foundation and a board member of the Long Now Foundation.[4]

Investing

Since leaving journalism Dyson has worked chiefly as an investor in young companies, often as a director. Her investments have included 23andMe, the personal genetics company, whose board she joined,[10] and two early web services later bought by Yahoo, the photo site Flickr and the bookmarking site del.icio.us.

Space

In 1958 and 1959, when she was a child, her father worked on Project Orion, a study of a ship to be driven by a series of nuclear explosions, and her brother later wrote its history.[11] Esther Dyson invested in Space Adventures, the company that arranges flights to the International Space Station on Russian Soyuz spacecraft, and flew on weightless parabolic flights in the United States.[2][10]

Space Adventures had arranged the first such flights, among them a trip by the software developer Charles Simonyi in 2007. On October 7, 2008, it announced that she had paid $3 million to train as the backup for Simonyi's second flight, booked for the spring of 2009. The backup would fly only if Simonyi could not. Dyson put the chance of that at about 5 percent.[2] She spent about five months that winter living in a dormitory at the cosmonaut training center at Star City, outside Moscow. Her training included centrifuge runs, the systems of the Soyuz and the station, weightless flights in Russia, and two days and two nights in subzero woods with two other trainees, to simulate "an unexpected landing in forested and marshy terrain in winter".[10] She had first studied Russian in high school. Asked about the danger, she told IEEE Spectrum that she was "more scared day to day of slipping on the ice here and breaking my leg", and she defended paid spaceflight on the grounds that it "builds a constituency for space exploration".[10]

Simonyi launched on Soyuz TMA-14 on March 26, 2009.[12] Dyson stayed on the ground.

Health

Dyson was one of the first ten volunteers in the Personal Genome Project, which George Church had started at Harvard Medical School to make volunteers' genome sequences and health information public. The ten, known as the PGP-10, included Church himself. The project gave them their first results on October 20, 2008, and nine of the ten chose to make their data public.[13]

Her largest health project was Wellville. Under a nonprofit she founded, the Health Initiative Coordinating Council (HICCup), she announced in 2014 a project then called the Way to Wellville, which was to give five small American communities advice, partners and help with data while they worked on health problems of their own choosing.[14] Early accounts described a five-year program. It ran for ten years, from 2014 to December 31, 2024, in Clatsop County, Oregon; Lake County, California; Muskegon, Michigan; North Hartford, Connecticut; and Spartanburg, South Carolina.[15][b] Its closing statement describes the end of the project as "much more like a 'commencement'", a framing it credits to Dyson.[15]

Molecular Reality Corporation

Dyson is an early investor in Molecular Reality Corporation, the nanopore instrument company founded in 2018 by Kent Kemmish and Charles Gaillard as demonpore, inc. Its other named backers are George Church and UPMC Enterprises.[16]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Her father is also known for a proposal of 1960 that an advanced civilization might surround its star with matter to capture its energy, the structure now called a Dyson sphere, which is a standard example in discussions of the Kardashev scale.
  2. ^ Niagara Falls, New York, was one of the five communities named in 2014; North Hartford took its place in the project.

References

  1. ^ "Dyson, Esther, 1951-". Library of Congress Name Authority File. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  2. ^ a b c Alan Boyle (October 7, 2008). "Backup for space billionaire". NBC News.
  3. ^ a b "Esther Dyson". World Economic Forum. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  4. ^ a b c d e "Esther Dyson". The Long Now Foundation. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  5. ^ "Yandex Announces Changes to the Board of Directors" (Press release). Yandex N.V. March 7, 2022.
  6. ^ "Domain Name System Privatization: Is ICANN Out of Control?" U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Commerce. July 22, 1999.
  7. ^ "ICANN At-Large Membership Registration Exceeds 158,000 Internet Users Worldwide" (Press release). ICANN. July 31, 2000.
  8. ^ "Minutes of the organizational meeting of the ICANN Board, Marina del Rey". ICANN. November 16, 2000.
  9. ^ Esther Dyson (July 1995). "Intellectual Value". Wired (3.07).
  10. ^ a b c d Tekla S. Perry (June 1, 2009). "Esther Dyson, Space Tourist in Training". IEEE Spectrum.
  11. ^ Dyson, George (2002). Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship. Henry Holt.
  12. ^ "Soyuz TMA-14 launches towards the International Space Station". NASASpaceflight.com. March 26, 2009.
  13. ^ "Genomes on display". MIT Technology Review. October 20, 2008.
  14. ^ "The Way to Wellville: A Bold Plan to Create Health in Five Underserved Communities". diaTribe. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  15. ^ a b "New Beginnings: Looking Forward from the 10-year Wellville Project". Wellville. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  16. ^ "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
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