Featured Speakers

		In 1996, Allen Rucker had no real complaints: happily married, two kids, a house in West Los Angeles. At the age of 51, his career as a television writer was looking up. Then one Tuesday, out of the blue, he started to feel a burning sensation around his waist. Inside an hour an a half, he was paralyzed from the waist down by a rare condition called transverse myelitis. It sounds like a nightmare, and he had a few of those, but in his new memoir, Allen Rucker describes his new life with honesty, accessibility, and irrepressible impudence.
		Donna Jackson Nakazawa is a nationally acclaimed researcher, writer and public speaker on health and family issues. She is the author of the upcoming book, The Autoimmune Epidemic: Bodies Gone Haywire in a World out of Balance and the Cutting Edge Science that Promises Hope (Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, February 2008), an investigation into the reasons behind today’s alarming rise in rates of autoimmune diseases (multiple sclerosis, lupus, type 1 diabetes, thyroiditis, and dozens of other immune mediated diseases) in industrialized countries around the world.