Paula Apsell interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson about his new book, The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet, and about his work in astrophysics. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist, is director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York and host of NOVA scienceNow. He is the author of nine books about astrophysics, including Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution and Death By Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries, and is the recipient of nine honorary doctorates and the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal. His latest book, The Pluto Files, chronicles his experience at the center of the controversy over Pluto's planetary status.
Paula Apsel is the senior executive producer for NOVA, and the director of the WGBH Science Unit. She got her start in broadcasting at WGBH Boston, where she developed the award-winning children's drama radio series The Spider's Web, and later became a radio news producer. In 1975, she joined NOVA, a fledgling WGBH-produced national series that would set the standard for science programming on television. Today, NOVA is the most popular science series on American television and on the Web. NOVA has won every major broadcasting award, including the Emmy, the Peabody, the AAAS Westinghouse Science Journalism Award, and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Gold Baton.