Gene Alan Spiller, D.Sc., Ph.D., is the director of the Health Research and Studies Center and of the SPHERA Foundation in Los Altos, California. He is the editor of many clinical nutrition books. Dr. Spiller received his doctorate in chemistry from the University of Milan (Italy), and a Master's degree and a Ph.D. in nutrition from the University of California at Berkeley. He did additional studies at the Stanford University School of Medicine at Stanford, California. He is a member of many professional nutrition societies. In the 1970s, Dr. Spiller was in charge of the Nutritional Physiology Section of Syntex Research in Palo Alto, California, where he did extensive human and animal research. At the same time he edited many clinical nutrition books. He continued his work in clinical nutrition research and publishing in the 1980s, first as an independent consultant and later as the director of the Health Research and Studies Center and of the SPHERA Foundation in Los Altos, California. Many human clinical studies, reviews, and other publications were the results of this work. Dr. Spiller has carried out clinical studies on the effect of complex whole foods and has focused on fiber, lipids such as monounsaturated fats and foods high in lipids such as nuts, antioxidants, and other beneficial nutrients. In addition, Dr. Spiller has been a lecturer in nutrition in the San Francisco Bay Area at Mills College and Foothill College. Two of his latest multiauthor books are The Mediterranean Diets in Health and Disease (Van Nostrant, 1991) and the CRC Handbook of Dietary Fiber in Human Nutrition 2nd Edition (CRC Press, 1993).