His book Animal Liberation published in 1975 created a worldwide movement to stop the exploitation of animals

His book, Animal Liberation, published in 1975, created a worldwide movement to stop the exploitation of animals. His writings have turned thousands of readers into vegetarians. Protestors say his beliefs about infanticide and euthanasia are similar to those of the Nazis. Academic critics say his thinking is unoriginal, a resurrection of a philosophy they regard as discredited.Peter Singer is the most effective philosopher alive. He lists his recreations as reading, writing, walking, bodysurfing, cross-country skiing and growing fruit and vegetables.CRITICS: His thinking has inspired demonstrations, abuse and the banning of his lectures in Germany and Austria.

He was the founding president of the International Association of Bioethics, and is now president of the Australia and New Zealand Federation of Animal Societies. He is to stand for the Australian Greens in Victoria in the next federal elections.WORK: His 1975 book, Animal Liberation, effectively created the worldwide animal rights movement. He has since published a huge range of books including The Expanding Circle, which is said to have created thousands of vegetarians around the world, Practical Ethics and How Are We to Live?LIFE: He is married with three daughters. He is Professor of Philosophy and deputy director of the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University, Melbourne. It would be nice to have seen some other British firms in there.RICHARD SARSON.

1: Peter Singer

`After ruling our thoughts and our decisions about life and death for nearly 2,000 years, the traditional Western ethic has collapsed’
LIFE: Peter Singer was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1946. From Britain, the only full members are BT and the half-French Sema software house. It is probably right that France should take a lead role in the European Web, as it has 10 years’ experience of a crude forerunner of the Web, Minitel, which is linked to tens of thousands of Teletel services.As the Web is one of the most explosive technologies of the future, however, it seems important for the whole of European industry, not just the French, to put in their penn’orth to the Web Consortium’s standards. One of the other French speakers declared that a reason for the “non” vote in Quebec was that the Web gave the English-speaking minority an unfair advantage in getting their electoral act together.Of the 20 full members of the European Consortium, about 15 are French firms, both IT companies such as Bull and Alcatel, and users such as Aerospatiale and Michelin. Elisabeth Dufourcq, the then minister of education, announced the main purpose to be to create “un Web francophone pour tous les Francais – et les Quebecois”, and put 10 million French francs on the table to fund Inria’s work on the Web and to connect small businesses to it. The main task, according to Berners- Lee, is to “multi-culturalise and multi-lingualise” the Web.The French interpret this to mean it should be more French. Most of the members are American IT firms.
The Web is solidly Anglophone – but not for much longer, if the French have their way.

The Paris jamboree was the launch of the European branch of the WWW Consortium and the announcement of Inria, the French IT research centre, as the co-developer with MIT. But in 1994 he switched to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the World Wide Web Consortium had been formed to take Web standards forward. When he invented the Web in 1990, Berners-Lee was working at CERN, the nuclear research centre near Geneva. He was Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web (WWW), the easy- to-read bit of the Internet with pictures. Finally, a slight, young-looking Englishman arrived on the platform and was greeted by applause from around the auditorium. Public funding of the project comes to pounds 12,000.For more information, e-mail Lighthouse at anno lighthouse .uk..