Richard Hayes has been active in social and political organizing since his student days at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. In the 1970s he worked as a community organizer with a wide range of progressive organizations. In the early 1980s he served as Executive Director of the San Francisco Democratic Party and ran the electoral field operations for the late Congressmembers Phillip Burton and Sala Burton. From 1983 through 1992 he was Associate Political Director and then National Director of Volunteer Development for the Sierra Club. In the early 1990s he was Chair of the Sierra Club's Global Warming Campaign Committee. In 1999 he began the work that lead to the creation of the Center for Genetics and Society in 2001. He holds a PhD in Energy and Resources from the University of California at Berkeley.
The Center for Genetics and Society (CGS) is a nonprofit public affairs organization working to encourage responsible uses and effective societal governance of the new human biotechnologies. CGS supports benign and beneficent medical applications of these technologies and opposes those applications that objectify and commodify human life and threaten to divide human society. CGS works in a context of support for the equitable provision of health technologies domestically and internationally; for women's health and reproductive rights; for the protection of our children; for the rights of the disabled; and for precaution in the use of technologies of great consequence.