"On my must-read list!" -Margaret Atwood
Hilary Rose is Emerita Professor at Bradford University and
Visiting Professor of Sociology at the London School of
Economics.
Steven Rose is Emeritus Professor of Life Sciences at the Open
University. Long active in the politics of sciences, their joint
books include Science and Society and Alas, Poor Darwin.
Fascinating, lucid and angry.
*Guardian*
On my must-read list! Genes, Cells, Brains ... the rundown on the
hype.
*Margaret Atwood*
Whatever else we may need for the public understanding of science,
we certainly do need the facts contained in this book. The Roses
show how rapidly the ideal of disinterested scientific research has
been evaporating since Mammon has been welcomed into the
laboratory. Immense and still increasing profits have been made by
people who have repeatedly promised various holy grails-discoveries
expected to arise from genetic and cerebral research-but
comparatively little of real use has emerged from that quarter. In
particular, Genes, Cells and Brains shows how the recent expansion
of the neurosciences, which was widely hailed as the dawn of a new
psychiatry, has actually had little effect. Plainly this research
has done little to check the steadily continuing increase in mental
illness. Altogether, this is a rather blood-curdling but
fascinating book and a much-needed alarm call!
*Mary Midgley, author of Animals and Why They Matter*
Genes, Cells and Brains is an angry book. It is also an important
one ... contains wonderful descriptions of the science behind the
new biology.
*Times Literary Supplement*
While I generally turn down requests for an endorsement of a book,
I must make an exception for the superb analysis of a very
important topic by Hilary Rose and Steve Rose. Genes, Cells and
Brains refutes with authority the extravagant claims that
everything that ails us will be cured by modern molecular and
cellular biology. They show that despite the self-serving hype
produced by both academic and entrepreneurial science, we still do
not understand how the brain works nor can we avoid the thousand
shocks that flesh is heir to.
*Richard Lewontin, author of The Triple Helix*
A scathing account of the failure of recent projects in biology to
provide significant new knowledge ... the Roses provide
thought-provoking and interesting contrasts to the secular,
neoliberal view that predominates at present.
*Nature*
Rose and Rose provide incisive analyses of the successes of the new
biology at improving corporate profits while failing to do much to
improve human health. This is a valuable therapy for all of us
suffering from the inflated promises and huge costs of the new
biology, and a splendid resource for reinvigorating the Radical
Science Movement in today's global political economy.
*Sandra Harding, UCLA Professor and author of The Science
Question in Feminism*
Genes, Cells and Brains offers a complex, compelling picture of the
social and political challenges emerging around biotechnological
investment, promise and hype.
*Maureen McNeil, Professor and Associate Director, Cesagen: ESRC
Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics*
I have just started Genes, Cells and Brains and I can hardly put it
down. What clarity and insights, what history and up to the minute
perceptiveness. And what brilliant and unpretentious writing. I
think this is an important book.
*Sian Ede, Director of the Gulbenkian Foundation*
What brilliant and energetic warriors Hilary Rose and Steven Rose
have been! Reading this book is to visit the innumerable
battlefields on which they have fought over half a century. The
battle cries have now softened into gentler irony, but the pace of
the writing is superb. Anybody who wants an incisive and radical
perspective on the excessive claims made for human genome project,
sociobiology, neurosciences, or human discrimination against other
humans, should read this book.
*Patrick Bateson, author (with Peter Gluckman) of Plasticity,
Robustness, Development and Evolution*
[The Roses] unwind the myriad assumptions about technology as the
engine of improvement in our lives and offer a powerful argument
against the sociopolitical machinery behind these dream
disciplines.
*The Daily Beast*
[Hilary Rose and Stephen Rose] unwind the myriad assumptions about
technology as the engine of improvement in our lives and offers a
powerful argument against the sociopolitical machinery behind these
dream disciplines.
*The Daily Beast*
The authors (professors emeriti of sociology and neuroscience at,
respectively, Bradford U. and the Open U., England) place
contemporary developments in the biotechnosciences of genomics,
regenerative medicine, and the neurosciences (the 'genes, cells,
and brains' of their title) within the context of the global
neoliberal economy and culture of the 21st century.
*Book News*
[Genes, Cells and Brains is] a detailed and acerbic history of
20th-century genetics: its uneasy dance in and out of the arms of
eugenics, its stumbles on the envisioned road to decoding and
commodifying human nature, and its upstaging-after the Human Genome
Project disappointed hopes for disease cures-by neuroscience,
which, in turn, has fallen short of its promises to find and fix
the psyche in the brain.
*The Scientist*
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