What Scientists Think

By Jeremy Stangroom (published by Routledge: ISBN: 0-415-33427-6)

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What are scientists working on today? What do they worry about? What do they think about the working of the brain, climate change, animal experimentation, cancer research, and mental illness? Is science progressing or in retreat? Could this century be humankind's last?

These are just some of the questions tackled here by twelve of the world's leading scientists and scientific thinkers. In conversation with Jeremy Stangroom, they clarify many of the most urgent challenges and dilemmas facing science today.

Steve Jones - Darwinism and Genes
Steven Pinker - Evolutionary psychology and the blank slate
Susan Greenfield - The human brain and consciousness
Kenan Malik - Science and the human animal
Kevin Warwick - Cybernetics and a post-human future
Robin Murray - Psychiatry and schizophrenia
Dorothy Crawford - Microbiology, viruses and their threats
Mike Stratton - On cancer research
Colin Blakemore - Animal experimentation, ethics and medical research
Norman Levitt - Science under threat
Edward O. Wilson - Biodiversity
Martin Rees - Science: Its dangers and its public

With a Foreward by Marek Kohn, author of A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection and the British Imagination.

"A pleasure at last to get access to the varied views of scientists." - Lewis Wolpert

"Stangroom has produced a volume in which the issues are contemporary and the interviewees speak clearly and non-technically...[I]t is a simple and pleasingly effective manual for understanding scientists and what they think." - Professor Mark Pagel, New Humanist

"...fascinating series of 12 interviews with leading scientists." - Times Education Supplement

"If I were a schoolteacher I'd buy a copy for every teenager and certainly every student going to university - not just those studying science, but for all the others, too, who find science difficult or even alien." - Dr Tom Smith, Medical News