Major social upheavals are typically accompanied by similar upheavals in the dominant ideas in society. This is as true of science as of other ideological spheres.
The English Revolution of 1642–49, a key event in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, was followed by discoveries that included Robert Hooke’s observation of the first biological cell and Robert Boyle’s elucidation of the physical properties of gases. This moment of scientific progress culminated in Isaac Newton’s Principia, which revolutionized our understanding of planetary movements by introducing the laws of motion and universal gravitation.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the first attempt to construct a socialist society on a countrywide scale. It saw the emergence of exciting new ideas in scientific fields as diverse as genetics, ecology, and psychology, before the rise of Stalinism snuffed out these developments.
The late 1960s and early 1970s have gone down in history as some of the most socially turbulent times in living memory. Although the hopes of activists at the time for a just and equal society free of oppression and war did not ultimately bear fruit, we shouldn’t underestimate the ideological impact of the period. That impact extended to science, as illustrated by the career of Steven Rose, a renowned British neuroscientist who died last month at the age of eighty-seven.
Rose, who was born in London in 1938 and educated at the University of Cambridge, was an internationally respected biologist with a prodigious research output. He published more than three hundred research papers and helped to found the new discipline of neuroscience, for instance through being a cofounder of the British Neuroscience Association and the European Neuroscience Association.
However, it is as a left-wing scientist activist, a campaigner for social responsibility in science, and an author of popular, but critical, science books, that Rose will most likely be remembered. Today there is no particular association between left-wing views and the authorship of popular science works. In the mid-twentieth century, however, things were quite different.
This was partly because many figures in the scientific establishment at the time viewed the idea of popularizing science with skepticism or disapproval due to concerns about accuracy and the potential for oversimplification or misuse. While there were also advocates for public understanding of science, a prevailing sentiment among many scientists held that popularization risked diluting the rigor and complexity of scientific knowledge.
Particularly in the early days of science communication, left-wing scientists, being natural rebels, often found it easier to go against the censorious viewpoint of the scientific establishment. They were also more likely to have a desire to educate the masses, and to believe that people without a formal science education would be interested in scientific ideas and discoveries and were capable of understanding them.
Scientists like J. D. Bernal and J. B. S. Haldane, who were members of the Communist Party, engaged in some of the first efforts at the popularization of science during the 1930s through articles, books, and the new technology of radio. Rose began to follow in this tradition of making science accessible to ordinary people with his first book, The Chemistry of Life. This was an introduction to biochemistry written in layperson’s language, published in 1966 when Rose was only in his late twenties.
Another notable popular science book that Rose authored was The Making of Memory, published in 1992. This provided a history of the study of this central aspect of consciousness, as well as the most cutting-edge scientific investigations of this phenomenon, including Rose’s own contributions to this area of study. Within its pages, he was also not afraid to tackle controversial issues like the use of animals in research.
Communicating science to the public was only one aspect of Rose’s literary output. More fundamental from the perspective of left-wing politics was the way that he used his books to criticize common assumptions in capitalist society about the role of biology in human behavior and social interactions. In particular, he challenged what he saw as a biological determinist understanding of such questions.
My own first encounter with Rose’s writing came during my third year of studying for a natural sciences degree at the University of Cambridge. I had arrived at Cambridge from a working-class, state school background. Being from a nonpolitical family, it was quite a revelation to become involved in political campaigns like the movement against apartheid in South Africa.
However, I tended to separate my increasingly left-wing political consciousness from the ideas I was forming about the biological world in my studies. This separation continued until a friend in my course suggested I read the book Not in Our Genes (1984).
This book, coauthored by Rose with the biologist Richard Lewontin and the psychologist Leon Kamin, was a direct challenge to a new movement in science known as sociobiology that was becoming increasingly influential in the 1980s. Pioneered by evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins in Britain and E. O. Wilson in the United States, sociobiology claimed to explain human behavior in terms of evolutionary biology and genetics. Dawkins captured the essence of sociobiology in his book The Selfish Gene with a statement that “we are survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”
In Not in Our Genes, Rose, Lewontin, and Kamin challenged the sociobiological view that genetic differences are the primary factor explaining human behavior in modern capitalist societies and the social inequalities that characterize such societies based on class, race, and gender. Instead, they proposed a more holistic view of human behavioral and social differences, highlighting the crucial role of environment, social factors, and life experiences in shaping individuals and societies.
Perhaps most importantly for me as someone who was beginning to question the world around me at the time, Not in Our Genes linked its critique of biological determinism to explicit advocacy for a very different type of society: democratic socialism.
It is one thing to challenge the biological determinist view that “everything is in the genes.” But as a student of biology, I was learning about the exciting discoveries being made in the fields of genetics, biochemistry, and molecular biology. Those discoveries increasingly defined the roles of biological molecules in a wide variety of cellular and bodily functions, including brain function.
Indeed, in his day-to-day work as a neuroscientist, where he used the chick as an experimental organism, Rose himself was deploying reductionist scientific methods to try and uncover the molecular basis of memory — a key aspect of consciousness not just in chickens but also in humans. So how did Rose’s search for the material basis of consciousness and his anti-reductionist stance intersect? Rose tackled this issue in another popular science book, Lifelines.
Published in 2003, Lifelines argued that life depends on the elaborate web of interactions that occur within cells, organisms, and ecosystems, and in which DNA has but one part to play. In this respect, Rose was arguing a similar position to that put forward by Lewontin and Richard Levins in their 1987 book The Dialectical Biologist. Lewontin elaborated further in The Triple Helix, published in 2000.
This approach to understanding life and humanity’s place within it has certainly influenced my own books, The Deeper Genome, Mind Shift, and Consciousness. It prompted me to see the human genome as a highly dynamic entity, not a static “blueprint,” as well as the importance of the interaction between DNA and its chemical cousin, RNA, in cellular function. In terms of understanding what makes human consciousness qualitatively different from that of other species, this approach led me to explore how the development of tools and language by our prehistoric ancestors has transformed the human brain both structurally and in its basic biology.
Rose was far from being just a theorist in the radical science movement. He also played a pioneering role as a socialist activist by working with other left-wing scientists to establish the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science (BSSRS) in 1969. The same year saw the foundation of a similar organization in the United States, Science for the People (SftP).
It says something about the heady atmosphere of the late 1960s that activists felt they could build a left-wing movement among scientists, a group of individuals not generally associated with radical political views. The fact that this effort primarily occurred in two countries viewed as bastions of the scientific establishment was particularly important.
The BSSRS and SftP challenged established ideas about the role of science in society among both scientists and the wider public. As well as criticizing the use of biological determinism to justify racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression, the groups also drew attention to the way that science was contributing to environmental destruction, health hazards, or technologies of warfare.
In addition, they highlighted inequalities within the scientific workforce, such as the low status of women and ethnic minorities in the profession. Overall, radical scientists sought to challenge the notion of scientific neutrality, arguing that science is greatly affected by social and political influences.
The BSSRS ceased to exist in the 1990s. Many observers saw its demise as a consequence of the more general fading of the radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s over the course of subsequent decades. However, Rose continued to play an important role as an activist until the end of his life, often in collaboration with his partner, Hilary Rose.
One focus of their work was opposing the oppression of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state. As someone who had been born into an Orthodox Jewish family, with relatives who supported the Zionist project, he brought a particular authority to this role.
Steven and Hilary played a key role as academics in founding the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP). Formed in response to the Palestinian boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, BRICUP was the first organization in the world established specifically to promote the boycott of Israel’s higher education institutions due to their complicity in Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands.
Rose devoted his life to using the methods of science not only to make important discoveries about the material basis of life — including its most intriguing manifestation, consciousness — but also to fight for a very different type of society. That raises the question of how a new radical science movement might be built in the future if we were to see a social upheaval comparable to that of the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Here, I believe it is important to look at the successes but also some of the mistakes of radical science movements of the past. It is my personal belief that one such mistake was the attitude of many radical scientists to recombinant DNA technology and, later, the Human Genome Project.
As someone who was heavily influenced by Rose’s writing when I was an undergraduate student, I was surprised later in my career to hear of his opposition in the late 1980s to the planned Human Genome Project. In fact, I should have been less surprised than I was, in view of previous opposition by the BSSRS and SftP to recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s.
The opposition in both cases drew on many valid points. Those who called for a moratorium on the development of genetic engineering in its early years expressed concern about the safety aspects of altering bacterial genomes.
Later, Rose opposed the sequencing of the whole human genome on the grounds that protein-coding genes account for less than 2 percent of our genome. He also criticized overblown claims that the project would provide the “instructions for making a human being” and transform the field of medicine by identifying genes linked to diseases ranging from diabetes and heart disease to mental conditions like depression and schizophrenia.
However, despite the validity of many criticisms, the opposition of many scientific activists to genetic engineering and the Human Genome Project quickly solidified into what could be viewed as a political stance that was hostile to science and technology. This stance underestimated the positive practical aspects of genetic engineering.
It also overlooked the fact that, instead of bolstering biological determinism, the Human Genome Project has tended to undermine it. The outcomes of this research have revealed the complexities of our genomes and their interaction with the cellular, bodily, and external environments.
Differences of opinion on this issue can have practical consequences in terms of past, present, and future attempts to build a scientific left. Mark Ptashne was a pioneer of molecular biology in the United States who was also a left-wing activist, giving lectures in Vietnam as an act of solidarity during the US invasion, for example. Yet in his own words, Ptashne later “broke with the left over recombinant DNA. They said we should oppose the experiments because they were dangerous . . . it wasn’t true.” Future attempts to build a scientific left have to be based on scientific evidence, not on overly rigid ideological principles that end up distorting or even ignoring such evidence.
These comments are certainly not meant to undermine Rose’s overall legacy — anything but. In both theory and practice, he performed a major role as a radical scientist. Any future scientific left needs to celebrate the achievements of organizations like the BSSRS and SftP, while developing a critical assessment of their approach that enables us to go beyond such achievements.
That could help us build a radical science movement that will play an important part in constructing a very different type of society where science serves the interests of the majority, not just the few. In this respect, Steven Rose will remain an inspirational figure.
Great Job John Parrington & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
