Science and politics can make strange bedmates with the question of whether it is possible to make completely objective observations about the emergence of highly politicized positions of the world. Neurobiologist Steven Rose, who died at the age of 87, adopted a large reductionist approach to his research on biochemical memory mechanisms, while at the same time adopted a high -profile political stance against the idea that human behavior was determined by our genes.
In 1969, the first professor of biology appointed at the open university, a workers’ government was the first professor of biology, which was the distance learning institution established by the initiative of a lesser, but equally effectively, Rose helped lead a democratic and distributed approach in teaching practical science. It has developed experiments in advance that students can complete at home, bring their results together and configure most of the “Citizen Science” projects that have become popular in recent years.
Hot, warrior and articulated Rose did not give a quarter in his discussions with other scientists. In the 1970s, he challenged the idea that IQ tests – the widely adopted adoption of education and employment – measuring some genetically identified “general intelligence .. These and subsequent discussions were played in a wider cultural arena, where most scientific debates fueled by a series of popular books are typical.
His main objectives were Evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins, who was combined by sociobiology writer Edward O Wilson and later cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker.
According to Rose, the idea that the roots of human social behavior were erected by the natural selection process in the service of maintaining our genes. Although Darwinci did not question the evolution as a driving force in biology, he argued that history and society are at least as important as the determinants of human actions from a Marxist perspective.
In 1984, Rose, American geneticist Richard Lewontin and psychologist Leon Kamin, together with biology, ideology and human nature is not in our nature. The book was a Trenchant critic of sociobiology and genetic determinism, and he went further in the accusation of these views to prevent a more fair society based on socialist principles. He met with mixed investigations, including the proposal that he and his joint writers misrepresent their rivals, but he never retreated from Rose’s position.
More than a decade, Lifelines (1997) reorganized his arguments, emphasizing the developmental and environmental events that he “organized herself” to make an organism a unique individual in a life, which has not been predetermined during a life. He wrote: “In the nature of living systems, even though we do not have our own choice, – our – constantly building our own future is radically uncertain.”
When he first became a neurobiologist, Rose chose an important problem to consciously investigate. What is biologically changing when we learn? He followed the hypothesis that some changes in the biochemistry of individual brain cells, trained as a biochemist, should be under the traces of permanent memory. The research devoted his career to search for newly scanned chicks in the brain of new protein molecules.
While he acknowledged that human memory brings much greater questions, he and his colleagues worked on this problem because “we know how to work”. Until his retirement Radmila Mileusnic He identified protein molecules that could meet the amnesic effects of antibiotics on chicks and hoped to develop them as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. However, like others, they ran against the problem that the brain put obstacles to such large molecules, so that they cannot be given as pills or injection.
Rose was a compulsive writer, the words made science, society and politics into a single whole. When he was still in his 20s, he published the foundation of the biochemistry to the general reader, a highly successful penguin. Making my articles: Molecules of mind (1992) Royal Society Science Book Award received the Award.
The 21st century brain, one of its subsequent studies, summarized the achievements of neuroscientists in recent years, but warned that science cannot always provide the best answers to questions about mind, consciousness and mental illness. While Rose advocated science as an approach to understanding the natural world, at least devoted most of its important energy to criticism of the relationship between science and the state.
Steven was born in an Orthodox Jewish community in North London, the eldest son of Lionel Rose (formerly Rosenberg), a chemical teacher who was an intelligence officer during the Second World War. Lionel then worked full -time as an organizer for the Jewish former Service and Women’s Association before establishing an advertising agency. Steven’s mother Ruth (Nee Waxman) gave up her own career desires to look at her home and her family, but later became the joint director of her husband’s agency and worked with one hand after her death in 1959.
Steven won a scholarship at Haberdashers ‘Ashe’s Boys’ school, then at Cricklewood in north of London. Another scholarship studied in Natural Sciences at King’s College in Cambridge, where he initially aimed to specialize in chemistry. However, he found himself with new discoveries in biochemistry, including DNA double spirals proposed by James Watson and Francis Crick at the Molecular Biology Medical Research Council Unit.
Rose, the first in biochemistry, decided to struggle with one of the most difficult problems in biology – how the brain works. Cambridge “exiled” to the Psychiatry Institute in London to examine the biochemistry of cow brain slices for a doctor. Rose talked about his frustration on this issue: iz We may also be studying big toes, livers or kidneys for everything he told me about the function. ”
At the London School of Economics, he recently met Hilary Chahts (Nee Channell), a widow reading sociology, at a new left investigation meeting in 1960 and married the following year.
Political action and protests have been part of his life since his childhood-in the late 40s he was attacked by fascist stone shooters and participated in wars with the police while performing against the occupation of Suez as a license. Steven and Hilary established a close partnership that was both personal and professional: Hilary, the founder of a few books, the founders of the British Social Responsibility Association, and from 1999 to 2002, Gresham Physics Professor Honorary Conference Post.
Hilary became a professor of social policy at Bradford University, showing special interest in the sociology of science, and united in the political activism of the Vietnam War, the control of chemical and biological weapons, and the boycott of the academic institutions of Israeli (extensively Marxist, but not Soviet).
At the University of Oxford, after making a false start as a after the doctoral researcher, Rose spent five years (1964-69) in Imperial College London after making a false start as a researcher. There, after learning a new behavior, the basis of the subsequent research studies, he developed the search technique of searching biochemical changes in single neurons in the brains of chicks. In 1969, he joined the open university, built his Life Sciences department from scratch and said how he could teach science with a combination of home and experiment, television programs and summer schools by working from the first principles.
He retired in 1999, but protected his laboratory and continued to do research for more than ten years. Thinking about the values that support his work for OU, he said to an oral history interviewer: iz If you want to share power in a democratic society, you must share information and share science knowledge. ”
Hilary survived by Simon (Hilary’s first marriage) and Ben and six grandchildren, Sara, Chloe, Woody, Cosmo, Saul and Mali and his brother Nikolas.
