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, and mental illness? Is science progressing or in retreat? Is this century humankind's last?
These are just some of the compelling and provocative questions tackled here by twelve of the world's leading scientists and scientific thinkers. In engaging and lucid discussion, they clarify many of the most urgent scientific challenges and dilemmas facing science today.
Essential reading for anyone interested in popular science, What Scientists Think is edited and written by Jeremy Stangroom of the highly successful The Philosopher's Magazine and includes a foreword by Marek Kohn, author of A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection and the British Imagination.
Biography
Jeremy Stangroom is co-editor of The Philosophers' Magazine.
'I don't often recommend books in the health column, but I have to make an exception this week. It's called What Scientists Think ... Why do I recommend it as a doctor? Because there are chapters on the brain and consciousness, on psychiatry and schizophrenia, on viruses and their threats, and on cancer research and animal experimentation, all of which are absolute 'must' reads for anyone who wishes to be properly informed on all of these subjects. 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 ... it is straightforward and thought-provoking and if you have opinions on science be prepared to change them.' – Dr Tom Smith, Broadcasting Doctors' Association
'Highly personal yet wholly intellectual, the interviewees reflect current hotspots in research' – Victoria Neumark, TES
'What Scientists Think ... can begin, incrementally, to give non-scientists a glimpse of how scientists work, and their thoughts and worries ... Stangroom has produced a volume in which the issues are contemporary and the interviewees speak clearly and non-technically. At just 194 pages, it is a simple and pleasingly effective manual for understanding scientists and what they think.' – Mark Pagel, New Humanist
