Читать книгу Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities - Lewis Pyenson - Страница 4

‘A considerable achievement.’ CASPAR HENDERSON, New Scientist

‘At best a heroic visionary, at worst a megalomaniac Frankenstein: either way triumphant individualism is taken for granted in the stereotypical scientist. So too is the disinterested purity of research conducted under lab conditions, all external considerations excluded like so many bacteria from a sterile vessel. Yet the reality has always been quite otherwise: the world refuses to stop at the laboratory door, and that has led to some of science’s greatest breakthroughs as well as its worst abuses. This highly readable, subtle and thought-provoking scientific history goes beyond whistle-blowing to consider more subtle and ultimately perhaps more interesting questions of how a changing institutional context has constrained the content and direction of we too unquestioningly take to be ‘pure’ science.’

Scotsman