鈥淚鈥檝e been reading some very good books lately,鈥� says Gregory Stock, director of the Medicine, Technology, and Society programme at the University of California in Los Angeles, and author of Redesigning Humans (Profile).
Food Politics by Marion Nestle (University of California Press, 2002) is 鈥渁 great overview of the tension in the US between food and nutraceuticals 鈥� both of which are essentially unregulated in their health claims 鈥� and pharmaceuticals,鈥� he says. This particularly interests him because he has set up a company that has 鈥渁 good shot at finding botanical extracts that will function as preventives for Alzheimer鈥檚 and other important diseases鈥�.
Stock is halfway through Steven Pinker鈥檚 Blank Slate (Penguin, 2002) and Matt Ridley鈥檚 Nature via Nurture (Fourth Estate). Both are 鈥渆xcellent efforts to cut through the misconceptions, politics and ideology that distort the nature-nurture debate and cloud our understanding of the larger implications of the current unravelling of the workings of biology鈥�.
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And he has just reread Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (Voyager, 2001). It鈥檚 odd, he says, that it is still cited as a brilliant cautionary vision of our future because 鈥渋t couldn鈥檛 be more wrong, from its predictions of the ascent of totalitarian government to those of mass-produced human subspecies.鈥�