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Planet earth plc
DISSECTING ROOM
LIFELINE Steven Rose Steven Rose trained as a biochemist at Cambridge and as a neuroscientist at the Institute of Psychiatry. He has been a professor of Biology and Director of the Brain and Behaviour Research group at the Open University since its foundation in 1969. He is the joint Gresham professor of physics with sociologist Hilary Rose. He researches into the neurobiology of learning and memory and is the author many books, including Lifelines. His latest book Alas Poor Darwin, edited with Hilary Rose, will be published in July. Who was your most influential teacher? Charles Darwin taught me how to think about science, Karl Marx how to think about philosophy and economics, and Hilary Rose how to think about society and life. Which research paper has had most effect on your work, and why? A paper by the Swede Holger Hyden in the 1960s opened up the study of biochemistry of memory formation and set the research questions which have occupied the rest of my laboratory life. What would be your advice to a newly qualified doctor? Beware of neuroscientists, geneticists, and pharmacologists claiming certainty and promising wonder cures. How do you relax? With difficulty. What is your greatest regret? I’m not now likely to see a world transformed by social justice in my lifetime. What, apart from your wife, is the passion of your life? To understand and change the world even a little for the better. What is your greatest fear? Behaving shamefully by failing to speak out for my principles. What books are you not reading? Anything on consciousness and, if I can avoid it, anything written by evolutionary psychologists. Have you ever broken one of the ten commandments? As an atheist from an early age, I can’t readily remember them. But I expect I have. Where were you in your sibling order and did you gain or lose as a result? First—and as for gains or losses, ask my younger brother.
1472
Planet earth plc n April last year—dare I say it, last millennium—I flew from Gatwick Airport, UK, to Buenos Aires. It took about 13 hours. There, I boarded a smaller aeroplane and flew on to Santiago, the capital of Chile. When I landed in Santiago, I’d been in the air for more than 15 hours. My journey had taken me across the equator into a different hemisphere. Yet when I reminisce about my bus-ride from the airport into Santiago, guess which image has proved the most enduring? I’ll give you some clues. It’s a shop. People go there to hire videos. There’s a postbox-style drop-off slot for films you have finished with. Its premises are gaudily decorated in blue and yellow. That’s right: Blockbuster Video. It is a shop with which I am particularly familiar—there is a branch just minutes from my flat in north London. This phenomenon, of course, is not new. For years now, perhaps decades, it has been impossible to escape Western brand names. More ubiquitous still are those trademarked symbols: the ‘swoosh’ of Nike; the shell of Shell; the dreaded yellow ‘M’ of you-know-who. Globalisation has become a buzz word. The phenomenon it describes is often seen as communicative (“hey, everybody just wants to talk to each other”). But the driving force of globalisation is less communicative than commercial. In other words, capitalism. The majority of people learning English, for example—from the Slovakian teenager to the Japanese stockbroker—are doing so because they know it is the language of business. Or, to be precise, it is the language with which to do business with the USA. If the national language of the USA where Dutch—as it so easily might have been—you’d probably be reading this in a journal called De Lancetboog. (Spare me the postcards if I’ve got that wrong.) An increasingly powerful tool of US-led globalisation is the internet. In
I
personal terms—perhaps selfish ones— I am a big fan. Free Web-based e-mail services have rejuvenated my friendships with people living outside the UK. (Some argue that e-mail is killing the art of letter writing; in reality, however, we e-mail people to whom we would not bother sending letters—it is just so much easier.) Ironically, the main tool of US-led globalisation has become the chief weapon by which to oppose it. As Michael Byers writes in the London Review of Books (Jan 6, 2000): “The information age offers unprecedented opportunities for democracy and individual autonomy, while at the same time posing serious threats to those same values”. The huge protest at the World Trade Organisation summit in early December, 1999—the so-called Battle of Seattle—was coordinated via the Web. Many of the protesters were expressing concerns about what they see as the dark side of globalisation: the world’s richest multinational corporations ruthlessly furthering their own interests. It is telling that the violent minority of the 38 000 protesters in Seattle attacked what they saw as symbols of globalisation. Newsweek (Dec 13, 1999) featured a double-page photograph of an obliterated branch of Starbucks Coffee. For the average backpacker, the world’s accelerating homogenisation will continue to put the damper on any travelling experiences (ah, shame). In an attempt to escape the cultural deja-vu I was experiencing in Santiago, and on a very tight schedule, I caught a bus to the port-town of Valparaiso. Little did I know that Valparaiso is a former British colony. Things were going well until I stepped into a shop to buy a loaf of bread. “Si?” said the Chilean women behind the counter—in a red Manchester United football shirt. Daniel Davies
THE LANCET • Vol 355 • April 22, 2000
LIFELINE Steven Rose Steven Rose trained as a biochemist at Cambridge and as a neuroscientist at the Institute of Psychiatry. He has been a professor of Biology and Director of the Brain and Behaviour Research group at the Open University since its foundation in 1969. He is the joint Gresham professor of physics with sociologist Hilary Rose. He researches into the neurobiology of learning and memory and is the author many books, including Lifelines. His latest book Alas Poor Darwin, edited with Hilary Rose, will be published in July. Who was your most influential teacher? Charles Darwin taught me how to think about science, Karl Marx how to think about philosophy and economics, and Hilary Rose how to think about society and life. Which research paper has had most effect on your work, and why? A paper by the Swede Holger Hyden in the 1960s opened up the study of biochemistry of memory formation and set the research questions which have occupied the rest of my laboratory life. What would be your advice to a newly qualified doctor? Beware of neuroscientists, geneticists, and pharmacologists claiming certainty and promising wonder cures. How do you relax? With difficulty. What is your greatest regret? I’m not now likely to see a world transformed by social justice in my lifetime. What, apart from your wife, is the passion of your life? To understand and change the world even a little for the better. What is your greatest fear? Behaving shamefully by failing to speak out for my principles. What books are you not reading? Anything on consciousness and, if I can avoid it, anything written by evolutionary psychologists. Have you ever broken one of the ten commandments? As an atheist from an early age, I can’t readily remember them. But I expect I have. Where were you in your sibling order and did you gain or lose as a result? First—and as for gains or losses, ask my younger brother.
1472
Planet earth plc n April last year—dare I say it, last millennium—I flew from Gatwick Airport, UK, to Buenos Aires. It took about 13 hours. There, I boarded a smaller aeroplane and flew on to Santiago, the capital of Chile. When I landed in Santiago, I’d been in the air for more than 15 hours. My journey had taken me across the equator into a different hemisphere. Yet when I reminisce about my bus-ride from the airport into Santiago, guess which image has proved the most enduring? I’ll give you some clues. It’s a shop. People go there to hire videos. There’s a postbox-style drop-off slot for films you have finished with. Its premises are gaudily decorated in blue and yellow. That’s right: Blockbuster Video. It is a shop with which I am particularly familiar—there is a branch just minutes from my flat in north London. This phenomenon, of course, is not new. For years now, perhaps decades, it has been impossible to escape Western brand names. More ubiquitous still are those trademarked symbols: the ‘swoosh’ of Nike; the shell of Shell; the dreaded yellow ‘M’ of you-know-who. Globalisation has become a buzz word. The phenomenon it describes is often seen as communicative (“hey, everybody just wants to talk to each other”). But the driving force of globalisation is less communicative than commercial. In other words, capitalism. The majority of people learning English, for example—from the Slovakian teenager to the Japanese stockbroker—are doing so because they know it is the language of business. Or, to be precise, it is the language with which to do business with the USA. If the national language of the USA where Dutch—as it so easily might have been—you’d probably be reading this in a journal called De Lancetboog. (Spare me the postcards if I’ve got that wrong.) An increasingly powerful tool of US-led globalisation is the internet. In
I
personal terms—perhaps selfish ones— I am a big fan. Free Web-based e-mail services have rejuvenated my friendships with people living outside the UK. (Some argue that e-mail is killing the art of letter writing; in reality, however, we e-mail people to whom we would not bother sending letters—it is just so much easier.) Ironically, the main tool of US-led globalisation has become the chief weapon by which to oppose it. As Michael Byers writes in the London Review of Books (Jan 6, 2000): “The information age offers unprecedented opportunities for democracy and individual autonomy, while at the same time posing serious threats to those same values”. The huge protest at the World Trade Organisation summit in early December, 1999—the so-called Battle of Seattle—was coordinated via the Web. Many of the protesters were expressing concerns about what they see as the dark side of globalisation: the world’s richest multinational corporations ruthlessly furthering their own interests. It is telling that the violent minority of the 38 000 protesters in Seattle attacked what they saw as symbols of globalisation. Newsweek (Dec 13, 1999) featured a double-page photograph of an obliterated branch of Starbucks Coffee. For the average backpacker, the world’s accelerating homogenisation will continue to put the damper on any travelling experiences (ah, shame). In an attempt to escape the cultural deja-vu I was experiencing in Santiago, and on a very tight schedule, I caught a bus to the port-town of Valparaiso. Little did I know that Valparaiso is a former British colony. Things were going well until I stepped into a shop to buy a loaf of bread. “Si?” said the Chilean women behind the counter—in a red Manchester United football shirt. Daniel Davies
THE LANCET • Vol 355 • April 22, 2000