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progress of knowledge and the accumulationof experience.

One might dispute Jasanoff ’s assertion thatthere “was no storehouse of precedents thatpolicymakers could reach into for historicallydocumented evidence concerning the wide-spread use of laboratory-crafted organisms”.Modern biotechnology brings precision, butno fundamental change, to the long-standingpractices of selective breeding and randommutagenesis, which had been used in the fer-mentation and seed industries for many decadesbefore the debates on recombinant DNA.

Jasanoff ’s thesis rests on stronger groundwhen she turns to the ethical impacts of mod-ern biotechnology and genomics, and the dif-fering national responses, which she discussesand compares in detail: “Genetic engineeringtransgresses some of the most deeplyentrenched categories of western thought…Designs on nature — once thought to be theprerogative only of a divine creator — seemnow well within the reach of human capabil-ity,” she writes. The “controlling narratives”that framed the course of policy developmentinclude not only a novel process for interven-ing in nature, and a source of new products,but “a state-sponsored program of standard-ization and control carrying profound impli-cations for human dignity and freedom, andraising questions of constitutional signifi-cance”. Given the profundity of the challengesthus brought into public and policy debates,democratic theory in the era of the knowledgesociety must take on board the involvement ofcitizens in the production, use and interpreta-tion of knowledge for public purposes.

She offers three main conclusions. First, thatcore concepts of democracy such as citizen-ship and accountability cannot be satisfac-torily understood without considering thepolitics of science and technology. Second,that in all three countries (and the EU), poli-cies for the life sciences have been incorpo-rated into ‘nation-building’ projects that seekto reimagine what the nation (or Europe)stands for. Third, that political culture mattersto democratic culture, and works through theinstitutionalized ways in which citizens under-stand and evaluate public knowledge. Thesethree aspects of contemporary politics helpaccount not only for policy divergencesbetween nations, but also for the perceivedlegitimacy of state actions.

These conclusions are well supported, anduseful not least for indicating why scientific,industrial or other communities have found it difficult to influence policy. So the book succeeds in its aims. The policy debates haveserved to crystallize the emergence of a Euro-pean polity and self-awareness. But the readeris left wondering: what if these high policydebates are founded on misperceptions, whichthey reinforce? ■

Mark Cantley is adviser, Research Directorate-General of the European Commission, onBiotechnology, Agriculture and Food.

atheist”, and campaigned against the revival of the Orthodox Church and pseudoscienceof all kinds.

Ginzburg never suffered personal repres-sion from the authorities, and in fact was honoured by the state, primarily for his workon the nuclear-weapons programme. He madea key contribution to the physics of the hydro-gen bomb, proposing the use of lithium-6 deuteride as a nuclear source — a suggestionthat surprised the Americans and broughthim, in late 1953, the Order of Lenin and theStalin prize first class. He might otherwisehave suffered repression from the state follow-ing his marriage to Nina Ermakova, who hadbeen exiled to Gorki and whose father wasfalsely regarded as an enemy of the state.

If history is a line with branch points at arbi-trary decisions, then the whole manifold of allpossible trajectories might be viewed as a tree.If this is the history of Russia, what shape isthis tree of all possible paths? How differentcould it have been? The science theoreticianArnosht Kolman entitled his autobiography of disillusionment Our Lives Should Have Been Different (1982). How would NikolaiBukharin, for example, have dealt with the situation if he, instead of Stalin, had succeededLenin?

Karl Marx hoped to discover laws and reg-ularities in human history, as did the ‘generalsystems’ movement from Bertalanffy to PeterTurchin today, but the practical results havebeen slight. Ginzburg points to the key branchpoint: “I believe that the fundamental andprincipal cause of all these disasters is the Bolshevist–Communist totalitarian regimewhich was set up in Russia as a result of thecoup d’état in October 1917,” which followedthe February 1917 revolution that deposedthe tsar.

The first part of the book is a detailed reviewof the physics that concerned Ginzburg,including radiation from uniformly movingsources (the Vavilov–Cherenkov effect), cosmic rays, soft modes, superconductivityand superfluidity. It manages to place his own

A scientist’s life in RussiaAbout Science, Myself and Othersby V. L. Ginzburg,Institute of Physics/Taylor & Francis: 2004.549 pp. $99.95

Alan L. MackayVitali Ginzburg, winner of the 2003 NobelPrize for physics, was born in Moscow in 1916.He has survived, through intellect, characterand chance, through the whole tempestuousand tragic period of the Soviet Union. Heexperienced two world wars, a revolution,leninism, stalinism, the fall of the SovietUnion, and the chaotic present-day recon-struction of Russia at the hands of ‘gangstercapitalism’.

About Science, Myself and Others deals withsome immense topics: the circumstances ofthe Soviet Union, the history of branches offundamental physics, and the lives of distin-guished physicists, especially Lev Landau. Inparticular, Ginzburg focuses on struggles inthree main areas: fundamental physics, themechanics of daily life, and the ideologies ofpolitics and religion.

Since the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985,Ginzburg has produced various accounts ofhis life and work, biographical sketches of hiscontemporaries, and more general pieces.About Science, Myself and Others is an Englishtranslation of the latest Russian edition, from2003, which brought together scattered mat-erial but with some repetition and no index. It also contains material based on chapterspublished in his earlier book The Physics of aLifetime (Springer, 2001), and includes its con-tents list. The new collection contains a massof detailed information on physics and on people, making it indispensable, particularlyto those interested in the school of Landau and his fellow Nobel laureate Igor Tamm.

Ginzburg writes his apologia pro vita sua notas an apology but with a (justified) “fair con-ceit of himself ” for posterity as his “version ofthe facts”. He makes little concession to theignorant and suggests a simple test of generalknowledge for politicians and others. Forexample: “Q. What causes the seasons? A. Theinclination of the axis of the Earth to the planeof its orbit.” He writes that he has found inter-views unsatisfactory, and in one paper he evenwrote both the questions and his answers.

Most people have sought “to render untoCaesar what is Caesar’s and to God what isGod’s”, with a boundary between their innerbeliefs and the society in which they live. ButGinzburg has always had an intense concernnot just for physics but for the welfare of Russia. In 1989, during the Gorbachev era, heeven became a deputy in the Supreme Soviet(the parliament), representing the SovietAcademy of Sciences, but left politics in 1991.In recent years he has been “an incorrigible

Vitali Ginzburg looks back on the science thatflourished amid the political turbulence in Russia.

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work in a historical framework.The second part of the book deals with

history and includes biographical memoirs ofseveral of his contemporaries, notably Landau,Tamm and Evgeni Lifshitz, but also SergeiIvanovich Vavilov (brother of the geneticistNikolai Vavilov and former president of theSoviet Academy of Sciences), as well as anautobiography. There is also an analysis ofRussia’s relationship with the Nobel prize, par-ticularly in connection with C. V. Raman’sprize for Raman scattering and the parallel

work of G. S. Landsberg and L. I. Mandelstam,and with the discovery of the Vavilov–Cherenkov effect. Finally, there is a collectionof Ginzburg’s publications on social and politi-cal questions, written with great factual detailand strong feeling.

In short, Ginzburg presents himself and hiswork, for the record, in the wider world ofphysics and of Russia. ■

Alan L. Mackay is in the School of Crystallography,Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK.

levels of resources from the mother. Siblings are no better to one another, given

the disturbing fact that some of us must havebeen murderers while in the womb: in morethan 90% of human twin conceptions, mor-tality of one of the two embryos occurs. If we were a species of bird, this fact would clas-sify us as an ‘obligate brood reducer’, alongwith those famously bloodthirsty little black eagle chicks.

How, then, do we react when we are told thatthese awful things are going on in our ownfamilies and inside our own bodies? Moreimportantly, what do we think about the socialand medical policies that perpetuate, or seek tomodify, these phenomena? Does evolutionprovide a rationale for their continued exis-tence, or a starting point for a better-informedprogramme of cultural and political change?

Unfortunately, the opportunity to explore

the ethical and philosophical implications ofour own biology is not taken. Towards the endof the book, however, Forbes hints at a morallandscape. Somewhat negative language is usedwhen describing current medical practices inassisted human reproduction. For example,the artificial implantation of multiple embryosincreases the chance of a successful pregnancy,but inevitably it also increases multiple birthsof twins and triplets. This in turn creates itsown problems (some as yet unknown) for themother and especially for the future health andmental functioning of children born from arti-ficial multiple pregnancies. The tragedy is thatindividual couples cannot afford the possiblyhealthier alternative of having fewer embryosimplanted each time (because of the manymore cycles that this would require), and most

governments do not consider ittheir financial responsibility to stepin, especially where older couplesare concerned.

The analogy of Aldous Huxley’sBrave New World is wheeled out toprovide the usual warnings againstthe application of modern technol-ogy to human reproduction. Yet,evolutionarily speaking, Huxley’swas perhaps a group-selectionistvision of excessive state control. Thecurrent ‘customer-centred’ healthcare that arises from free-marketeconomics, and generates the socialdilemma outlined above, mightrather be described as an outcomeof individual-level selection. Butwhat, if any, should society’s role be in moderating individual repro-ductive choices? I can’t help feelingthat the author, having implicitlyintroduced moral statements con-cerning modern human reproduc-tion, bears some responsibility todiscuss the ethical issues that followfrom an evolutionary perspective —if only to expose the complexity ofthe problem.

At the end of the day, this foray into popularscience perhaps does not do justice to the highquality of the author’s own research on avianfamily conflict. In terms of outlining theunderlying theory and non-human evidence,other texts, such as Douglas W. Mock’s MoreThan Kin and Less Than Kind (Belknap Press,2004), probably represent a better compromisebetween the popular and formal science for-mats. However, these do not attempt to dealexplicitly with the tricky issues of human fam-ilies and reproduction. In contrast, Forbes hastaken on one of the hardest tasks in populariz-ing science, that of explaining to readers complex scientific findings about their ownlife and culture — and inevitably we all haveour own opinions about that. ■

Jonathan Wright is in the Institute of Biology,Norwegian University for Science andTechnology, Trondheim 7491, Norway.

Families behaving badlyA Natural History of Familiesby Scott ForbesPrinceton University Press: 2005. 248 pp.$27.95, £17.95

Jonathan WrightI always feel that I am in a better position thanmany scientists when a friend or family mem-ber asks what my research is actually about.Compared with a theoretical physicist, it is rela-tively easy for me, as a behavioural ecologist, to enlighten and entertain members of thepublic, using the obvious parallels that existbetween birds and humans in their family rela-tionships. For example, there are disagree-ments between members of a pair over whodoes most of the childcare, and constant bat-tles between overworked parents and theirdemanding offspring concerning apparentlyunimportant items of food. In his new book A Natural History of Families, Scott Forbestakes up this theme with a vengeance to revealthe many fascinating aspects of human familylife and reproduction that arise from evolution-ary conflicts of interest.

This ‘popular’ science book sells itself on thesalacious revelation that all is not as nice as it seems within our cosy families and in thewonderful creation of an infant. As an avianbiologist, the author presents a dispassionateaccount of parent–offspring conflict, siblicideand infanticide in animals and plants. But inthe background lurks the disturbing fact thatwe are talking here about mothers and fathers,sons and daughters, and the family — an insti-tution at the heart of human social experience.

The full horror is revealed when the authorexposes at length the human side of the story.He describes research showing that ‘morningsickness’ and even pre-eclampsia (danger-ously high blood pressure) during humanpregnancy may be the manifestation of an evolutionary struggle between mother andchild over placental blood flow and the fre-quent abortion of ‘unfit’ embryos. Fathers also get involved, and often on the side of the offspring. Certain genes become ‘imprinted’only when inherited from the father, and theseprompt the embryo to sequester even higher

Who said we are meant to live in harmony? Malcolm in theMiddle sees the funny side of life in a dysfunctional family.

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