Reinventing the Future: Conversations with the World's Leading Scientists

by Thomas A. Bass

Book Overview

"The author of The Eudaemonic Pie now reveals the inspiration, motivations, and aspirations of the world's greatest scientists."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 020162642X
• ISBN13: 9780201626421
• Release Date: December 1993
• Publisher: Addison Wesley Publishing Company
• Length: 249 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

From artificial intelligence to AIDs

Exploring the state of the world, Bass spent hours, sometimes days, with 11 of today's ground-breaking scientists. He distilled the results, keeping the interview format and dispensing. He discusses sex and female strategies with behavioral biologist Sarah Hrdy, AIDS research with Luc Montagnier, the French scientist who first isolated the virus, space-age archaelogy with geologist and Apollo scientist Farouk El-Baz, artificial intelligence and selfish genes with zoologist Richard Dawkins. Many of the pieces naturally concern AIDS, medical breakthroughs and gene research. Perhaps the book's most thoughtful piece is "Plague," the interview with Dr. Jonathan Mann, founder of the Global Program on AIDS. Mann's persepective on social and human rights implications is thorough, calm and flawlessly reasoned. His measured tone seems to rob the issue of its polarizing energy, fitting AIDS into the context of modern life and technological advances. Bass' interviews are well organized, integrating personal background with scientific method and discovery and speculations on future advances.

An informative collection of conversations

In my experience, the 'conversation' format invariable leads to interesting books. Bass' 'Reinventing the Future' is no exception. There are 11 conversations with leading scientists, spread over 240 pages. That means that every scientist gets sufficient space to explore his or her ideas in depth. The selection of people is imaginative: there is a mix of discipline, gender, culture and character which is well judged. The conversations are invariably well crafted; it's obvious that Bass has done his homework very well. A number of chapters are so insightful that I keep returning to this book again and again. James Black, a pharmacologist who discovered cimetidine and beta blockers, offers a view on pharmaceutical Discovery research which, at the time of the interview (1989), must have been simply visionary. I also derived much insight from Thomas Adeoye Lambo's fusion of Western and traditional ideas on mental illness when studying psychotics and schizophrenics in the villages of his native Nigeria. As an update on important scientific theories this book is slightly dated by now. But as an account of how great scientific personalities work it remains as fresh and relevant as when it was written.