What prompts a well-renowned scientist in molecular biology to
write memoirs about a part of his life? In the case of Gunther
Stent, it was not to reflect on his career as a scientist, but to
come to an understanding of his own soul. In his seventies, he had
come to see that he had been, throughout his life, an emotional
sleepwalker, especially as regards women and, in addition, that he
had been troubled by Jewish self-hatred. His story may have more to
do with St. Augustine's Confessions than with a scientist's
memoirs. Stent provides insight into the power of political
correctness, and the ability of a government to establish a
perverse vision of reality. For readers interested in bioethics,
Stent's memoirs help to explain how Germany could have been the
first country to enact an all-encompassing protection for human
research subjects while it was also the country that produced the
medical experiments of the Nazis and the greatest perversion of
medical morality in history. Stent is a person of intelligence and
subtlety, an accomplished writer, a deep and wise man, and a loyal
friend. His narrative is centered emotionally on a youth spent in
Berlin in the Nazi period. As a boy of fourteen he was an
eyewitness of the horrors of the Kristallnacht pogrom.On New Year's
Eve 1938 he escaped from Germany across the "green frontier." He
came to America in his teens, only to return to Berlin at the end
of World War II as a scientific consultant for the U.S. Military.
On his return to the States, Stent participated in the exciting
early scientific breakthroughs of molecular biology that
transformed the twentieth-century life sciences. His Nazis, Women
and Molecular Biology is a piercing self-examination, and as its
review in Science Newsletter says, "an act of self-exposure,
abnegation, contrition, and expiation." It will be of keen interest
to those who have inhabited Stent's worlds or shared his
experiences, as well as those who wish to learn more about them.
Gunther S. Stent is professor emeritus of neurobiology at the
University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of such
classic texts as Molecular Biology of Bacterial Viruses and
Molecular Genetics, as well as philosophical books, such as The
Coming of the Golden Age, Paradoxes of Progress, and, most recently
(2002), Paradoxes of Free Will.
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