Science of Life
The Science of Life: Andrew Huxley, Richard Keynes and Horace Barlow is part of the series Creative Lives and Works. It is a collection of interviews conducted by one of England’s leading social anthropologists and historians, Professor Alan Macfarlane. Filmed over a period of 40 years, the three conversations in this volume are part of a larger set of interviews that cut across various disciplines—from the social sciences, the sciences, to the performing and visual arts. The current volume on two of England’s foremost physiologists and a vision scientist is yet another addition to the series of several such books.
These Cambridge men of science, Sir Andrew Huxley, Richard Keynes and Horace Barlow, apart from shaping certain very fundamental and critical elements in the disciplines of Physiology and Neuroscience also belong to illustrious lineages. Sir Andrew Huxley, for instance is a direct descendant of T.H. Huxley, while Richard Keynes and Horace Barlow are both the great grandsons of Charles Darwin.
Their conversations greatly expand our understanding of physiology and neuroscience. The book will be of very great value not just to those interested in Physiology, Medicine and Neuroscience. The interviews also take us into a fascinating period of Cambridge Science, dominated by certain key families of distinguished thinkers.
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Alan Macfarlane was born in Shillong, India, in 1941 and educated at the Dragon School, Sedbergh School, Oxford and London Universities where he received two Master's degrees and two doctorates. He is the author of over forty books, including The Origins of English Individualism (1978) and Letters to Lily: On How the World Works (2005). He has worked in England, Nepal, Japan and China as both an historian and anthropologist. He was elected to the British Academy in 1986 and is now Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. Professor Macfarlane received the Huxley Memorial Medal, the highest honour of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2012.