"On my must-read list!" -Margaret Atwood

Our fates lie in our genes and not in the stars, said James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. But Watson could not have predicted the scale of the industry now dedicated to this new frontier. Since the launch of the multibillion-dollar Human Genome Project, the biosciences have promised miraculous cures and radical new ways of understanding who we are. But where is the new world we were promised?

Now updated with a new afterword, Genes, Cells and Brains asks why the promised cornucopia of health benefits has failed to emerge and reveals the questionable enterprise that has grown out of bioethics. The authors, feminist sociologist Hilary Rose and neuroscientist Steven Rose, examine the establishment of biobanks, the rivalries between public and private gene sequencers, and the rise of stem cell research. The human body is becoming a commodity, and the unfulfilled promises of the science behind this revolution suggest profound failings in genomics itself.

"Fascinating, lucid and angry." - Guardian

"Genes, Cells and Brains is an angry book. It is also an important one ... contains wonderful descriptions of the science behind the new biology." - Times Literary Supplement

"A scathing account of the failure of recent projects in biology to provide significant new knowledge ... the Roses provide thought-provoking and interesting contrasts to the secular, neoliberal view that predominates at present." - Nature

"[The Roses] unwind the myriad assumptions about technology as the engine of improvement in our lives and offer a powerful argument against the sociopolitical machinery behind these dream disciplines." - The Daily Beast

"[Hilary Rose and Stephen Rose] unwind the myriad assumptions about technology as the engine of improvement in our lives and offers a powerful argument against the sociopolitical machinery behind these dream disciplines." - The Daily Beast

"The authors (professors emeriti of sociology and neuroscience at, respectively, Bradford U. and the Open U., England) place contemporary developments in the biotechnosciences of genomics, regenerative medicine, and the neurosciences (the 'genes, cells, and brains' of their title) within the context of the global neoliberal economy and culture of the 21st century." - Book News

"[Genes, Cells and Brains is] a detailed and acerbic history of 20th-century genetics: its uneasy dance in and out of the arms of eugenics, its stumbles on the envisioned road to decoding and commodifying human nature, and its upstaging-after the Human Genome Project disappointed hopes for disease cures-by neuroscience, which, in turn, has fallen short of its promises to find and fix the psyche in the brain." - The Scientist