Science and politics can make awkward bedfellows, with the very question of whether it is possible to make purely objective observations about the world drawing forth highly politicised positions. The neurobiologist Steven Rose, who has died aged 87, took a broadly reductionist approach to his research into biochemical mechanisms of memory, while at the same time adopting a high-profile political stance against the idea that human behaviour is determined by our genes.
Less publicly but equally influentially, as the first biology professor to be appointed at the Open University – the distance-learning institution founded through a Labour government initiative in 1969 – Rose helped to pioneer a democratic and distributed approach to teaching practical science. He developed experiments that students could complete at home, pooling their results and prefiguring many of the “citizen science” projects that have become popular in recent years.
