Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. (born
28 June 1942) is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific
papers and ten books.
A former Research Fellow of the Royal
Society, he studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, where
he was a Scholar of Clare College, took a double first class honors
degree and was awarded the University Botany Prize.
He then studied philosophy and history
of science at Harvard University, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow,
before returning to Cambridge, where he took a Ph.D. in
biochemistry.
He was a Fellow of Clare College,
Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell
biology. As the Rosenheim Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he
carried out research on the development of plants and the ageing of
cells in the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge University.
While at Cambridge, together with Philip Rubery, he
discovered the mechanism of polar auxin transport, the
process by which the plant hormone
auxin is carried from the shoots
towards the roots.
From 1968 to 1969, based in the Botany Department of the University
of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, he studied rain forest plants. From 1974 to
1985 he was Principal Plant Physiologist and Consultant Physiologist
at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid
Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India, where he helped develop
new cropping systems now widely used by farmers.
While in India, he also lived for a year
and a half at the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu, where
he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.
From 2005-2010 he was the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project
funded from Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a Fellow of Schumacher
College , in Dartington, Devon, a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic
Sciences near San Francisco, and a Visiting Professor at the
Graduate Institute in Connecticut.
He lives in London with his wife Jill Purce (www.healingvoice.com) and
two sons.
He has appeared in many TV programs in Britain and overseas, and was
one of the participants (along with Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel
Dennett, Oliver Sacks, Freeman Dyson and Stephen Toulmin) in a TV
series called A Glorious Accident, shown on PBS channels throughout
the US. He has often taken part in BBC and other radio programs.
He has written for newspapers such as,
the Guardian, where he had a regular monthly column, The Times,
Sunday Telegraph, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Sunday Times, Times
Educational Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement and Times
Literary Supplement,
...and has contributed to a variety of magazines,
including
-
New Scientist
-
Resurgence
-
the Ecologist
-
the Spectator
Books by Rupert Sheldrake:
-
A New Science of Life: The
Hypothesis of Formative Causation (1981). New edition 2009
(in the US published as Morphic Resonance)
-
The Presence of the Past:
Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988)
-
The Rebirth of Nature: The
Greening of Science and God (1992)
-
Seven Experiments that Could
Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary
Science (1994) (Winner of the Book of the Year Award from
the British Institute for Social Inventions)
-
Dogs that Know When Their Owners
are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals
(1999) (Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the
British Scientific and Medical Network)
-
The Sense of Being Stared At,
And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (2003)
With Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna:
-
Trialogues at the Edge of the
West (1992), republished as Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic
Consciousness (2001)
-
The Evolutionary Mind (1998)
With Matthew Fox:
