Taylor and Francis Stent, G: Nazis, Women and Molecular Biology

What prompts a well-known 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, as told in Nais, Women and Molecular Biology, may have more to do with St. Augustines Confessions than with a scientists memoirs. For readers interested in bioethics, Stents 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 Nais and the greatest perversion of medical morality in history.