Robert M. Young (academic)

Robert Maxwell Young, usually known as Robert M. Young or Bob Young (born September 26, 1935 in Highland Park, a suburb of Dallas, Texas), is a historian of science specialising in the 19th century and particularly Darwinian thought, a philosopher of the biological and human sciences, and a Kleinian psychotherapist.

Young's initial education was in the United States, at Yale University and the University of Rochester Medical School, but in 1960 he moved to the University of Cambridge for his PhD on the history of ideas of mind and brain. The resulting monograph, Mind, Brain and Adaptation, has been called 'a modern classic' by Peter Gay. From 1964 to 1976 he was a Fellow and Graduate Tutor of King's College, Cambridge and became the first Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine set up within the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. From 1976 to 1983 he was a full-time writer. In this period much of his political activities and writing involved radical critiques of science, technology and medicine. His contribution in this area has been compared by historian Gary Werskey with that of J. D. Bernal (While this is Werskey's opinion, it was not, according to Francis Aprahamian, Bernal's research assistant for "Science in History", a view shared by J.D. Bernal himself (personal communication F.A.) Instead Bernal saw Steven Rose a natural scientist, outspokenly left wing and active in the Anti-Vietnam War movement as a younger version of himself.)

In various books and papers he has argued that science, technology and medicine—far from being value-neutral—are the embodiment of values in theories, things and therapies, in facts and artefacts, in procedures and programs. Succinctly put, all facts are theory-laden, all theories are value-laden, and all values occur within an ideology or world view. Scientists and technologists pursue agendas; they have philosophies of nature, world views, usually tacitly held. In studies extending across a broad spectrum of disciplines he has argued that our culture is disastrously riven. It is characterised by sharp dichotomies, each and every one of which is a false (or, at least, overdrawn) dichotomy, but our beliefs in them preclude unified deliberations about the scientific and the moral:

...
Wikipedia