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Brian J Ford revolutionised modern popular science with his articles and broadcasts. The founder of Science Now for the BBC, and host of television programmes including Computer Challenge and Food for Thought, he contributes to television programmes from Hollywood to Japan. His interdisciplinary scientific research has been published in the major scientific journals including Nature, Scientific American, Medical News and the British Medical Journal. Many of his discoveries feature in major science encyclopedias and textbooks, and his work attracts the enthusiastic support of scientists in many different fields around the world.
His science books claim popular attention (with large reviews in Punch, the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Mail, as well as in New Scientist, Nature and Science Digest). He was the first British President of the European Union of Science Journalists Associations, based in Brussels, and Chairman of the scientific committee at the Society of Authors in London. Brian Ford has studied widely around the world and serves on many academic bodies in Britain and America. Widely reviewed as a ‘sparkling speaker’ and a ‘rare master of the art of getting the message across,’ he has lectured throughout Europe and has an annual lectureship in the United States, also visiting Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, exploring the tropics through India, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore and the Pacific Islands, and travelling in Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean and the Bahamas.
He was recently awarded the Professor August Köhler medal for excellence in scientific research at a ceremony in Chicago. Over ninety editions of his books have been published, including the award-winning Images of Science, the best-selling First Encyclopedia of Science, and his influential BSE: The Facts.
Is humankind innately superior to other forms of life? Or do plants and animals have the senses and the emotions to match?
In Sensitive Souls, Brian J. Ford demolishes the recieved wisdom that only humans have the capacity to dream, fall in love, create a home or experience passion. He shows how life in in the plant and animal kingdoms is rich with sensation and marvellously complex: how birds, even fish, can mourn for a lost love; how pain is felt even in the most microscopic of organisms: how plants modify their behaviour in the light of what they sense.
Sensitive Souls offers an all-embracing new vision of life, of plants and animals united in a tapestry of communion with nature and with each other. In an age when concern for animal welfare is increasingly important, this exciting and thought-provoking book marks a timely revolution in popular and scientific thought.
'Ford's call for a more moral view of the natural world is
welcome. His approach also challenges the rigid neo-Darwinist
orthodoxy of Richard Dawkins and the 'selfish gene' school . . .
a convincing case for wonder and respect for fellow creatures and
the plants on which they depend'
Jochn Ackeroyd, Times Literary Supplement.
'Puts forward a great desal of evidence to prove that animals
have many sensibilities in common with humnan beings'
Fiona Pitt-Kethley, Daily Telegraph