"Science is a social institution," he writes in this collection of essays, which began their life as CBC Radio's Massey Lectures Series for 1990. "Scientists do not begin life as scientists, after all, but as social beings immersed in a family, a state, a productive structure, and they view nature through a lens that has been molded by their social experience. . . . Science, like the Church before it, is a supremely social institution, reflecting and reinforcing the dominant values and vices of society at each historical epoch."