Rupert Sheldrake

Rupert Sheldrake is a Cambridge-trained biologist who has spent his life pursuing one audacious idea: that memory is inherent in nature, and that the regularities we call the laws of physics may be better understood as habits — built up, reinforced, and evolving over the history of the cosmos. From that idea grew his hypothesis of formative causation and the principle of morphic resonance, and, across more than forty years, one of the most wide-ranging experimental programs in the borderlands of science: carefully controlled tests of telepathy between people, of the sense of being stared at, and of animals who appear to know things they could not know by any recognised channel. By training he is an orthodox and genuinely accomplished plant physiologist; by vocation he has become the most prominent scientific heretic of his generation — a man who insists that the way to settle these questions is not to dismiss them but to test them.

A Cambridge education

Alfred Rupert Sheldrake was born on 28 June 1942 in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, into a Methodist family; his father was a pharmacist and amateur naturalist who passed on a love of plants and the microscope. He went up to Clare College, Cambridge, to read Natural Sciences and took a Double First, winning the University Botany Prize. A Frank Knox Fellowship then took him to Harvard for a year, where he studied philosophy and the history of science and first met Thomas Kuhn's idea of scientific paradigms — the notion that science advances not by smooth accumulation but by revolutions in its background assumptions, a theme that would shape his whole career. Returning to Cambridge, he took a PhD in biochemistry in 1967 with a thesis on "The Production of Hormones in Higher Plants," became a Fellow of Clare College and its Director of Studies in cell biology, and held a Royal Society Rosenheim Research Fellowship.

The plant physiologist

It matters, in weighing what came later, to be clear about what Sheldrake actually was: a serious, productive, mainstream botanist. His research centred on how plants develop — in particular on auxin, the principal plant growth hormone. He argued that auxin is produced as cells age and die, and with Philip Rubery he worked out a chemiosmotic model of polar auxin transport — how the hormone is carried in one direction through plant tissues. That model proved genuinely prescient: the efflux carriers it required were identified decades later as the PIN proteins, now central to plant developmental biology. His single-author paper "The Ageing, Growth and Death of Cells" appeared in Nature in 1974, one of more than eighty peer-reviewed papers he published. From 1974 he served as Principal Plant Physiologist at ICRISAT (the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) in Hyderabad, India, leading work on pigeonpea and chickpea and helping develop short-duration pigeonpea as a crop. Whatever one makes of his later ideas, these credentials are real and undisputed — even his sharpest critics concede the training.

India, and a new science of life

In India Sheldrake lived for a year and a half at the ashram of Father Bede Griffiths at Shantivanam, in Tamil Nadu, a contemplative community where Christian and Hindu traditions met. There he wrote his first and most important book. A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation appeared in 1981, proposing that the forms and instincts of living things are shaped by morphic fields carrying an inherent memory, transmitted across time and space by morphic resonance — the idea worked out across these pages as Morphic Resonance & Formative Causation.

The reaction was extraordinary. Nature ran an editorial by its editor, John Maddox, headed "A book for burning?", which called it "the best candidate for burning there has been for many years." Thirteen years later, on the BBC television series Heretics of Science, Maddox went further: "Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science, and that can be condemned in exactly the language that the Pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy." Few scientific books have ever provoked so raw a response — and few authors have worn the establishment's fury so lightly, or turned it so squarely back into a question about the open-mindedness of science itself.

The research program

Sheldrake's wager was always that morphic resonance is testable, and he spent the following decades testing it. Seven Experiments That Could Change the World (1994) set out a do-it-yourself agenda of cheap, decisive experiments anyone could run. From it grew his work on the extended mind — the proposal that the mind reaches out beyond the brain through perceptual and mental fields, The Extended Mind — and a long series of controlled studies: tens of thousands of trials of The Sense of Being Stared At, the four-caller design behind Telephone Telepathy, the videotaped vigils of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, and the language-using parrot N'kisi. From 2005 to 2010 this work was supported by his appointment as Perrott-Warrick Senior Researcher, funded through Trinity College, Cambridge. He reports the results in full and submits them to journals.

The Science Delusion

In 2012 Sheldrake turned the argument on science itself. The Science Delusion (published in the United States as Science Set Free) names ten "dogmas" he believes modern science has mistaken for proven facts — among them that nature is mechanical, that minds are nothing but brains, and that the laws and constants of nature are fixed — and argues that turning each dogma back into an open question would set inquiry free: The Science Delusion & the Ten Dogmas. A 2013 TEDx talk of the same name was removed from TED's main channel after its science board objected; the removal drew far more attention to the talk than it had ever had before. In his later books, Science and Spiritual Practices (2017) and Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work (2019), he turned the same empirical eye on contemplative life — asking what meditation, gratitude, ritual and pilgrimage measurably do: Science & Spiritual Practices.

The man

Sheldrake remains a practising Anglican who also draws on Hindu and Christian contemplative traditions — a union of empirical rigour and religious seriousness that unsettles partisans on both sides. He is married to Jill Purce, who teaches overtone chanting and the healing voice; their sons are the biologist Merlin Sheldrake, whose Entangled Life won the Royal Society Science Book Prize, and the musician Cosmo Sheldrake. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and of Schumacher College. What most distinguishes him is a habit rare on either side of these debates: he frames his claims as predictions, says plainly where the evidence is inconclusive, designs experiments that could prove him wrong, and invites anyone — skeptics included — to run them. That posture, more than any single result, is why his work belongs here.

Sources & talks

A long-form profile spanning his life and work:

The UK's Most Controversial Scientist — Rupert Sheldrake (Theories of Everything)YouTube

Sheldrake's own retrospective, four decades on from A New Science of Life:

Morphic Resonance After Forty Years — Rupert SheldrakeYouTube

More: a wide-ranging career-survey interview (7jnpSs3gMl4).

Primary sources: his website sheldrake.org (papers, online experiments, full bibliography, and the biography and CV drawn on here) · books including A New Science of Life (1981; revised as Morphic Resonance, 2009), The Presence of the Past (1988), Seven Experiments That Could Change the World (1994), and The Science Delusion / Science Set Free (2012) · and his summary paper "Morphic Fields," World Futures 62 (2006): 31–41.