Letter: Science and society

Sir: Lewis Wolpert ("The sociologists of science should shut up", 2 July) is right: the widely shared view of sociologists and historians of science is indeed that science's account of nature is intimately connected to the society within which it is produced.

I find this so self-evident that I really can't see his problem. How on earth could, say, his own work, be produced in an agrarian peasant economy? But to say that science is intimately linked with a particular culture does not explain it away, it instead gives us a new way of thinking about science as part of culture, society and economy.

HILARY ROSE

Visiting Research Professor of Sociology, City University

London WC1