Steven P. Rose (born 4 July 1938 in London, England, UK) is a left-wing Professor of Biology and Neurobiology at the Open University and University of London. Rose studied biochemistry at King's College, Cambridge, and neurobiology at Cambridge and the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. His research focuses on the biological processes involved in memory formation and treatments for Alzheimer's Disease. He has written several popular science books and regularly writes for The Guardian newspaper. From 1999 to 2002, he gave public lectures as Professor of Physiology at Gresham College, London. His work has won him numerous medals and prizes.
Steven Rose has been instrumental in calling to boycott Israeli academic institutions for as long as Israel continues its controversial occupation of the Palestinian Territories, on the grounds of Israel academics' close relationship with the IDF and participation in the Israeli industrial-military complex, as well as that political strategies used against the Palestinian people has often been devised by Israeli university professors. As a man of Jewish background this has led him to be criticised within the Jewish community itself, as well as by other oppositionists to the academic boycott call. He has described himself as 'anti-Zionist'.
With Richard Lewontin and Leon Kamin, Rose championed the "radical science movement." These colleagues, along with Stephen Jay Gould assailed sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and adaptationism. The three wrote Not in Our Genes (1984), laying out their opposition to Sociobiology (E. O. Wilson, 1975), The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins, 1976), and other works promoting an evolutionary explanation for human social behavior. Dawkins, in turn, accused the authors of giving "ideology priority over truth". Not in Our Genes - Dawkins Review
Rose is a regular panelist on BBC Radio 4's ethics debating series The Moral Maze. He is married to the sociologist Hilary Rose with whom he shared the Gresham professorship, and with whom he has written and edited a number of books including Alas Poor Darwin: arguments against evolutionary psychology. He is also the elder brother of the prominent British sociologist Nikolas Rose.
Professor Rose is a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association.