The Wisdom of Your Cells: How Your Beliefs Control Your Biology

It is understandable that this audiobook should have both passionate positive and negative reviews: it offers a genial new interpretation of biology, evolution and history, with ramifications into medicine and psychology.

An earlier reviewer remarked the ideas contained here would never be published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Indeed! - these journals do not publish personal interpretaions. A book (or in this case, an audiobook), and not a peer-reviewed journal, is the perfect medium for this kind of work.

I am an M.D., I was marveled by this work and highly recomend it to everyone.

Caveat emptor on this one. Dr Lipton is one of the best biology teachers I have had the pleasure to experience. His explanations of the workings of the cell, the role of DNA, and gene regulation are deeply insightful - I understood several aspects better than I did before. However, he uses this foundation to build a Gaia-esque philosophy of existence as if one followed logically from the other. He ignores huge jumps of logic, quotes favorable research while ignoring contrary views, etc.

The basic story is that we are all about energy and that we can control energy, and thereby everything about ourselves, including health. This is a viable point of view, it his belief that his formal biology science proves it that I find a 'bridge too far'. It is based on three premises: first that nature is fractal - that the cell is the elemental unit of life (fine so far), all fauna are communities of cells (intriguing hypothesis), societies are communities of people, earth is a community of communities that inhabit it, the universe is a community of planets....; secondly that the molecular processes that power the cell are based on the energy forces within the atoms that make them up (true); and thirdly, that since we can control our energy, we can control everything about us (at least open to serious debate, but probably just wishful thinking)

No

Since the negative review writers here boast that they have their PhDs, I will mention my creds. I have a BS in Chemistry and an MS in Public Health. I'll get my PhD in a science, which in my view is not a huge deal!
Bruce Lipton is amazing to me. This book really explains why the medical establishment has no idea how so many of our illnesses are caused. If you don't know what I am talking about, just sign up for some Anatomy & Physiology classes at your local community college. Take Physiology, Pathophysiology, and Microbiology. Discover that professors all around the country, including medical school professors, are teaching this dis-ease and that dis-ease, but when they address the cause, they teach "We don't know what turns the genes on!" Bruce Lipton offers the brilliant idea that the internal environment and our perceptions (stress, fear, worry, etc.) are what determines what genes are turned on, and thus what proteins are made, which determines function. His idea that the cell membrane is more analogous to the brain and the nucleus is more analogous to the gonads is truly a ingenius paradigm shift! A brilliant read! Loved every word of it!

I really enjoyed this Audiobook. I'm a nurse and I've always wondered why some people get sick and others don't. Some eat well, excercise and do all that stuff right and have a heart attack while smokers and junk food eaters do fine. Of course, that's not always the case but this book explains why it can be the case. Shows how powerful stress is in our bodies and how our fear based society contributes to so much disease.

I definitely see why the pharmaceutical companies wouldn't like this book as it shows your belief in medicine is more important than the medicine itself. As a nurse I've witnessed this first hand.

This is a wonderful book and recommend it to anyone with an open mind.

Here's what the publisher's say: In the tradition of Carl Sagan, Rachel Carson, and Stephen Hawking, a new voice has emerged with the unique gift of translating cutting-edge science into clear, accessible language: Dr. Bruce Lipton.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I'm an English teacher; I've got freshman writers who can clearly articulate an argument. Bruce cannot. I expected actual science, not rambling self-absorbed anecdotes without a point.

Let me first state a strong endorsement for the scientific content "Wisdom" features. There is much to discover and explore here and I'm looking forward pursuing a number of exciting hypothesis and research efforts of which I'd been heretofore unaware. Sprinkled throughout the talk are an abundance of genuinely worthwhile concepts and lines of inquiry I found highly compelling.

The downside is the author/speaker's style, which sounds like nothing so much as a 7th graders unrelenting run-on sentence, the totality of which is intended as his first blackboard presentation in science class. I winced and groaned as the good doctor droned from unrestrained, apparently totally unrecognized self-congratulations to comically absurd total non-sequiturs presented as stunning revelations. all elocuted with a nails-on-chalkboard style of a breathless dillettante with a limited vocabulary practiced only on a hapless younger sibling immobilized by two broken legs, arms, and a full body cast. I shuddered my way through thanks to those frequent nuggets I found so compelling and uncurled from my fetal position with a long list of hard-won topics for study. I must say I found myself, at the last, liking this man for his sheer enthusiasm but hoping for a voice coach next time. Please.

As a PhD myself and working as I am in the field of cell biology, I have to say that this is the worst book I've ever finished. And I did so only to try to measure how far the author would go with the nonsense.

He misleads the readers (listeners) with a few scientific facts, overextending outrageously the implications and presenting them in a way that makes it as if he were in a noble crusade against the evil establishment of science.

He shows an alarming lack of understanding in the biology of the cell membrane, signal transduction and epigenetics while presenting them as if he were his sole discoverer. These are in fact current topics of research as any serious scientist in these fields can attest, and are not taboo or dogmatic truths as he seems to think.

The conclusions he draws from his (very) basic experiments and "revolutionary" thinking are enough to make any real scientist feel dirty just by reading them. No peer reviewed journal would ever publish something like this, and not because they are part of a conspiracy, but because it makes no sense and can't stand up to scrutiny.
It's as if in trying to explain gravitation he comes to the theory that it's invisible goblins that pull things downwards, and then as proof he drops a stone and says "see, those were the invisible goblins in action", yes the facts match the theory, but that doesn't make it correct.

There is no need for far fetched theories, all is needed is careful honest research in this complex field, but it seems that's something Mr. Lipton can't be bothered with.

This is not a real science book at all.

I've listened to the first hour and so far he has:

*equated Newtonian physics with materialism (I'm sure Newton would have been surprised);
*referred multiple times to the theory that genes determine development as a "belief system", and
*set up a straw man by conflating this with the view that one's whole life is determined at conception,
*cited the fact that stem cells develop differently depending on the conditions around them as evidence against it,
*claimed without justification that a prediction of this theory is that organisms with more complex (to human eyes) phenotypes should have physically larger genomes, which of course is not what is observed because it isn't true;

*suggested that the human genome (a word he pronounces incorrectly) project was done solely for the profits of venture capitalists, which I can only assume is an attempt to smear by association the whole of genetics and materialism, perhaps so that later he can say "but my brilliant revolutionary theories are ignored by the orthodoxy because they are in the pockets of...";

and he hasn't even started to outline his main thesis yet!

I don't intend to listen to the other 7 hours.

I thought I was buying a book about new discoveries in cellular biology, a fascinating area. Instead it is the pseudo-scientific ramblings of former achedemic who abandoned good scientific logic in favor of jumping to conclusions, building bogus conclusion on top of bogus conclusion, in order to reinforce his going-in spiritual assumptions.

The book has not turned me off from books in the science genre, However, in the future I will be more careful not to be misled by religious pseudo-science posing as science

Misrepresented unsubstantiated

No

When I bought this book, I was looking for some passionate scientific news. Well, I got the passionate - Liptons talks quite emphatically about all the new revelations he has experienced in science and his way of relating that science to his inner life. Now, I love stuff like this, but it was way too much fluff or basic high school biology and too little story about the really cool, cutting edge stuff he touches. He speaks like every little thing he is saying is a revelation, which is quite annoying to me, as someone well versed in science. I'm amazed I got through this book. There were two scientific tidbits that were revelations and that I quite enjoyed learning, but man, what a lot to slog through to get those!

I wish the author the best in his science and his talks, but definitely the style was not for me!