The People Shapers: Vance Packard

What will happen to our own sense of identity if surgeons can transplant heads? If biologists can make heads bigger? If psychologists could put electric motors inside the head? This is a sharp assessment of contemporary scientists' projects for reshaping people and controlling their behaviour. Packard investigates the work of geneticists, behavioural psychologists, psycho-surgeons - and politicians, technologists and marketing professionals. Some of the projects are intriguing; some are disturbing - and some make the skin crawl...such as: devising ever-more sophisticated forms of surveillance; manufacturing living organs; stimulating and modifying the brain; programming behaviour; controlling people en masse; altering the natural process of birth, death and old age; hybridising man with animal or man with machine; manipulating genes.