Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food, Taming Our Primal Instincts »

Terry Burnham, Ph.D., is a visiting scholar at the Harvard Business School. He co-founded Progenics, a publicly traded biotechnology firm with promising treatments for cancer and AIDS.

Jay Phelan, Ph.D., is a biology professor at UCLA. His main area of research is evolutionary genetics and aging.

Burnham, a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School, and Phelan, a biology professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, reveal that our struggles for self-improvement are battles against our own genes that helped our distant ancestors flourish but are selfish and out of place in the modern world. They examine issues such as body image, money, addiction, and the search for friendship and love, and use knowledge of the connections between genes and behavior to offer steps for improving the quality of our lives.