Sheldrake was the subject of an episode of Heretics of Science, a six-part documentary series broadcast on BBC2 in 1994. In this episode, John Maddox discussed "A book for burning?," his 1981 Nature editorial review of Sheldrake's book, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance. Maddox said that morphic resonance "is not a scientific theory. Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science, and that can be condemned with exactly the language that the popes used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reasons: it is heresy." The broadcast repeatedly displayed footage of book burning, sometimes accompanied by audio of a crowd chanting "heretic." Biologist Steven Rose criticised the broadcast for focusing on Maddox's rhetoric as if it was "all that mattered." "There wasn't much sense of the scientific or metascientific issues at stake," Rose said.
