The Politics of DNA

Join us for the Royal Society David Attenborough Award Lecture 2021 given by Dr Adam Rutherford.

All science is political. Though the scientific methods have been designed over the centuries to free our understanding of reality from the baggage of perceptive and psychological biases, and the grubby world of politics, it's an ideal we strive for, but have never achieved. All new discoveries exist in the culture in which they are born, and are always susceptible to abuse. In this talk, Dr Adam Rutherford will be exploring how the abuses in his own fields of evolution and genetics - by politicians, ideologues and by scientists themselves - were central to the most heinous crimes of modern history. Adam will be arguing that scientists must know their own histories, and how Darwin's phrase 'ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge' should be a mantra for our times.