Transcript
Episode 9: Breeding “Better” Humans & Other Dangerous Ideas Driving American Politics
KEY TOPICS
The ideology of eugenics is fundamentally driven by a pursuit that can seem deceptively desirable: the “improvement of the human species.” What does it really mean to “improve” people?
How does the pursuit of perfection drive eugenic thinking?
How are you thinking about efforts today to scrub scientific research of engagement with gender and race?
Across human history how have people thought about biological sex gender and social roles?
What did DNA testing bring to the conversation about how patriarchy spread?
What do you think medical and genetics professionals should really be paying attention to in terms of how science, in particular genetics, is being discussed today culturally and politically?
How does taking a long view of human history inform how you're thinking about the political moment we're living through right now?
Do you think the left / progressives have a cohesive story that people want to hear?
Interview
Susanna Smith
Hi everyone. This is Genetic Frontiers. A podcast about the promise, power and perils of genetic information find us wherever podcasts are found and go to geneticfrontiers.org to join the conversation about how genetic discoveries are propelling new personalized medical treatments, but also posing ethical dilemmas and emotional quandaries. I'm your host, Susanna Smith.
Welcome to Season 2 of Genetic Frontiers. This season we’re focusing on Genetics in American Politics & Culture. We talk with historians, journalists, technologists and philosophers about the alluring but dangerous pursuit of improving the human species through genetics. We discuss how ideas about people’s genetic worth and worthiness are driving American politics and policy today.
On today's episode, I will be talking with Angela Saini, an award-winning science journalist and author who has written a number of books. Her most recent book, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for political writing.
Her last two books, Superior: The Return of Race Science and Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, delve deep into our cultural, historic, and scientific understandings of race, gender and sex, which are all delineators that figure prominently in eugenic ideas about human worth and worthiness.
Angela has also worked in broadcast journalism, including hosting two BBC documentaries, “Eugenics: Science's Greatest Scandal” and “The Misinformation Virus,” and she co-edited a series on race science for Undark Magazine. Her writing has been published in the Financial Times, National Geographic, Wired and other outlets. Angela is based in New York and currently teaches at MIT.
Thank you for joining me today on Genetic Frontiers.
Angela Saini
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
Susanna Smith
I wanted to start today by talking about how in science and medicine many discoveries and treatments are aimed at allowing people to live longer and healthier lives. But the ideology of eugenics is fundamentally driven by a pursuit that can seem deceptively desirable: the “improvement of the human species.”
Can you talk about what it really means to improve people?
Angela Saini
Oh, that's a very big question, I think. I mean often when we think about science and medicine and what it's for, one of the purposes, I think, of it is to make our lives better. And better is a very loaded term because it can mean so many different things. It can mean something as simple as making our lives more comfortable, you know, making homes that are more comfortable or environments that are more comfortable. Medicine is about making sick people well again. But at the edges of that I think there is also this idea of human improvement that it's not just about making us better from a point of sickness, but better from a point of where we are already. This is where things get very complicated and mixed up with these very troublesome 19th century ideas about the quality or the fitness of the human race so you know there are ideas from Darwin in here, from Huxley. This notion that the human race is perfectable through evolution and is there some way that we can intervene as researchers or scientists to somehow make humans even better than they already are. So to lift us up along that evolutionary ladder.
Susanna Smith
Yeah. And I think it's such an important point to think about who is asking the question, who is answering the question about what is better?
Angela Saini
Yeah, absolutely. I mean it's a difficult thing because better means different things to so many different people. And I think if we're honest with ourselves, if we think about the qualities that we value in each other and in ourselves, they tend to be things like kindness and goodness, and being able to get along with someone, being cooperative things like that. But if you're thinking in purely utilitarian terms about what society as a whole, or maybe the state or the capitalist state values about a human being. It is often things like how well you can work, how productive you are, how intelligent you are, how beautiful you are. You know qualities that while we may value in each other, might be low down in terms of personal qualities that we truly value in ourselves and other people but that has become the focus. You know the improvement of human beings is less about those warm, lovely human qualities that we actually do care about, and more about intelligence and beauty.
Susanna Smith
And when we chatted last, you mentioned the idea of perfectibility and that if we're constantly trying to improve ourselves, we're moving towards this idea of perfection. Could you say more about how you view that in line with eugenics?
Angela Saini
Well the science of eugenics or the pseudoscience of eugenics as we understand it now was essentially about moving humans along the evolutionary ladder, up the evolutionary ladder by selecting people who have traits that we admire, that we want more of. And these are imagined to be hereditary traits, and encouraging those people to have more children and discouraging people, who have negative traits that we might not want, discouraging them from breeding because, again, it is imagined that these traits are heavily hereditary.
Now, of course, many of the traits that we're talking about actually are a mix of lots of different things, you know, intelligence. Let's just take intelligence, for instance, because that became a big focus of the eugenics movement very quickly. This is a very complex trait. And although there is a hereditary or genetic component to it, we've learned in the 21st century that there are very many genes involved here. And it is heavily mediated by diet, by education, by upbringing, by so many different things in the environment. So there's not just one thing that makes somebody intelligent. But the ideology rested on the presumption that you could breed for these things, and that certain people should be encouraged to have more kids. In fact, in the UK, and I learned this only while I was making this documentary for the BBC a number of years ago, there were researchers at the London School of Economics at the time, which was founded by these kind of left-leaning, socialist-minded reformers, and they were funding, they were giving a bonus to research staff who were having kids. So if you had kids then you got a bonus in your pay packet, which is just shocking when you think about it. It's essentially telling people you're smart, you should be having more children. And we will incentivize you to do that.
Susanna Smith
Right, and it's not a social support for having children. It's only offered to certain types of people.
Angela Saini
Yeah, absolutely. Because other people were being discouraged from having kids. And again we forget birth control pioneers people like Marie Stopes, who we think of as feminist icons because they did free women by giving them birth control, at the same time had a lot of strongly eugenic ideas that they believed that poorer women shouldn't be having so many children because they were somehow genetically inferior in some ways. And they were having kids that the state didn't want.
Susanna Smith
Yes, and we've discussed this. Margaret Sanger is a big one who comes to mind, who fits that mold as well.
Susanna Smith
You've written a lot about understandings of race and gender across history and the intersections with science. How are you thinking about efforts today to scrub scientific research of any engagement with gender particularly, and also race?
Angela Saini
Well, it's complicated. And this is something I'm thinking about a lot at the moment, because the book I'm writing right now is on human classification. So how we categorize people, how states classify people, and what the purpose of that is. And what the Trump administration is doing is actually not scrubbing sex and race away. They're narrowing how we think about sex and race. So if you look at one of Trump's earliest executive orders, it says that sex is binary. And all government agencies should be thinking about it in this way so they're not saying that we're not interested in sex or gender. They're saying, this is what sex is. And this is what a man is. And this is what a woman is, and this is how you know the state and bureaucrats shall be thinking about this from now on. So they are deliberately invoking these ideas, and these are very loaded ideas. We have to ask ourselves fundamentally, why does the state care about sex or race in the first place. And the reason it cares about sex and race goes right back to the beginning of the creation of the United States, for instance, that race and sex were categories along which people's rights and freedoms were defined. That what you could do in law was decided by the way that you were classified. So in some ways what the Trump administration is doing is, it may feel like it's taking race and sex out of the equation. It's doing it in such a way as to return to what we had in the 19th century, which is essentially to give people fewer rights and freedoms based on what it defines race and sex to be.
Susanna Smith
I think that's such an important point, and a really clear way to break it down because one of the things I wanted to talk about was how transgender identity has become such a hot button issue. And if you really say well, it's to remove rights by creating the gender binary, those being the only group of people who deserve full rights. It's very clear what's happening.
So from your research, what have history and science actually shown us about how, across human history, how have people thought about biological sex gender and social roles?
Angela Saini
Well, I think we have to remember that what's happening now is not just impacting transgender, intersex, non-binary people. It's actually impacting all of us because it's telling everybody this is what the government expects of you on the basis of how it defines sex. So it's much broader than you might imagine. And this, again, has a very long history that the state has defined sex in such a way as to dictate how you must behave, what your freedoms are, you know, for women. There was a point in time when you couldn't vote based on your sex classification, or you couldn't go to certain universities based on your sex classification. So I mean, I very much hope that that's not what we're returning to. But certainly when you combine what's happening with the clampdown on abortion access then essentially the government is saying, or the Trump administration is saying that a woman's role in society is this: it is to have children, and a man's role in society is this. When you combine what is happening in terms of classification with all the other anti-DEI measures, and the way that it is framing, you know, who makes a good employee and who doesn't make a good employee in certain government functions then it is essentially saying to women, you know, this is the 1950s again, that this is how you should be living and behaving. And again, it is saying to men that you know a man's place is here doing this job, being a breadwinner belonging in the military. And for women, it's something else. So as devastating as this is for transgender, non-binary, intersex people, anyone who kind of blurs the boundaries of these categories, it actually has profound implications for absolutely everyone.
Susanna Smith
And what would you say if we stack up today next to sort of the scope of human history, what would you say about the expansiveness or the narrowness of how people define gender sex and social roles?
Angela Saini
Well, these are necessarily moving terms. They're not going to ever stay static because gender is something that we create as a society. We imagine it as a society. And the reason that academics, for instance, use this language of gender being a social construct and race being a social construct is because how we define gender and race, and by that I mean what you can do and what you can't do based on gender and race, is decided by the culture that you're in obviously. So different cultures have different ways of thinking about what's appropriate for men and women, the kind of jobs that they do, their roles at home, all these different things. And that will always be a movable feast.
And I'm very much with the scholar gender scholar, Anne Fausto-Sterling, who has argued that we're in a transition period right now. What we see happening among younger generations especially, you know, this is not my generation of feminist politics, this is the generation coming up underneath me, really, that is, breaking those boundaries, thinking more expansively, and in some cases creating new categories. Will those categories stick? Or will they also dissolve and turn into something else in the long run? Probably, you know, because that's the nature of these things, and I love that. You know, that's how it should be. We should be able to reimagine who we are, keep redefining the boundaries. I hope, you know, my dream is that we get to a point where every single person can be appreciated as an individual, that we won't be judged or defined, or our freedoms dictated by these categories or classifications that we can just be ourselves. What I would love is a world in which we can live free of these labels. We're not close to that yet because they still have so much social meaning and history baggage associated with them because of all this historical weight. My hope, my dream, is that we can transcend these labels eventually. And in the middle of the 20th century, this was the big dream of women's rights activists, of the civil rights movement, that we can live in states that don't care about our sex and gender, or our race, or our ethnicity, that we can build a society in which a person is just a person. They are just themselves.
Susanna Smith
Yeah. And I think we see this return to hard and rigid ideas and these binary categories. And at the same time I feel a lot of hope when you point to generations younger than we are, and sort of their approaches to gender, which are really more expansive. So thank you for making that point.
Angela Saini
That's okay. I'm thinking about this topic a lot like, I say, because I've been researching it for the last year or two, this kind of the question of classification. And where I've landed over time is really that this is an ongoing thing. It has to be, and it always will be, and I don't know where it will end up. But I very much value the fact that it's happening.
Susanna Smith
So one of the parts of your book that I love The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule was the exploration of DNA testing and how it's changed the field of archaeology and our understanding of human history. Could you talk a little bit about what happened when DNA testing got introduced?
Angela Saini
Well, it's a very exciting new technology. So it's not just DNA testing but being able to test ancient samples of DNA. So these are 1,000 year-old or more, sometimes, many thousands of year-old specimens, human remains, animal remains. And what this has done is open up an area in which genetics and archaeology have started to overlap. So you find these very old specimens, and suddenly now you can start testing them. You understand the genetic makeup of these samples: Neanderthals, Denisovans, you know other forms of human that have now gone extinct as well as very, very old human samples. And you can compare their DNA to living people, to people who have lived in different regions. And from that you can start to paint a picture of family relationships within ancient settlements, migration patterns. So you can start to look if families were moving over time, you can see that through the ancestral record. It's not a foolproof science because we have to remember that culture and genetics are two different things. It's not necessarily the case that just because two communities are genetically related that doesn't necessarily mean they speak the same language even or they have the same culture necessarily. But it does fill in some of the gaps, I think, in the historical record. So in that sense it's a very useful way of thinking about the past as long as you do it with caution.
Susanna Smith
Absolutely. And so, for people who haven't read your books, The Patriarchs, first of all I recommend they do but if they haven't yet, what did DNA testing bring to the conversation about how patriarchy spread?
Angela Saini
It gives us a lot, actually. So one of the questions it helps to answer is that there was a theory in the 1960s going into the 70s, 80s, and 90s that there was a big movement of people from the Eurasian steppes. So this is kind of modern day Russia, if you like so towards the east of Europe, into Europe, what was called by the Lithuanian archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas, old Europe, and that this movement of people brought patriarchy into that region, that previously the region was very female, focused matrilineal, matriarchal even. And that there was this movement of patriarchy into that region thousands of years ago. And although genetic evidence hasn't answered the question of whether there was that patriarchal shift, what it has done is help settle the question of whether that movement really did take place. And it did.
So this was a big question mark, you know, for a very long time, and now we know that there was a big shift of people. It didn't happen suddenly. It happened over a very long period of time but it did happen. And it's possible that it brought a change in customs, change in ideas, possibly a change in language. Although that is contested again, you know, archaeologists, geneticists, historians, fight about this. But some of those ideas are borne out by the DNA evidence that we have.
Susanna Smith
And did I understand this correctly from your book, that also a lot of the groups of people who moved out of the Eurasian steppe, westward into Europe were groups that were largely male, and sometimes they had some women, but often men?
Angela Saini
Yeah, there is that argument that's been made based on human remains. I don't know if we can know that, for sure, but it's been argued by some scholars that this was a group of people that was particularly concerned about sons, that they rode horses, which was, you know, a big shift in the way that people travelled, and how they must have appeared to people who are meeting them for the first time, that they were concerned with war, that they buried their dead in a certain way, and that the movement of people was mainly men. But that's not to say that this is the only group of people who were warlike or patriarchal, because we have very good evidence that there were other groups of people who also shared those things. And even in so-called old Europe at the time, which Marija Gimbutas, the archaeologist, described as very peaceful and matriarchal and feminine, we know that there were massacres of large groups of people, that it wasn't as peaceful or perfect as we think, and that there were very many women warriors during this period of time as well. So it's not just the case that men were involved in war. We have very good evidence that women right throughout history on every continent on the planet have been involved in war and conflict, and that there have been women warriors and women military leaders on every continent for about as long as we have historical records. And on that front I can highly recommend the book Women Warriors by the military historian, Pamela Toler.
Susanna Smith
Thank you. Yeah. And I think it just also again points back to this idea of rejecting stereotypes about gender, isn't really what we've seen throughout human history.
Angela Saini
It's very difficult because I think especially when I was writing that book it's very tempting, and, in fact, many people have been tempted by this, to kind of paint the past in these big, broad brushstrokes, and imagine that it was marauding, warlike men who introduced patriarchy to the world. And women were these kind of helpless victims. And it's not actually like that. That's not what the historical record actually shows us. The very earliest settlements that we have data from and these are 9,000 years old, you know, near the fertile crescent in modern day Turkey show that people were living very egalitarian lives at that time, that men and women were doing pretty much the same thing. There was no real division in any sense in how people lived based on gender. So you know this myth that we have, that women have always been oppressed by men, that men can't help oppressing women. These kind of stereotypes, essentialist stereotypes about men and women actually aren't borne out by the data. It's more complicated than that essentially.
Susanna Smith
Yeah, so many of our listeners work in the fields of science or medicine. In terms of how genetics and science are being discussed today, culturally, politically, what is jumping out at you that you think professionals in these fields should really be paying attention to?
Angela Saini
Things have changed, and I think particularly the way that politics has gone in the last decade or so, the rise of the far right, the rise of this kind of eugenic way of thinking among especially Silicon Valley billionaires. You know, they're very much bought into this idea of effective altruism, which is again a very utilitarian way of thinking about human life, which then starts to overlap with old fashioned eugenics ideas. There have been certain circles in which these kind of high tech billionaire types have advocated for certain people having more children and other people having fewer children. And you can see that playing out in the current administration that they're discouraging immigration from certain countries. They want to encourage it from others.
There's a pronatalist movement happening now which is very racially tinged, you know, white supremacists arguing that white people should be having more children because they're at risk of being replaced. So there's all this very damaging, dangerous stuff happening out there in the politics. And I think for scientists, for geneticists, for scholars. Anyone working in this area. It's incredibly important now to engage with that to understand it and to push back against it. The human race, first of all it should not be our goal to so-called improve it, you know. And I'm doing a lot of air quotes with my fingers, which you can't see. But you know this idea that we can “improve” people is so morally and scientifically bankrupt. It is just incredibly dangerous. And it doesn't work this way. Heredity doesn't work this way. Genetics doesn't work this way, you know, that's the number one thing.
But, secondly, we have to ask ourselves, what are our values? What do we have science for? What do we have engineering for? Is it really to create some kind of race of superhumans in a kind of science fiction sense? Or is it to make life better and happier and healthier for everyone who's already on the planet. For me, when I see these tech billionaires chasing, for example, immortality through all these different techniques that they have now. And you know whether any of them will work or not, goodness knows, but the fact is that we could be saving and prolonging the lives of millions of children around the world right now with interventions that we have already vaccinations, simple diseases like malaria, that are so easily treated, and they are not being treated. Why do we not invest in those things instead?
Susanna Smith
It's a great question. And we are actively disinvesting from these things. And investments that we've made for the last 60 years, we've stepped away from. And it's heartbreaking to watch it happen.
Angela Saini
Yeah, it really is. And I feel that, you know, at the moment the world is being led by the rich and the rich have very different preoccupations from the rest of us. You know the things that they're concerned about, the things that they want to invest in are not necessarily the things that are good for humanity as a whole. For all the rest of us, 99%, and it's a very dangerous trend. I genuinely don't know how we got to here through democracy, that we voted in people who do not have our best interests at heart.
Susanna Smith
Yeah. And I think it really, I like the question of what is science for? Because I think that's a question you can ask, and regardless of your particular politics, or how you prefer to vote, I think it's an important question for us all to consider. And I think a lot of the history of science has been, even fundamentally the development of vaccines, vaccines were developed to treat everyone, that was the point of having vaccines, in public health campaigns around distributing vaccines. And so we're stepping backwards, I think, from this idea of science as a tool of sort of raising all boats and equalizing the value of all lives.
Angela Saini
Yeah, and it is worrying. It's disturbing. I do a lot of work around. So I run a group based in London called challenging pseudoscience. It's based under the Royal Institution of London, which is, I think, the world's oldest ongoing scientific society. It's where in centuries ago, scientists used to come and present their work to the world, and then it would enter the canon of scientific knowledge, and it still does that. So scientists go there they give, they deliver lectures. So underneath this group, and we're just a ragtag bunch of volunteers, some of us are journalists, editors, scientists, policymakers, social media people, who work in social media companies, you know, right across the board. So this group and the goal is to just understand how it is that pseudoscientific ideas spread into the mainstream, and how we can make sure that people have access to the best possible scientific information.
One of the projects that we ran was looking at vaccine hesitancy. This was during the COVID pandemic, and what we learned very quickly was that people who were vaccine-hesitant at that time were not poorly educated. They were actually very well informed often, and very well educated, and they ran the entire demographic range. So there was no one demographic that was more likely, or at least that we found that was more likely, in Britain to be more vaccine-hesitant than another. But one thing they did all have in common was distrust of authority, and this fear of losing bodily autonomy to authorities that they didn't trust. Which, frankly, when you think about, I mean. I don't know what it was like in the U.S. at that time, I was living in the UK during the pandemic, but it was very hard to trust the government because, as we found out, they were having parties during lockdown while they were telling everybody else to stay at home and not go out. You know, there were a lot of scandals that were happening at that time. So we have to be able to meet people where they are. If they have these concerns, these are not illegitimate concerns. Sometimes they come from a place of genuine worry and genuine anxiety. And for journalists like myself that's where we should be meeting, is understanding the psychological and emotional reasons why people have these fears, because often it's not rooted in them not trusting a scientific paper, or what the WHO is saying, in them not trusting the government. And if the government says have a vaccine, and they're already distrustful of the government then that just compounds itself.
Susanna Smith
Yeah. And I could see how this would sort of feed into a dangerous cycle because at least as the U.S. is disassembling their government then you know, you kind of ask, well, what is the FDA doing? What is the CDC doing? What is the NIH doing? And it becomes harder to trust the science coming out of the government. They're a major funder of scientific research.
Angela Saini
So yeah, people get nervous. And this is not a left-right thing. This is across the board that, you know, you see people on all sides of the political spectrum exhibiting these fears for understandable reasons.
Susanna Smith
Throughout your work you often ground readers in descriptions of physical places, which I love, the British Museum in London, the Çatalhöyük archaeological site in Turkey, and you dive deep into history and prehistory, meaning the time before written records, to help us make sense of our lives today. So how does this approach inform how you're thinking about the political moment we're living through right now?
Angela Saini
That is actually a very good question. And it really has transformed the way I think because it gives me such a long view when I read what's happening in the newspaper, I am thinking at the scale of thousands of years. I'm not thinking at the scale of a few years or a few months. And when you put things into context like that it does help calm you down a little bit because you realize that whatever happening now will pass, it won't be forever that there is always this kind of push and pull, this friction that happens within society. I write at the end of The Patriarchs, I quote the sociologist Lewis Cosa, who argued that human life is conflict. You know societies are always in a degree of conflict. And actually that's to be welcomed because that's how change happens. If there wasn't some conflict happening, if there weren't people arguing over the best way to live, then nothing would ever change. And so I like to think of it that way, that even at the very worst moments, and it's pretty bad, maybe it will get even worse, I like to think that there are also people pushing back. And I meet those people all the time. You know, people who are laying down their lives for the kind of world that they want. But we have to remember, you know, I'm on the progressive end of politics if you want to categorize me, but I do think that for those people who are progressive, who do want a more racially or gender equal society as I do then we can't assume it will just happen. We have to fight for it and make the case for it. Sell it to people. Convince them of it and really work hard on that front because I don't think social change happens all by itself.
Susanna Smith
And it also doesn't necessarily stay. I think this is part of your point, right? Even as we've made what progressives might consider progress, social progress, we've also seen a lot of those things stepped back in the last two weeks or five years.
Angela Saini
So, yeah, absolutely. And you only have to look at countries like Afghanistan to see how quickly things can change for people, and how quickly your rights can be taken away. So we have to defend them. But at the same time I think we have to remember, and I think this particular election has been an interesting one for the Democrats because I feel that unlike the last time there is a lot more soul searching happening now. That people are asking, well, actually, did we not do a good job of making a case for the kind of society that we want? Did we not reach out to people where they are? Has the left to some degree or at least the left that was in power forgotten what it's like to be poor in America, what it's like to struggle in America? Because there are so many very wealthy progressives, and so very many wealthy people on the left that it's easy to forget there are so many poor. So there is work to be done there, I think, and we shouldn't be complacent about that. If people have voted a certain way that we have to trust that they are telling us something.
Susanna Smith
Do you think the left or the Progressives have created a cohesive narrative that people buy into? Are they telling a story that people want to hear?
Angela Saini
I don't think there is a single cohesive narrative. No, and I don't think that exists in any social movement to be honest. And even on the right, I mean even within Trump's own coterie, there are people who disagree, who have very different visions of the kind of world that they want. And exactly the same is true of the left. And again maybe that's to be expected that we each have to make a case for the kind of society that we want to live in and work towards that, and imagine it more strongly and more powerfully than we do at the moment.
The big issue that I'm concerned about, and that I think comes through most clearly from the data when you look at inequality, is how much income and wealth inequality is overlooked. This is a huge issue. It's quite shocking how easily overlooked, that is, and it means that when Democrats like Joe Biden were telling us that the economy was doing so great that just didn't ring true for a lot of people. They couldn't believe it because in their personal lives they just weren't seeing that wealth. Almost all the wealth in the United States is in the hands of the top 10%, and that is just unacceptable. It's just shocking. And it means that we, you can't have a cohesive society, as long as that's the case.
Susanna Smith
It's also gotten a lot worse over the last three decades, right? So the wealth disparity has grown and grown. So it's that everything you're saying has been increasingly true, and people don't see that the economy is doing well in their day-to-day lives but also when they look back over the last few decades they don't see it either.
Angela Saini
No, they don't, you know. I'm speaking outside my areas of expertise but I am kind of astounded at how deep that runs. And the reason it's easy to overlook is because the United States population is so large, 10% of the country being very, very rich, means you have millions and millions of very, very rich people, who run everything, who are the visible ones, who are in the universities, who are in positions of power. And if those are the only people you ever meet when you're walking through Washington or you're going through a university or, you know, if those are the only people you ever see then you can easily imagine that the United States is in a very different situation from where it really is. It's only when you travel out into rural areas or into, you know, the deep, deep suburbs. You know the edges of the country that you see just how profound that inequality runs. And it is as profound as anywhere I've seen in the world. I mean, I've lived in India, and income inequality is profound. In India, it's very visible. You can see it. And in some ways it's just as profound here. It's just less visible.
Susanna Smith
That's an interesting point. Thank you, Angela, for joining me today on Genetic Frontiers.
Angela Saini
You're very welcome. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
Susanna Smith
For anyone listening who would like to learn more about Angela’s work please go to her website: AngelaSaini.co.uk. Her recent book, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, as well as her other books are linked to in our show notes below and are available online.
Susanna Smith
Genetic Frontiers is co-produced by Brandy Mello and by me: Susanna Smith. Music is by Edward Giordano and design by Abhinav Chauhan and Julie Weinstein. Thank you for listening to this episode of Genetic Frontiers connect with us at geneticfrontiers.org or on Instagram and Linkedin at Genetic Frontiers, to continue the conversation. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to support our independent production. Please make a donation to Genetic Frontiers through our Patreon account.