Dr. Adam Rutherford on Control

Leonard Lopate at Large on WBAI Radio in New York

Control is a book about eugenics, what geneticist Adam Rutherford calls “a defining idea of the twentieth century.” Inspired by Darwin’s ideas about evolution, eugenics arose in Victorian England as a theory for improving the British population, and quickly spread to America, where it was embraced by presidents, funded by Gilded Age monopolists, and enshrined into racist American laws that became the ideological cornerstone of the Third Reich. Despite this horrific legacy, eugenics looms large today as the advances in genetics in the last thirty years (from the sequencing of the human genome to modern gene editing technique) have brought the idea of population purification back into the mainstream. Join us when Dr. Adam Rutherford examine his book Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics on this installment of Leonard Lopate at Large.