Dr Adam Rutherford: Eugenics and the misuse of Mendel

Have we been teaching genetics wrong? To deliver The Tinbergen Society's 2024 annual lecture, we are excited to welcome Dr Adam Rutherford, a geneticist, author, broadcaster, former editor at Nature, and UCL lecturer. One of his latest broadcasting projects has been BBC Radio 4's series Bad Blood: The Story of Eugenics, based on his book Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics. He will be speaking about how Gregor Mendel's seminal findings about inheritance provided a pseudoscientific substrate for genocidal eugenics policies. Modern scientific discoveries show how boiling genetics down to Mendelian inheritance is overly-simplifying and dangerous, and so we need to refresh how we communicate genetics, both to scientists and the general public.