The unwelcome return of scientific racism: the Olaudah Equiano annual race justice lecture

About this event

It's back. Or maybe it never went away, but we convinced ourselves that the spurious ideas of race science - fully dismantled and debunked by genetics in the 20th century - had been put away, bygones from a less enlightened time. But with the rise of populist politics and Silicon Valley technocrats, they have made a startling comeback from the grimy corners of the internet, all the way to the White House. Now is the time to get informed and get involved and put these dangerous ideas back in the dustbin of history.

About our speaker

Dr Adam Rutherford is an award-winning geneticist, broadcaster, and author.

He presents BBC Radio 4’s flagship culture programme Start The Week. In his latest BBC Radio 4 series, The Human Subject, he and Julia Shaw reveal true stories of unethical experiments and unimaginable endurance.

Adam wrote and co-hosted the popular BBC Radio 4 podcast ‘The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry’, alongside Hannah Fry, has appeared on 10 episodes of the Infinite Monkey Cage and was the host of BBC Inside Science for 8 years.

Adam’s engaging style and broad expertise makes him a prominent voice in communicating complex scientific ideas to the public. He has presented numerous documentaries, exploring topics such as AI and robotics, the inheritance of intelligence, MMR and autism, astronomy and art and scientific fraud, and most recently the award winning Bad Blood: the story of Eugenics.

He has presented many TV documentaries, including The Beauty of Anatomy (BBC4), Horizon: Playing God (BBC2), The Gene Code (BBC4) and The Cell (BBC4).

Adam has authored eight best-selling books including Creation (2014), The Book of Humans (2018), and A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived (2016), which was praised as ‘nothing less than a tour de force.’ His first children’s story Where Are You Really From (2023) which won 2024 The Week Junior Book Award for best science book. Adam has also worked as science advisor on many movies, including Ex Machina (2015), Annihilation (2018), Life (2017), The Kingsman (2014), and A Quiet Place Day 1 (2024).

Adam gives talks all over the world, discussing his work on human evolution, data, race, racism, eugenics, hip-hop and genetics. He received the Royal Society David Attenborough award for outstanding public engagement with science.

About this lecture

The Olaudah Equiano Annual Lecture on Race Justice is hosted by the Race Equality Committee at Anglia Ruskin University’s Faculty of Science and Engineering. The lecture series is named after Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797), an enslaved man who bought his freedom and wrote compellingly about his experiences, later becoming a prominent figure in the movement to abolish the slave trade. His legacy is particularly celebrated in Cambridgeshire and the East of England, where he set up home in his later life. In honouring Olaudah Equiano and his legacy, each lecture in the series is focused on a specific topic related to race equality and justice, and features carefully selected speakers who are recognised as having made substantive contributions to recognising, understanding, and promoting race justice equality.

Event presented as part of the Cambridge Festival.