As a UCL Lecturer and science communicator, Adam Rutherford is advancing public understanding of evolutionary science and working to dismantle scientific racism and the historic misuse of genetics.
Dr Adam Rutherford, a self-proclaimed “UCL lifer” has been here for almost 30 years. Arriving as an undergraduate in the 1990s to study evolutionary genetics, he was in awe of UCL’s central London campus: “I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the main reason I came here was because of how amazing the portico looked in the springtime!”
UCL’s progressive, secular origins also appealed, Adam is a life-long humanist and the former President of Humanist UK. In 2002, he completed a PhD in genetics at UCL’s Great Ormond Street Hospital and today he is a lecturer in the very same department he once studied.
Adam teaches several modules within UCL’s Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, that reflect both his work confronting challenging scientific legacies and his commitment to science communication. His module, Science Communication for Biology, draws on his career as a broadcaster and writer.
It’s super important that we teach scientists the tools of being able to write and present not just to peers, but also the public and media. So that’s TV and radio, but we have also introduced how to do TikTok videos, how to talk on YouTube, how to do podcasts, and all manner of things that I think are quintessentially part of science.
He also leads the Genetics and Society module to give students a deeper understanding of the cultural and social histories of UCL’s role in genetics and evolutionary thought and, by extension, in the legitimisation of scientific racism and eugenics.
Addressing these histories has been a central strand of Adam’s work. He was involved in UCL’s formal inquiry into the history of eugenics in 2018-2020, which resulted in prominent eugenicists - Karl Pearson, Ronald Fisher and Francis Galton - being removed from UCL buildings, and the university committing to integrating the history of eugenics into the curriculum.
We have removed their names, but we are not just erasing those histories, we’re replacing them with teaching and understanding and cultural contextualization. We should continue to be a beacon of examining our own history.
A leading public voice on genetics and evolution, Adam also works to dismantle scientific racism through weekly BBC Radio 4 broadcasts, documentaries and bestselling books, a body of work recognised with the Royal Society’s David Attenborough Medal for Science Communication.
Over three decades, Adam has witnessed the rapid pace of scientific progress, quipping it’s both “rewarding and frustrating, especially when a student completed an experiment in six weeks that I had failed to achieve in 3 years during my PhD!” He hopes UCL stays true to its radical roots of inclusion and blue skies thinking, something he is reminded of every day:
There's a blue plaque outside my office in Gower Street and it says "Charles Darwin lived here". And I look at that literally every day, on good days, particularly on bad days, and think, I'm really embedded in the home of who I think is the greatest thinker human history, who is the reason I study this field and why I’m here at UCL.
