Special Episode: Angela Saini & Superior

to the book club list? Send your thoughts to our contact us form on our website This Podcast will Kill You dot Com, or our email This Podcast will Kill You at gmail dot com. I hope you have more room on your shelves or space on your eReader, because

this week's book is yet another must read. Superior The Return of Race Science, by award winning science journalist and author Angela Siiny, published in twenty nineteen, traces the origins of race science and examines its disturbing persistence in medical

and scientific research today. Sayiny, whose other fantastic books examined sexism and scientific research in her book Inferior and the complex roots of patriarchy in the Patriarchs, which is just now out, joins me on this bonus episode to chat

about the topics she explores in Superior. Listeners of the podcast are likely familiar with some of the story of how eugenics rose to prominence, especially in the United States, as the field of genetics provided a means through which eugenesis could classify individuals or groups as quote unquote fit or quote unquote unfit to reproduce. We've discussed eugenic laws and policies in the context of Huntington's disease, diabetes, hemophilia,

and most recently, epilepsy, just to name a few. In some cases, you are forbidden to get married if you had been diagnosed with any one of a number of conditions or diseases scored within a certain range of an IQ test, were alleged to have committed a crime, or had skin color that was deemed inferior. Eugenic policies didn't stop at outlawing marriage to certain individuals. However, there was, also,

of course, the incredibly frequent practice of forced sterilization. The appalling popularity and widespread acceptance of eugenics in the US often gets downplayed or omitted entirely in some histories which portray Nazi Germany as the originator of eugenics, when in fact Adolf Hitler took inspiration from the eugenic policies of

the US. But while the origin of eugenics dates back decades before the Third Reich, the racist ideas and prejudices that gave rise to eugenics had existed for hundreds of years in the form of race science, and race science certainly did not die out with the fall of Nazi

Germany after World War II. You can find ample evidence of race science in medical, genetic and biological research done today, helped along by the burgeoning field of genomics, with some scientists continuing to search for a genetic basis to race despite never finding one because it doesn't exist, or looking for population level genetic differences in intelligence, or promoting race

based medicine. While some of these researchers make no attempt to hide their racist motivations for conducting this research, others may be well meaning but still participate in the type of research that supports the notion that racial groups can

be defined biologically and classified hierarchically. In her widely acclaimed book Superior, Angela Siini explores the deep history of race science, tracing how racial categories were constructed and examining what purposes they served and continue to serve, particularly in the justification of slavery and colonization. She charts the repackaging that race science underwent as scientific knowledge about fields such as genetics

and genomics expanded. As Sione reveals, this insidious repackaging has allowed for the continued presence of race science today in many forms, some of which are overtly racist and others that are unintentionally so, but harmful all the same. Superior is a compelling, eye opening, an essential read that feels increasingly relevant, chillingly so in the political and scientific landscape today. I'm very excited to get to the interview itself, so we'll take a quick break here and when we get back,

we'll dive right in. Angela, thank you so so very much for being here today. I loved your book, Superior, for how brilliantly you trace the problematic history of eugenic and race science and its disturbing persistence in medicine and scientific research today. So tell me what is race science and what made you decide to write a book about it.

parents still live there and it's completely different. Demographically, but when we were growing up, racism really was the backdrop to my teenage years in ways that sometimes I think it's difficult for people to understand about Britain now. For younger people living there now, it was just, you know, all the time, this was a fact of life that you were confronted with, and that was part of the

reason I went into journalism in the first place. One of the first things I remember writing for other people was about this violent racist incident that me and my sister was subjected to when we had some visitors from visiting our home and we were out with them, and I read that out in class when I think I was around eight or nine, and very quickly realized the power that the cathartic power for myself in being able to write things down and process them, but also the

power that could have in helping other people understand. When I got to university many years later, I got involved in anti racism activism. I became one of the coachairs of the Anti Racism committee at Oxford, and I started writing for the student press about race and racism. And when I left university, rather than becoming an engineer, which I think I would have done otherwise if my life

had been different. I went into journalism. I worked at ITN and the BBC as a news reporter TV news reporter for years, and then when I went freelance to write science books, my writing and my reporting was driven by this idea that science is a system of power, just like any other. Is an establishment that consists of people who are worried about things like their own personal status funding. It's informed by the politics of the world

around it. So my books really look at that and try to understand what part does science play in helping us understand ourselves, but also how is science affected by the wider world around it. And when it came to writing Superior, you have to remember it was commissioned at a time when people still thought that we were getting

past race. This is an issue for you know, previous generations, not for future generations, which is very naive of course, and it was actually quite a hard sell in that sense. It wasn't an easy one to convince people of that a book like this needed to be written. But of course,

in hindsight things have only got worse. I mean, the rise of ethnic nationalism populism all around the world and the horrific ways in which scientific racism or pseudo scientific racism has been co opted by the far right, and it has entered the main stream to some degree. If you think look at things like the Great Replacement theory, which is hugely informed by these pseudoscientific ideas. It has turned out to be prescient, but it didn't feel that way when I started writing it.

all over the world in lots of different ways. But during the development of modern Western science in the sixteen seventeen eighteenth centuries in Europe and later in North America, The political reality was one of a growing imperialism, imperial force, and then later the development of slavery, the Transatlantic slave trade. Now slavery, of course, also has been practiced all over the world for as long as we can we have records.

But the nature of that political reality necessarily informed the way that science developed, because as European Enlightenment naturalists were looking at the natural world and saying, can we codify it? Can we start placing boundaries and develop a taxonomy around nature? You know, different plants and animals, different types of creature, and how they're related to each other. Can we do the same for humans? Which sounds like a perfectly logical

thing to do. But of course, as they were doing this, they didn't have a very thorough understanding of how human variation worked all over the world, and they certainly weren't fully convinced at that point that we were just one species as we know we are now, or that we are very homogeneous species as we know we are now, And so a lot of this understanding came from sometimes just myth and legend or travelers' reports, folk ideas that

they had about how human difference played out. Very superficial things, but particularly the political hierarchies of that time. So for example, Europeans would have looked at the Transatlantic slave trade. They would have encountered people in states of subservience and other people who had power over them, and then started to equate that in their imaginations with some idea of a racial hierarchy or some idea of you know, that there are groups that are better than others, which, as I

said before, societies have always done. The powerful have always done that to the less powerful in different ways. You know, men have done it to women, the free have done it to slaves, citizens have done it to non citizens. Natives have done it to foreigners. This is, you know, part of how humans operate when it comes to think about their own status and the status of others. But science, which we imagine to be this subjective project, was affected

by this too. So for example, last year, I remember I was in the New Orleans on holiday and there's a beautiful little historical museum there, and in that museum you can see a book from around the middle of the eighteenth century called the Black Code. This is a very thick book produced by the French authorities there, which was a guide for how the black residents of the city should behave with respect to the white systens of the city, and vice versa. Now, why was it called

the Black Code? Earlier that book would have been termed the Slave Code. But because of the Transatlantic slave trade and the demographics around that, blackness began in the eighteenth century to be associated with subservience and slavery. And so when you read these early taxonomies of race where they divide people up by color, and that's not just one you know, that's just one arbitrary way of dividing people. There is no natural way of doing it. But that's

just one way you can see. You know, blackness is associated with slavery, that brownness is associated with something else, yellowness is associated with something else. And love and behold, you know, whiteness is always elevated. Is this perfect special category of human that is just superior to everyone. So

it's very self serving, it is very political. And this is something I like to remind people of is that, you know, during the Black Lives Matter resurgence after the murder of George Floyd, there were some scientists that came out and said, you know, stop politicizing science, Why are you bringing anti racism into science? Well, if we did not have anti racism in science, trust me, we would

be perpetuating the pseudoscientific myths. It started off political, and that's why it's so important to continually think about these things and how we might interrogate them and challenge them and correct them in order to have a better science of human difference going forward. But that original sin, if you like, or those original mistakes around race, the development of this idea of race came to form the bedrock of the science of human difference for hundreds of years.

So by the time you get to the nineteenth century, by which time these pseudoscientific beliefs are deeply rooted in the Western scientific establishment, you have serious physicians and biologists claiming that black people have thicker skin than white people, that their bones are denser, that they don't feel pain. In the same way legitimizing slavery and colonialism on the basis that races are just different and that some races have a right to control others or to civilize others.

Ideas about the primitive or the modern what it meant to be civilized became kind of fed into all of this, and we still live with the legacy of it to this day.

I mean, it's difficult for me to put into wards how revolutionary it is for someone raised in the West to be witnessed to a system of thought that is so diametrically different from what you're used to. And we have to remember the racial history of Australia was one in which these entire cultures were you know there was an attempt to wipe them out. One of the very first pieces of legislation to pass in Australia in the nineteenth century was the White Australia Act, which essentially tried

to breed out the color from Australia. It forcibly took children away from their parents raised them in boarding schools, something that in North America. Of course, the story we're also familiar with because of the story of Indigenous Americans, to whom this was also done. And it's only relatively recently we're starting to understand the scale of the horrors

of what went on in these institutions. But it does mean that while not destroyed, cultures were undermined, all in the name of this idea of white supremacy, that the white settlers in Australia had a right to that territory, that the communities that had lived there for tens of thousands of years did not, this idea that they were primitive and doomed to die out. Now, in the nineteenth centuries, also when the first bones of Neanderthals were discovered and

identified in the Neandervalley in Germany. Let's remember one of the first things archaeologists and scientists did when they discovered those bones was to go and compare them to the bones of living Aboriginal Australians. Why did they do that to people living on the other side of the world. And the reason, of course, is that here was this form of human or species of humans it was conceived

of then, that had gone extinct. And in the racial hierarchy or taxonomy of that time, there was a belief that other races were also doomed to go extinct, among them the indigenous Australian communities of Australia and New Zealand. And so if anyone was going to share some resemblance to Neanderthals, scientists, you know, in this ridiculous pseudoscientific myth

that they had created, thought it must be them. This comparison was made, and even to this day, if you look up the dictionary definition of Neanderthals, of course it's not just this extinct form of human, but also kind of a brutish, oafish, stupid man. He's a Neandertal. So

for years this association had been made. What's fascinating for me, as a journalist who writes on this topic is that in the last few decades, as it became clear that perhaps there was some mixing between the Antertals and humans, to the extent that we share some Neandertal ancestry. Many of us on the planet share some Neandertalle ancestry, but particularly in Europe, of course, because Neanderthals lived in Europe, that those of European heritage share, particularly this Neanderthal ancestry.

The language around Neanderthals began to shift, and it's palpable in the scientific literature, but also in the popular press.

You know, people started saying that Neanderthals were smarter than they then perhaps we thought they were, that they were more human, just like us, and that I find particularly galling this idea that here is this extinct form of human of whom we know very little about, you know very little, and the rehabilitation that Neanderthals have gone through drawing them into the circle of humanity, when one hundred years ago or more, living people, living modern humans were

driven out of the circle of humanity by virtue of this idea that they were closer to in Neanderthals. No scientist or geneticist or archaeologist will now paleontologists will ever admit that there is anything you know, racialized about this, that there is anything racist going on in the way that they frame these things. But I think it's impossible to look at that the kind of speculation that went has gone on over the last hundred years and not see that of course there is how can there not be?

That is impossible. As I said before, we are genetically more homogeneous than chimpanzees.

And while I don't have kind of a theoretical problem with that, a lot of my work is about asking scientists what are they trying to achieve here, what is the end goal of all of this, And is it really about improving health or improving our understanding of humanity? Or is there something else going on that it may be subconscious, I don't know, but something else going on here.

people are better than others by nature. Eugenics is the belief that some people should be allowed to have children and some people shouldn't, or some people should be allowed to have more children than others based on their genetic fitness, that the child of beautiful, clever parents is more likely to be beautiful and clever, which, of course, as we know,

is not true. But leaving aside the fact that eugenics as itself is flawed in that heredity doesn't work that way, it was popular because it spoke to that kind of scientistic belief that society could be improved if we just managed reproduction, which is an idea to some degree that we still live with. It's an idea that is woven through popular culture. Even now that you know, why are some people having loads of kids and the clever people are not having loads of kids? And what will that

mean for the future. Well, necessarily it won't mean anything. But we have at the back of our minds this eugenically informed idea that we want everyone in the world to be the best that they can possibly be. We want them to be the smartest, the fittest, the strongest, the tallest, and that we can somehow engineer a society like that through selective breeding or by encouraging reproduction in some than others. And it was very popular on the

left and the right. I have to add. It wasn't just we associate it now with the Nazis in Germany in their program of racial hygiene, which of course led to the Holocaust. But it was very popular among progressives social progressives who believed very much that this was a scientific, a technological solution to society's problems. If people who were criminally indigent over generations or intellectually deficient over generations, if they could just be wiped out somehow, then society's problems

will be fixed. But of course, as I said, it doesn't work that way.

Winston Churchill and thinkers like Virginia Wolfe. Virginia wolf very much believed in this idea of class superiority and inferiority. So this was a popular view at the time across parts of Europe, but particularly taken up in the US. So the UK itself didn't in the end carry through with any eugenic style policies government policies, but the US did. There were sterilization policies here, there were anti immigration policies which were certainly informed, I think by the eugenics movement.

And there was an overlap, a very solid overlap, between the American eugenic society and mainstream science and genetics that continued for a very long time. There were attempts even after the Second World War to rehabilitate genics to create a kind of signs of positive eugenics. There were attempts by some scientific racists like William Shockley, Nobel Prize winning engineer, who try to create a sperm bank for Nobel Prize winners and very smart people in which he placed his

own sperm, and of course that continues. Jeffrey Epstein did something similar. He was very much adhered to this idea that smart, brilliant people should be having more children, leaving aside the fact what qualities do we really want in the next generation. Do we really want more William Shockley's than Jeffrey Epstein's. I'm not sure about that. But the point is that we live with these ideas and sometimes

in very subtle ways. Even now. Sometimes I look at the exhortations on social media to be the best version of yourself, and I think to myself, how different is that really from this eugenic idea that we are not enough as we are, that we can't accept people just

as they are. Be happy with that desperate kind of quest that modern day middle class parents have to turn their children into superhuman kids through training and classes, and I very much imagine one day, probably genetic selection, they're not happy with what they have, and that is tragic because if there is one ideal I think that has evolved throughout the twentieth and twenty first century that I think it would be tragic for us to let go of,

is that every life matters, and every person is valuable in their own way. Regardless of how productive they are or how useful they are to society, They're still precious and useful to us, to themselves, and it is it's awful that you know, we still live this up with this idea that we are not enough. I think, I very much think that is a eugenic style of thinking that we hang on to.

But after the war, of course, that became very unfashionable, and so a lot of eugenesists or race scientists as they would have been called, completely innocuously before the Second World War, began to reversion themselves, rehabilitate themselves as geneticist population geneticis And this was a very left wing group of people at the beginning, so they were very much opposed to racism. Many of them had experienced the horrors of what had happened during the Second World War and

wanted to leave that behind. But the science of human difference was so deeply rooted in this idea of human difference at the population level, it was very difficult to do that in a whole scale way. So what you get with the Human Genome Diversity Project is an attempt to map human variation in a way that, for all intents and purposes, looks very much like old fashioned race science.

Was looking for genetic differences between populations. They won't call them races, but they essentially are races that they're looking at, or large population groups, which is essentially the same thing. And so it was fraught from the beginning. It had a lot of opposition from indigenous groups, particularly because the project was all about going to these small, isolated communities around the world in the belief that they might be genetically exceptional in some way. None of them were, but

you know, there was this in their imagination. They hoped that they could pinpoint something genetically special about these isolated groups. And of course these isolated groups were not fans of this. They had learned over the centuries not to fully trust Western scientists coming in and trying to take their genetic material or their biological material. So there was a lot of pushback on that front, but also conceptually, as social scientists have been at pains to point out those flaws.

From the beginning, they didn't really resolve these group of anti racists within science hadn't fully resolved why what they were doing was not really race science. In the end, it didn't really go in anywhere. But what did come

out of that project more broadly was ancestry testing. So modern day ancestry testing really is a product of that movement within population genetics, and of course ancestry testing has only re affirmed in the public imagination this idea that race must be real, because then how else can you take a DNA test and it tell you where you're from.

Welcome back everyone, Let's get back into it. In your book, talk about how race science is still conducted by two primary groups, These well meaning anti racist scientists whose research nevertheless perpetuates the notion that race has a biological foundation, and then the racial realists, the quote unquote racial realists who exploit scientific language to disguise themselves as legitimate scholars when they are really just using pseudoscientific journals to promote

racist views. What role do each of these groups play when it comes to race science today?

There are ideologies and beliefs are straight out of the nineteenth century. There is no real difference between what they say and what they believed in the nineteenth century. But mainstream science, to some degree, I think, still has this commitment to race, which plays out in far more subtle ways usually. I mean, there are some firmly within mainstream academia who give a lot of space to those on the fringes. So I wouldn't say that they're necessarily anti racist.

They will say probably that they're apolitical, that they are just driven by curiosity, or you know, that they have no political skin in the game, they're just interested. But for some reason they give a lot of space to those on the far right. And in fact, I just published a piece recently in and Dark about mainstream scientific journals and how much overlap there is between the people who write for them and the people on these racist fringes,

and there's far more than you would imagine. But then there are also mainstream scientists who are permitted to anti racism, who very much believe in the need to move on and you know, really make a break from those mistakes of the past and the pseudoscience of the past. But for some reason, deal keep coming back to race as a guiding principle in the way that they think about

human difference. And you see this particularly in medicine. So, for example, in recent years, we've had a lot of calls from very well intentioned people in medical research and clinical research asking for more people of color to take part in clinical trials. And sometimes this bleeds into this claim that drugs tested on white people might not work in black and brown people, which is absolute nonsense. Of

course that's not true. If it were, we would have real problems right now when we went to the doctor. But there is this problematic kind of space in which we want diversity in clinical trials. Of course, because there is such a huge degree of individual difference between us, it's good to be able to map that in as broad a way as possible, and to some degree, you know, calling for people from different ethnicities can feel like a way of achieving some of that diversity. But the truth is,

if you have a large enough group of people. It doesn't really matter what race they are as long as there is enough of them, and that sometimes gets lost in that messaging. So we need to be very careful. I think about the way that we talk about race in science, and this is something I often say to researchers when I do talks at universities or when I've spoken at the nih IS. Every time you use race, ask yourself why you are using it and what you

think race means in that context? How are you defining it? It's astonishing to me how many papers I read that don't go through that essential first step.

are just fundamentally different. And this is why this grift continues into the present is because there are so many people still invested in this idea that racial difference at the psychological or intellectual level is so real that we will never really overcome it, that when we look and see these racial disparities, for example, in American society, that that is something that will never be overcome because that just reflects nature. Very again, a very self serving argument.

It's an argument for doing nothing, for not changing anything, and it's very ahistorical because, of course, if you look at any group of people that has been designated and then deliberately oppressed for centuries and deliberately disadvantage, and then overlay on that the legacy of prejudice created by those myths, pseudoscientific myths and centuries of disadvantage, of course you are going to society is going to look the way it does.

Of course, how can it look any different. But that kind of lazy, pseudoscientific approach to explaining inequality is still there. You see it in, for example, in Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein's The Bell Curve, which is still popular, which people still cite and still read. You see it in more subtle ways sometimes in the literature and education, for instance. You know, how do we solve educational disadvantage? We haven't

completely got rid of that yet. But what I would say to people, and this is what you know, people like W. E. B. Dubois said, when everyone is treated fairly, when you have really extended that hand of opportunity to absolutely everyone in as fair away as you can and you still see difference, then perhaps you can come back and start complaining about it. But you can't do that right now.

seen as illogical and pseudoscientific. By this point, it was completely unfashionable to be a race scientist in the after the Second World War, but there were a number of academics around the world who were still committed to it, who very much still thought that maybe we weren't one species, that we were different species or subspecies or breeds, and that racial mixing was somehow dangerous to society that would create these strange hybrid people, which I know sounds absolutely

bizarre now, but was an actual fear that, you know, some people had less than a century ago. So they created a journal of their own. It was called The Mankind Quarterly. It was funded by a very wealthy segregationist, Wickliffe Draper, American man who had inherited his wealth and invested it in the segregationist cause. And one of the planks of this was to fund racists within science and academia who shared his views, who could then be used as a kind of intellectual force with which to convince

conservatives that desegregation was a stake. And that's exactly what The Mankind Quarterly was for. Wickliffe Draper distributed it to prominent conservatives in the US, and some of the people who wrote for it were prominent in the early days, quite prominent scientists. There was Henry Garrett, who was a very well known and distinguished psychologist who argued that racial

mixing was deadly, that it was dangerous to society. There was a lot of overlap between this community who wrote for it and right wing, far right wing politicians and figures in the segregationist movement and white supremacist movement, and there were calls for it to be shut down. Even at the time the journal was reviewed in mainstream scientific journals and found to be complete nonsense. People asked for

it to be shut down. It wasn't shut down because, like I said, it was independently funded, and in fact, it's still in publication today. And that's the thing that people find absolutely impossible to understand is how something like this can still be circulated today. That's not to say it's widely read, but it is there, and it certainly

has influence on the far right. Many of the people who write for it, or who have written for it, you know, also provide intellectual ballast, if you want to call it that, for some of the most horrific right wing ideologies that we have, and they are cited. They were cited by the man who killed ten black people

at a supermarket and Buffalo just last year. If you read his manifesto, there are scientific article after scientific articles cited there, and many of those people have written for the Mankind quarterly.

And in your book you wrote about the hypertension drug by Dill, where does this drug fit into the growing problem of racialized medicine?

he admitted quite happily that bidel works on everyone. It's not that it works better on black people. It was just a complete act of expediency that it was much cheaper and cost effective to test only on black people. And because in America rates of hypertension are much higher among black Americans, they did it that way. So there's no logic. But there's no scientific logic behind it. And in fact, he himself prescribes it to white and black patients.

He doesn't discriminate in the way that he prescribes it. There has long been this correlation between being black in America and having higher high pertension. There's no genetic basis to it, at least that's not what studies are found, and a lot of money has gone into looking for genetic explanations for this. It is most likely associated with social factors. You know, high blood pressure or persistently high blood pressure, which is what high pertension is. You see

all over the world. Millions of people around the world have it. My mother has it. You know. This is a common condition and it's caused most often by high salt in the diet, which is why the highest rates in the world are seen in Finland and Germany. Once adjusted for other factors, of course, Infinite and Germany diets tend to be very high in salty meat and fish. It's also caused by stress. People have shown that higher blood pressure is associated with fewer years of education, with

being an immigrant. So there are lots of factors that contribute to high blood pressure, and of course stress and racial discrimination and one of them. But this kind of desperation to prove a racial genetic underpinning to hypertension is just the most fascinating story and it just shows I think it's emblematic of the ways in which race can be invoked in medicine inappropriate ways, but just continue over

time until it becomes myth, until it becomes dogma. And even now that dogma is so deeply rooted that in the UK, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which is the body that advises doctors on how to treat patients deal advises different drugs if you're under fifty, if you're black, then if you white, and there is

no scientific basis for that. I should add, you know, there was a study done in twenty twenty one, this is after my book came out that showed that there is no logic, there's no evidence basis for prescribing different drugs based on ethnicity.

I remember I was in the UK. Then I was still living in the UK, and rates were very high among Asian people living in Britain. So this is usually in Britain that refers to South Asian, so from the South Asian subcontinent, and people started speculating about whether South Asian people were uniquely susceptible to this virus. But of course you only had to look at the demographics to

understand why that was. It was because the virus hit in London, first, London is a minority white British city, so demographically it does not look like the same as the rest of the UK, and the majority of or a disproportionate number of frontlines workers in London come from ethnic minority or immigrant backgrounds, not to mention the fact that the NHS, which is where a number of those deaths happened among doctors and nurses, is disproportionately staffed by

ethnic minorities, so of course the figures are not going

to look the same. And that's leaving aside the fact that race impacts health on so many different levels, which we can see for ourselves, for example, in the fact that when we should have known this already that in the US, black Americans have a lower life expectancy than white Americans, not in any way because they are somehow uniquely biologically disadvantaged, but just because of the way we live, the way people are treated, for the same reason that

poor people around the world have a lower life expectancy, of course, because of the lives that they live in

the way that they are treated. And why those social explanations for the differences weren't brought in sooner, why I had to endure you know, while we all had to endure serious scientists and physicians making these ridiculous claims in those early months of the pandemic, which did enormous damage to people, because later on, when the vaccine came out, ethnic minority groups were nervous about taking the vaccine because they felt that a vaccine tested on white people wouldn't

necessarily work on them. Had emails with people asking me that, which is absolutely nonsensical. But of course that ridiculous speculation on the part of scientists and doctors for the two years prior had fed into that.

who's just a kid. He's nine years old now that he was seven or eight then, and it was just I couldn't I couldn't bear it. I had to just distance myself. I took down any pictures of him. I try and keep a minimal presence on social media now, and it's a very difficult thing to deal with because, of course, as a freelance journalist, you work, your only

currency is your reputation. And I still worry sometimes that, you know, for people who don't know any better, they will see these things that they write online and they will believe them about me, that I'm compromised in some way, that I'm some kind of left wing stooge who is just peddling these They call me a pseudo scientist, you know, these scientific racists online, these pseudoscientists online. And that is a hard thing to deal with as a freelancer. And

it's not just me. There are many of us who deal with that every single day. So that really doesn't stop. And I hope people can see through that now. I hope people are more aware of their tactics and the way they operate, and in fact, at the end of twenty nineteen, because of all of them, I started a group which now sits under the Royal Institution in London

called Challenging Pseudoscience. So I bought together scientists, academics, policymakers, social media experts, people who work in the misinformation space, counter terrorism experts, and we as an informal group. None of us get paid. We have quite a bit of funding, but none of us get paid, and we commission projects around scientific misinformation and disinformation. We commissioned some research last year on anti vaxers. There's some really detailed ethnographic research

on anti vaxxers and how they work. And we run public events and I hope that we're making some traction there. I mean, that's my way of kind of making a difference in this space, is just to help clean up the wild West that the Internet has become when it

comes to these kind of ridiculous pseudoscientific conspiracy theories. And I hope that ultimately we can create a system, if not a regulation, which I would certainly hope for, but at least a return to some kind of civil discourse online which is informed by a factual, you know, good faith information, not what we have at the moment.

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