In this episode, host Gwyneth Shaw talks to Professor Osagie K. Obasogie, a professor of law and bioethics and the only UC Berkeley faculty member to hold an appointment at both our law school and our School of Public Health, including the Joint Medical Program with UC San Francisco. As a sociologist of law and medicine, Obasogie’s research combines doctrinal scholarship with empirical methods and novel theoretical approaches to understand the ways race is central to how the institutions of law and medicine operate.
He’s the author of Blinded By Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind and co-editor of Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics, and his scholarship has been published in top law reviews as well as major medical and science journals. Obasogie is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022.
Recently, he organized and wrote the opening essay for a major project published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Legacies of Eugenics.” Over the next couple of years, the review is publishing essays from more than a dozen scholars and writers examining how the ideas underpinning eugenics continue to shape many aspects of science, medicine, and technology in ways that we often don’t appreciate. The project is supported by the Center for Genetics and Society, the Nova Institute, and UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute and school of public health.
To learn more about Obasogie and his work:
Excited Delirium and Police Use of Force
The Climate Gap and the Color Line — Racial Health Inequities and Climate Change
Race, Racism, and Police Use of Force in 21st Century Criminology: An Empirical Examination
About:
“Berkeley Law Voices Carry” is a podcast hosted by Gwyneth Shaw about how the school’s faculty, students, and staff are making an impact — in California, across the country, and around the world — through pathbreaking scholarship, hands-on legal training, and advocacy.
Production by Yellow Armadillo Studios.
Episode Transcript
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GWYNETH SHAW: Hi, listeners. I’m Gwyneth Shaw. And this is Berkeley Law Voices Carry, a podcast about how our faculty, students and staff are making an impact through pathbreaking scholarship, hands-on legal training, and advocacy.
In this episode, I’m joined by Professor Osagie Obasogie, a professor of law and bioethics, and the only UC Berkeley faculty member to hold an appointment at both our Law School and our School of Public Health, including the joint medical program with UC San Francisco. As a sociologist of law and medicine, Obasogie’s research combines doctrinal scholarship, with empirical methods and novel theoretical approaches to understand the ways race is central to how the institutions of law and medicine operate.
He’s the author of Blinded by Sight, Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind, and co-editor of Beyond Bioethics Toward a New Biopolitics. His scholarship has been published in top law reviews, as well as major medical and science journals. Obasogie is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, and won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022. Recently, he organized and wrote the opening essay for a major project published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Legacies of Eugenics.
Over the next couple of years, the review is publishing essays for more than a dozen scholars and writers, examining how the ideas underpinning eugenics continue to shape many aspects of science, medicine and technology in ways that we often don’t appreciate. The project is supported by the Center for Genetics and Society, the Nova Institute, and UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, and School of Public Health.
At the most basic level, eugenics is a debunked theory that humans can be improved through selective breeding of populations. As Obasogie writes in his opening essay, the term was developed by Francis Galton in 1883, with a meaning of good in birth, or noble in heredity. Galton believed that heredity is the foundation for human behavior and health outcomes. Eugenics stood for the idea that a person’s abilities and social position were innate traits determined by their biological and genetic makeup, and the same attributes would be passed on to their children.
Everything from intelligence to poverty, to criminality, to general morality was thought to be inherited. In the late 19th century, when race science was all the rage, eugenics extended the conversation on scientific racism by providing not only a seemingly objective way to understand the achievements of wealthy whites across generations, but also an explanation for why poor or disabled people and racial minorities seem stuck, unable to break what appeared to be inescapable cycles of destitution. In short, biology was thought to be destiny. Thanks so much for joining me, Osagie. I’m really excited to be talking with you about this fascinating work.
Great, thanks for having me.
GWYNETH SHAW: Tell us a little bit about your background and training, and how you came to work at this intersection of medicine and law.
OSAGIE OBASOGIE: Sure. So my background in training is at the intersection of law, sociology, and bioethics, and medical ethics. We can do an entirely separate podcast on how I stumbled upon these fields, but the short story is that I went to law school, and graduated from law school, and decided to do a PhD afterwards here at Berkeley. And I came out to Berkeley, and after a couple of years here, I stumbled upon this article, this was around 2005, about what was then a new drug called BiDil.
So BiDil is a combination therapy that was marketed as being able to treat African-Americans suffering from heart failure. And at this point, it was the first race specific-drug to receive FDA approval. So like any good sociologist at the time, I was a bit baffled by the idea that race could be at once thought of as a social construction, that is something that is created by social and political forces. And at the same time could be seen as both medically and scientifically, quote, unquote, real, to the point that the FDA could approve a drug that could help a specific racial group who is suffering from a medical condition. So that began my entree into the field of medical ethics, and issues of health disparities, and racial disparities and health.
And it’s been about two decades since then. And part of the work of examining issues around racial disparities in health involves understanding the broader context and history, regarding issues of race and science and medicine, so that necessarily involved me taking a close look at the history of scientific racism, and as well as the eugenics movement. And for me, it was a fascinating exploration to do this as a graduate student, because in all of my studies as a high school student, and college student, and law student, eugenics was not something that came up.
And it wasn’t really until I was a graduate student that I really was exposed to this history. And looking at the history of eugenics closely, you start to understand how this moment in the late 1800s, up until the 1930s and 1940s, this moment where scientists and physicians were looked at as being the folks who could help guide policy makers in determining which groups should reproduce and which groups should not, that this moment is still with us, even though we understand this as being a quote, unquote, bad moment in human history. Some would say it was the most horrific moment in human history leading up to unbelievable atrocities, including the Holocaust, and periods of forced sterilization, and many other horrific acts.
That ideology and the ways of thinking that were born during this period in many ways still shape the way that science, medicine and technology are done to this very day. And so this project is really an opportunity to examine the legacy of eugenics, how an idea born out of hatred, and racism, and bigotry faced a particular reckoning after World War 2, where we in many ways made a promise never to go down that path again. But at the same time, so much of the logics of eugenics had embedded themselves into many professional areas that continued to work from these frameworks and how they do their work. So this collaboration with the LA Review of Books is a way to understand this legacy, to highlight particular ways in which the ideas of eugenics continue to shape various areas of science and medicine, and to start a conversation about how we can move in a different and better direction.
GWYNETH SHAW: And what do you think that conversation is going to be like? The lead essay is out, as I said in the intro, you’ve got a couple dozen scholars and writers engaging with this topic. How do you expect this conversation to go, and what are some of your goals for it? When we talked about this before, you said you would like for this to be a 1619 project for eugenics, and really open people’s eyes and minds to, as you just said, how this history, or at least parts of this history is still living with us today. What are some of your goals for this project, both for people who are coming to this as a layperson, because this writing is very accessible to people who aren’t PhD scholars or doctors, but both for the layperson and also for the academic community?
OSAGIE OBASOGIE: So it’s a great question. And I think whenever you embark on a project of this size, you have to have goals at multiple levels. So at a very basic level, one goal is just to have a healthy conversation about the history of eugenics. Periods of forced sterilization didn’t really stop until the 1970s and 1980s. And there are actually examples where, for example, incarcerated women here in California have been forcibly sterilized as recently as 2014.
There are people who have suffered from this idea, and some of them are still with us, and have been treated quite harshly under the auspices of the notion that their reproductive capacity should be cut off as a way to improve public health. That’s a very troubling idea, and at a very basic level, one goal of this project is to show how the notion of eugenics is something that didn’t simply disappear after World War 2, but continues to be with us. And there are people in our communities who are still suffering from that.
So that’s a very basic goal. A second goal and a more ambitious goal, is to really have a serious conversation with medical professionals about how their profession is still grounded in a very troubling idea that is impacting the way they do their work. And again, that’s a more difficult conversation. I don’t expect that by the end of the two-year project that medicine will totally change itself, it’s a very long horizon.
But we want to, at the very least, use these essays as a way to document the various ways that different aspects of science, medicine and technology are drawing upon eugenic ideologies as a way to engage their work. And so I’m hopeful that the folks we’ve invited to share their thoughts through these essays can do that work. They’re all fantastic scholars, and I think many people will be surprised by the depth of the connections between the past and the present.
GWYNETH SHAW: And your introductory essay covers a lot of that history, some of which you’ve already talked about, and outlines ways in which this word may have faded from the spotlight, but the concepts persist. A couple of quotes that really stuck with me, you write that since the end of World War 2, eugenics has, and I’m quoting you now, simultaneously hidden in the shadows and festered in the sunlight, and also that the politics of eugenics is baked into many of the theories and methods of science, medicine and technology.
Can you elaborate a little bit on that– And I know part of the goal, as you just said, is to have that conversation within these fields, so I don’t want to push you into tipping your hand too much –but can you give some examples of just some of the ways you think these concepts are popping up in the things that we engage with? The better living through science always comes to mind when you think about this. But what are some other ways that you’d say this is being recycled, I guess, into our modern society?
OSAGIE OBASOGIE: So before I answer that question, I think it’s useful to take a step backwards to try to understand what eugenics is. So eugenics was this idea developed by Francis Galton in the late 1800s, that was based upon this idea that all social problems and social ills were somehow connected to some type of inherent, biological or genetic inferiority. And so for Galton and his followers, eugenics was a way to identify the biological failures within particular groups, and then use science and medicine to, in a sense, identify what those problems were, and at the same time advocate for the limited reproduction of these groups.
So for Galton, the idea that, for example– Galton was particularly fascinated with the notion of quote unquote, feeble mindedness and other types of developmental disabilities. And eugenics was also particularly interested in limiting the reproduction of folks with disabilities, both physical and cognitive. And also they saw poverty as a issue that was linked to some type of inherent limitations.
And so for eugenicists, the idea was that these were biological problems, rather than problems that stemmed from society. And the idea was that, if we could limit the reproduction of groups that exhibited these problems, that is poor people, people with disabilities and racial minorities that tend to disproportionately exhibit certain issues, then that would, in a sense, improve the entire race. So this begins the conversation of race betterment.
I think that context is helpful, as we think about how eugenics played out over time. So throughout the 1920s and 30s, we saw certain groups being particularly targeted as having limitations that were thought of at the time as being antisocial, or against the improvement of the human race. And we saw rather horrific policies and practices being instituted as a way to limit that reproduction, everything from forced sterilization in states like California and North Carolina, and other states across the United states, as well as genocide that we saw during World War 2. So all of these practices were connected by the idea that by eliminating these groups, we could somehow improve the racial stock of individuals.
So your question is important, which is like, well, if we recognize the problem of this idea after World War 2, and there was at least some type of implicit, and at times explicit promise that we would never go back down this road, or that this was something that was so horrific, we could revisit, how was it that this legacy could persist to this very day? Well, part of the way that this ideology persists, is this ongoing idea that social categories of race are somehow biologically meaningful and salient. That is to say, that we tend to continue to think that racial differences are somehow reflected in the genes, and that the disparities that we see in between racial groups are somehow function of differential biological makeup, which creates the context of thinking about health disparities as being a function of who people are, rather than having the more appropriate conversation of seen health disparities as a function of how people and groups are treated.
And so there’s a legacy of eugenics, and that continued framing of these type of racial disparities and health being tied to the genetics or biology of race. There’s also an important conversation about how eugenic methods become embedded in certain professional fields over time. So, for example, we have an essay coming out shortly by Aubrey Clayton, who’s a mathematician. And he reveals something that many people either don’t know, or don’t talk about, which is that the field of statistics, which is the cornerstone of many academic fields.
It’s a field that was created by, or at least became quite popular through several men who were flat out eugenicists, and very explicit about their eugenic aspirations. And many of their contributions to the field of eugenics were models that were created specifically for eugenic outcomes, that is to say that many of the quantitative models that were contributed by people like R. A. Fisher and some of his colleagues, they were done and created explicitly for the purpose of trying to further, or create a eugenic assessment of the world that could help public policy make these type of reproductive decisions about who needs to have their reproduction controlled and whose reproduction should be promoted.
And so once we understand this as being the cornerstone of the field of statistics, we have to take seriously the idea that if many of these quantitative formulas that have been used across many disciplines, from economics to political science and sociology. And these eugenic aspirations are embedded in the very formulas. I think it’s appropriate to think about, well, how are those assumptions shaping the work that these fields continue to do to this very day, and do we need to engage in a project of reassessing these quantitative measures to ensure that they are not replicating certain ideas about the world that we, in a sense, promised never to do again.
And so that’s another example. Other examples are, for example, the fields of social welfare and public health were instrumental to eugenicist’s aspirations in the early 20th century. These were some on-the-ground soldiers, for lack of a better word, in terms of how folks in social welfare and public health were at the forefront of working closely with communities, and implementing certain eugenic practices, and making sure that families who were thought of as being less desirable were having access to programs that they thought would help limit their reproduction, and conversely, promoting the reproduction of other folks. So again, it’s about trying to understand how these professional fields were at once instrumental to eugenics and its applications during that early 20th century moment, and trying to see if there’s any continuity in thought and practices that continue to shape how the field interacts with certain communities, and thinking about whether or not that’s still appropriate.
So we see these type of issues across a wide spectrum of academic fields. And this is an opportunity for reassessment to make sure that we’re not, in a sense, unwittingly reproducing troublesome ideas about the world by continuing eugenic conversations, but often under a different lens. So, for example, one important conversation that one of our essays will be about how the practice of eugenics for that early period created a lot of specialists and experts who were eugenicists, and who identified as such up until World War 2. And at that point it then became unpopular to call yourself a eugenicist.
Well, what happened to these people? Well, many of the folks in a sense rebranded themselves as geneticists or population geneticists, and continued much of their work, but under a different lens. And so in one of our essays we’ll talk about that transition from eugenics to genetics. Even one of the major journals in eugenics rebranded itself after World War 2 as a journal of genetics.
And so we have to understand the significance of that continuity, and also examine whether or not the textual rebranding, whether it led to substantive rethinking of certain ideas, or the business simply carry on as usual. And if so, again, that should lead us to, in a sense, have a serious evaluation of whether the way folks in these fields do their work, whether it’s appropriate in light of our otherwise anti-eugenic commitments.
GWYNETH SHAW: And to that end, you open your essay, discussing one of the developers of in-vitro fertilization, Robert G. Edwards. And his connections to facility with reverence for genetics. I guess all of those things are true. And you write about when you first heard this being really surprised, and struck by the idea that this person who’s affiliated with this literally life-changing technology, had come out of this movement.
Can you talk a little bit about your own discovery of this history through the lens of medical professionals in particular, and just how it changed your own lens, because I’m listening to you talk about a whole bunch of different things that you’ve been working on for many years. And how did getting that window into the idea that a lot of these same people who are pushing scientific ideas through the 20th century into the 21st had roots in eugenics, or at one point were, as he was, members of a society that was promoting eugenics? How did that influence how you’ve been thinking about a lot of the topics you think about?
OSAGIE OBASOGIE: It’s a great question. And the Edwards situation is so striking. And so this is a widely admired person who won a Nobel Prize in 2010 for developing in-vitro fertilization, which is a technique that has helped millions of people have families, and there’s nothing inherently eugenic about IVF aid of itself.
But it’s a situation where the person who created the technique, was someone who was enthusiastic about eugenics as an idea. And the public perception of Robert Edwards was one where they only focused on his scientific contributions, and not his intellectual background and training and aspirations. And so when I stumbled upon this, and noticed that nobody was talking about this, I was stunned. And at that time, this was shortly after he won the Nobel Prize in 2010, I wrote an article for Scientific American to help people understand what the connections are.
So how does someone who could create a technology that has been so beneficial to many, many people have this dark history behind them? And the answer is, is that for Robert Edwards, he saw eugenics and IVF as being connected to the extent that IVF can become a platform technology for a eugenicists wildest dreams. That is to say that if your wildest dreams are to create the capacity for science and medicine to create a quote-unquote super race of individuals that are free of, quote-unquote disability in other types of social stigmas, and to be able to engineer this race of individuals with all of the advantages, then IVF as a platform technology, where gametes can be joined outside of the body and perfected, and then inserted into the womb, IVF becomes central to that idea.
And so for Edwards, he was working on a part of that, and he saw the development of IVF as part of that broader aspiration. And so that raises some complicated questions about, well, what do we make of all this? Does that mean that IVF should never be Used Well, of course not, and nobody would argue that.
But it is to say that, as members of society who have concerns about our future, we have to be aware that many of the things that we embrace have dark histories. And we can continue to use these technologies and innovations that make our lives better and make our families whole, while also, or I should say that while we continue to use these technologies, we also should be aware that there is a dark side creeping behind many of them. And we have to be very proactive in making sure our that we embrace the benefits, while also appropriately critiquing and fending off the darker aspirations that might surround them.
And so for me, part of the reason why this series we’re doing with the LA Review Books is important, is that it helps keep that conversation going. It helps to educate the public, it allows them to understand that science and innovation move forward, but often time, there is the weight of history behind many of these innovations. And we have to continue to engage and make sure that we hold true to our commitments of equality, and inclusion, and fairness and to ensure that as we move forward, that we don’t continue to stigmatize many of the groups that have been stigmatized for many, many years.
GWYNETH SHAW: I’m struck, too, by how important this is to the broader debate we’re in right now about reproductive rights. I’m thinking, of course, about the IVF case in Alabama, where you had a court saying IVF was illegal. And you saw politicians really rush to, at least, say that they want to protect IVF as something that shouldn’t be caught up in discussions over abortion, and things like that.
But I remember talking to one of your colleagues, Professor Khiara Bridges, a few years ago about teaching Buck v. Bell in her Reproductive History and Rights class, and how, just as you noted earlier, students and younger people today are really astonished by the year on that case, how short a time ago that case was decided. But even today, as we’re looking at an election in the fall, and we’re having these conversations, where do you think this project fits into that reproductive rights discussion? Because obviously, there is a very, very big difference between a policy of forced sterilization, and the ability of a woman and men to a certain extent, to control their means of reproduction. Is it important to understand the underpinnings of those policies that pushed particular groups not to reproduce, as we talk about this larger picture today, because it is about rights, versus the right to decide, versus the right to be told or forced.
OSAGIE OBASOGIE: Yes, and this is one of the more complicated aspects of this entire conversation. Many anti-choice advocates draw upon the history of eugenics as a way to restrict reproductive freedoms. And so part of the work that we have to do is to make sure people have an accurate understanding of that history, and understand that one can, and should, support reproductive freedoms and reproductive justice, while also at the same time being critical of the reemergence of certain eugenic projects. That is to say that we can support individuals rights to decide when and how to have children, while at the same time have a healthy understanding of the history of eugenics. And realize that things like abortion care, while there are moments in our history, where abortion care has been used in eugenic terms, and we should understand and know about the history of people such as Margaret Sanger and others who have had these troubling pasts.
But at the same time, that does not necessarily call into question the practice or the availability of these reproductive services as being integral to broader notions of reproductive justice. And so we can support continuing access, while also having serious conversations about the history of eugenics. And that requires, again, these type of careful conversations, where we are having serious discussions about these nuances, and not allowing the conversation to move off and along a political terrain that, quite frankly, is often not helpful.
GWYNETH SHAW: I, too, was interested in your thoughts on this pro-natalist movement, which is a group of people– I think some of them are very rooted in the California tech culture, who are concerned about the birth rate falling, and committing themselves to having multiple children, many more children than would be average, especially, for most of them, within their social class. I read your essay to be asserting that there’s some whitewashing, for lack of a better word, of some of these eugenics concepts, these underpinnings of eugenics, as modern things.
OSAGIE OBASOGIE: Well, I think part of your question is, how do we make sense of this pro-natalist movement that’s emerging in these aspects of Silicon Valley culture. And I think there’s an important connection there. In one of our essays we’ll be talking about this, which is, at the heart of this pro-natalist movement, is this idea that the smartest, and the best, and the brightest are not reproducing enough, and that as a society, we’re heading towards a demographic cliff, where poor people and people of color are out reproducing those people who are wealthy, white and educated.
And so the pro-natalist movement, in these corners, is really trying to say, hey, if we don’t step up and reproduce, that’s going to lead to a form of race disintegration, which is the very same conversation that Francis Galton was having in the 1880s and 1890s. So it’s a straight line from the concerns that led to Galton’s creation and promotion of eugenics, that is to say that the perceived least equipped of us in society we’re creating the most children and our reproducing those people who are most capable. That’s the very same conversation that these pro-natalist are engaging in today. And oftentimes, that pro-natalist conversation is being put forth and promoted without an acknowledgment, that we’ve been down this road before, and things that did not end up well at all.
So folks need to understand that, when we engage in the form of pro-natalism, that in a sense tries to suggest who should reproduce and who should not, and then tries to not only have a social movement, but also engage in public policies and laws to further support that, that again, is allowing history to repeat itself in ways that we should not. So I think the question is a good one. And it’s further complicated, that in addition to a social movement among certain people in tech culture, that movement is being further supported by technical innovations that further allow for the selection of certain traits, and the deselection of other traits that may very well align with the same type of pro-natalist attitude about what types of people should be produced in the future.
So I think your question is important, because what we’re seeing is a synergy between attitudes among some tech elites that is being further bolstered by new technological capabilities that can, when taken together, again, recreate the past in a new set of terms that could have tremendous consequences for our future and for our democracy. So while these seem like quirky stories that we read in the news, they’re quite serious, because over the next few years, we’re going to be confronting these conversations more and more.
Well, and this is where history really serves us so well, is situations where you develop a technology that does a particular thing. And the missing loop always seems to be, well, just because we can, should we? And it seems to me that pushing forward the history of something like eugenics at a moment in time, like this, is really important, because of that need to step back and say, well, why are we doing this. what is the purpose of this? Is there something that is not entirely altruistic about this technology or our use of this technology?
GWYNETH SHAW: I know you said before, you want to start uncomfortable conversations, where are a couple other places within the technology arena, where you feel like those conversations need to happen? The one that leaps to mind first is gene editing, which has on the one hand, really incredible possibilities, but you can certainly easily imagine that being used for exactly the same things you outlined in the essay that seems like ancient history. Are there other things that you can think of that will be well served by being processed along with this history?
OSAGIE OBASOGIE: Absolutely. So much of my work is in the field of reproductive and genetic technologies, which is basically a field that is all about the set of questions, that is to say that we have a new set of technologies that will allow individuals to screen certain embryos prior to implantation to be able to decide which embryos exhibit the best traits. That raises some ethical issues that should inform the way we think about how these technologies are used, and how that can shape the future demography of our society.
So everything from embryo screening, to other forms of reproductive and genetic technologies that attempt to insert and delete particular traits to questions of surrogacy, to questions of other forms of assisted reproduction, all many of these questions, or many of these issues, I should say, raise issues that speak to the future of humanity. And again, one thing I am not saying, and I want to be clear about this, I am not saying that these technologies are eugenic in and of themselves, but rather it’s time to have conversations about how do we want to move forward as a society, and what, if any, boundaries or regulations we want to have in place to ensure that we don’t go down the wrong path.
GWYNETH SHAW: What’s next for you? You’re going to spend the next 18 to 20 months working on getting this project shepherded all the way through, but what other avenues are you exploring now, or looking to explore from a scholarship perspective?
OSAGIE OBASOGIE: Sure. So I’ll continue this work, and I’m looking forward to editing these next set of essays with the LA Review of Books. In terms of some of my other work, I’m doing a lot of work now on the concept of excited delirium, which is this idea that has developed in the field of psychiatry, that suggests that people who die in police custody are not dying from any type of injury that they receive from the police, but because of some preexisting psychiatric issue they have, that could lead them to become so agitated, just so worked up, that they spontaneously die on their own. And this is an idea that, while developed within the field of psychiatry and forensic sciences, has been adopted by law enforcement as a way to prevent them from being held accountable for deaths that occur in police custody.
What’s interesting is that this idea of excited delirium has very little, if any, scientific or medical backing, there’s no scientific evidence that it exists. But at the same time, law has embraced excited delirium as a real, tangible medical thing. So it raises the question of, how can an idea that has no medical or scientific backing behind it somehow be legally relevant and be used in cases to prevent police accountability. So my work is trying looking at the intersection of these two phenomena, the legal side and the medical side to try to understand what’s happening, and to try to provide some guidelines on what types of evidence regarding expert witness testimony should be allowed in courts when you have medical professional’s testimony testifying to the legitimacy of excited delirium.
So I have an article coming out next year in the Harvard Law review that we’ll talk about the expert witness side of this, and hopefully, at some point down the future, I will be writing a book on the history of excited delirium, and its intersections with law and medicine. So again, another weighty topic that has its own connections with the conversation of eugenics in terms of thinking about how medicine has been used as a site for social injustice, and how can we use law and regulation as a way to ensure that medicine is being used to support the health and well-being of people, and not being used to support motives by the state, that could be quite problematic.
GWYNETH SHAW: Great. Well, we’ll look forward to that, too. Maybe we’ll have to have you back on when we get to that book. Well, thank you so much for this amazing conversation, it’s really interesting. And I really appreciate you taking the time to explain so much about both the history and the connections to today.
And thanks to you listeners for tuning in. If you’d like to know more about Professor Obasogie, his work, and the legacies of eugenics project, you can find links in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it. And be sure to subscribe to Voices Carry wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, I’m Gwyneth Shaw.
OSAGIE OBASOGIE: Thanks so much.