Alexander Dragonetti

Adam Rutherford is an award-winning geneticist and evolutionary biologist, broadcaster, professor and Sunday Times bestselling author. A highly sought-after speaker on the international circuit, he is available for panels, conferences, keynote addresses and Q&As, and is widely respected across the corporate and academic worlds alike.

With an engaging, authoritative style and a rare breadth of expertise, Adam has become one of Britain’s most recognisable science communicators. He is known for making complex scientific ideas accessible and compelling, and has delivered talks around the world exploring human evolution, data, race and racism, eugenics, genetics, and even the intersections of science and hip-hop.

Alongside this, he presents BBC Radio 4’s flagship cultural discussion programme Start the Week, and 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 and has appeared on 10 episodes of the Infinite Monkey Cage and was the host of BBC Inside Science for 8 years.

He has presented many TV documentaries, including The Beauty of Anatomy (BBC4), Horizon: Playing God (BBC2), The Gene Code (BBC4) and The Cell (BBC4), where he’s explored topics such as AI and robotics, the inheritance of intelligence, MMR and autism, astronomy and art and scientific fraud, and most recently the story of Eugenics in the award-winning series Bad Blood (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 2020 book, How to Argue with a Racist, is a Sunday Times bestseller which tackles race, discrimination, intelligence and ancestry from a scientific perspective. More recently, he published Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics (2022) which presents a clear-eyed exploration of how eugenic thinking has shaped policies and power and why understanding that history matters today. In 2023 he also released his first children’s book Where Are You Really From? an engaging illustrated non-fiction book exploring human evolution, migration and ancestry, which won The Week Junior Children’s Science Book of the Year in 2024

Adam has also worked as scientific advisor on many movies, including Ex Machina (2015), Annihilation (2018), Life (2017), The Kingsman (2014), and A Quiet Place Day 1 (2024).

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