Dr Adam Rutherford

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

He presents BBC Radio 4’s flagship cultural discussion 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 book, Where Are You Really From? (2023) won The Week Junior Book 2024 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.