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Rina Bliss, "What's Real About Race: Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society" (W.W. Norton, 2025)
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Narrator/Host
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Professor Rena Bliss
help him see if he can afford it.
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Narrator/Host
Copilot shows Hank where the money's and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now Hanks has a line out the door.
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Professor Rena Bliss
Hank makes the pizza.
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Narrator/Host
Copilot handles the spreadsheets.
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Professor Rena Bliss
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Grace (Moderator/Interviewer)
My name is Grace, and I, along with an interdisciplinary group of graduate students and visiting faculty at Princeton. Garrett, Emma, Jose, Yanisa, Paloma, Wisdom, and Jingwen, are very excited to Be speaking with Professor Rena Bliss about her new book, what's Real about Race. Rena Bliss teaches in the sociology department at Rutgers University and has written on the social significance of genetic studies, on intelligence, race, and social factors, among other things. In what's Real About Race, she explores the history of race as a genetic category. It's hazardous across research, medical, and social contexts and its implications for knowledge production. We're so excited to be able to chat with you, Professor Bliss. First, to open us up, could you tell us a little bit about how you found your way into this book? How does it relate to your previous work or your education?
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Professor Rena Bliss
Absolutely. So, by the way, thank you for having me. I have been studying race and researching and analyzing race for a very long time, But I actually have been interested in it since I was a kid. So I am mixed race. I have family from Indonesia and I have family from all over Europe, mostly Eastern Europe, and who have been in America for a while. And so as a child, I was always kind of aware that there was something off about the way that people talked about race around me. When I was a kid, even at a very young age, I. As far back as I can remember, I was bullied for the way that I looked and. And kind of the uncomfortability of. Of what race meant that I provoked in people, you know, kind of gave me this sense of like, this is. This is not good. Like, I don't know what, you know, why, why we have to believe in this. But I. I was also kind of drinking the Kool aid at the time, you know. Okay, so I hear that races are these discrete groups, and I belong to two of them, but they're supposed to be oppositional to each other. So that's really confusing. And one of them seems to be liked and is better, and the other one is supposed to be worse. And a lot of my even friends would make fun of my mom's accent and make fun of her culture and our culture and in our home, it was that culture. So it was just kind of like it was a time of a lot of confusion for me. And when I went into, like, elementary school and then middle school and high school, I was exposed to a lot of racism towards my friends who are of different backgrounds. And so I saw that this wasn't just happening to me, you know, but it was happening to all kinds of my friends. And for some of my friends, our teachers would be like, openly racist in the classroom towards them or would, you know, one of my good friends that I write about in my book, what's Real about Race, I talk about a friend who the teacher basically wouldn't let her be in the honors English class even though she should have been in the honors English class. And so that kind of thing, I was witnessing that. And so in high school I started to get mad about it. I was just like, this is absolutely unjust, not right. And it made me think a little bit, like, what is it about race? Why have I been ascribing to these stereotypes and almost like stereotype threat, as psychologists will say, like, you know, performing to act like the correct version of my so called race, AKA what, you know. And so like I started to be like, I'm going to push back against this. And when I got to college, the, the like first year experience type college class that everybody had to take was in part about race. And so it was like a race, gender, class, sexual orientation, kind of like, you know, and, and then I was like, whoa. I mean, there are people who research this, you know, who actually they're scientists who are studying this. Like, I want to do that, you know. And at first I didn't know that I was going to be focused on race, but I definitely felt like, you know, this is going to be a part of my. Who I am, who I'm going to become is somebody who knows scientifically what this means. And so, you know, my research and all of the things like the RA ships I did and everything was always like kind of around race. I did a lot of things in college that were around affirmative action and you know, just different, different kind of positions. And then going into, and the senior theses and all of that kind of honors thesis type stuff, you know. And then going into grad school, I was like, I really definitely want to focus on understanding the social construction of race. And so by the time that I got into dissertation mode, I was sure that I wanted to understand why we construct these categories as mutually exclusive as discrete entities and why everybody kind of drinks the Kool aid, right? So I had gotten that far. At the same time I noticed this debate that was going on between genome scientists and they were people who had worked on the Human Genome Project and they were, you know, people who were working in biotech, having these startups that were becoming a big thing and they were all kinds of, you know, positioned in different places, but all of them were having this debate like, what is real about race in a sense, right? And not that they put it that way, but it was kind of like, is there something genomic and genetic about race, or is it not? You know, what does the Human Genome Project tell us? And what I found was that I decided to do my dissertation research on that, right? And so then what I found was that scientists were really confused themselves. And even people who were certain that the genome, like, disproved that there were discrete categories and that we knew for sure that kind of race was a biological fiction. And even genome scientists who adhered to the notion of social construction and who were like, yeah, the social constructionists have it right. You know, like Human Genome Project shows, like all the genome mapping shows that there aren't these discrete, discrete categories. There's a spectrum of diversity and all of that kind of stuff. I found that still many of these scientists were publishing papers that use racial categories or they were giving talks where they used racial labels. And I also did a fair share of shadowing scientists and working with people who were in biotech. And I was seeing that there were literally racial labels on some of the samples, the DNA samples and international HapMap project. And it became true for the 1000 Genomes Project. And it just kept on rolling. And so that became my first book, Race Decoded. And it was an academic work that really showed what I had found and how there was that dissonance between what people believed and then what people being scientists, what they. What they actually were doing. Right. And so that's where I really got deep into it. Then when that book came out, I noticed that there were a lot of people working on behavioral outcomes and social outcomes. And that led me to look at race also, but also the way that gender and sexual orientation were figuring into this new area of research, which my colleague and collaborator, Gene Robinson first called sociogenomics. He's like a animal genomicist, right? But at the time I didn't know he was using this term, and he had coined this term and I coined it for the human genomics side of things, which was really cool and interesting. And eventually we came together and it was awesome. You know, it's great to collaborate with people across the field of genomics. But anyways, I started to really dive deep into this new science that was focused on social outcomes. Things like getting a PhD or, you know, getting the death sentence or, you know, like things different kind of outcomes, how far you got in school or what kind of financial investment strategies you availed yourself of. Yeah, retirement investing, like all kinds of, like credit card debt, you know, all kinds of things. And I was just really interested in both, just that all that whole movement of Science, kind of from a science and technology studies point of view of field formation, and also, like, yeah, boundary work and things like that. And then also from the perspective of how does race and gender and sexuality and other kinds of things factor into the discourse that this field is providing us with. Right. And so, yeah, so that was the next book that I wrote, which was social by nature. And then after that, I wanted to go deep with intelligence. And that was, to me, that seemed like one of the most easy to grasp, controversial parts of sociogenomics was research into intelligence. And at the time when I was writing my next book, which is called Rethinking Intelligence, and, you know, is a book that I wrote for the general public that. With. With that, I. I just felt like I want people to understand that there are all of these, you know, scientists who are doing this research more for the sense of, like, what should we know about our genes and their associations with specific outcomes. But then there are all these companies that are out there that are, like, scooping up this data and then using it to sell people genetic IQ tests and now embryo scoring or kind of like pgd, IVF kind of services to select for embryos that have higher IQ and things like that. And that all was starting when I was writing that second book. So when I wrote Rethinking Intelligence, I was really just trying to. And also, I should say, crispr science was a new thing. And so I was like, are we, you know, some of these. These biotech firms are looking at neurogenetics and neurodegenerative diseases? Of course, but, like, there are things that have, you know, some kind of association with this sociogenomics literature and the kinds of alleles that they're looking at. Right. So I was like, you know, this is all becoming a real thing in the world. So I. I made that transition into writing for the general public and also used intelligence as my kind of anchor, you know, and my touchstone for how to talk about all of these broader issues. And of course, that was a big part of that book was laying out the history of eugenics and race and where IQ tests come from and also, you know, where the concept of race comes from and all that. So coming to the present book that we're talking about what's real about race, I. I basically really wanted to write a book that not just summed up all of the connections between my prior work, but also kind of looked at these new companies and the way that biotech was changing and is changing, I should say, because, you know, the book came out just last year and is still very much a part of. Of what's going on right now. And so I think that, yeah, I just wanted to write something that could bring us up to date and bring everyone up to speed on specifically the issue of race and what's real about race. And I will say one other thing, which is, sorry for the very long answer to your first question, but which is that a big thing about this book for me was explaining what social construction of race means and also what kind of language would be better used, because I think that that social construct, social construction, it becomes empty sometimes when we use that phrasing. And so. Yeah, that's amazing to hear.
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Grace (Moderator/Interviewer)
Thank you.
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Graduate Student/Interviewer
Okay, so my question is. I will build my question upon what you just said because what's Real About Race is not the typical book that we read in grad school in universities. It's not also the typical book that we used to write. Okay. And which is unfortunate because we should write more books like this because it's a different narrative. It's not an academic monograph. It's not a native volume. And I can imagine that it gave you more liberty to write or say things that sometimes we cannot say or we cannot do. For example, in Like Animal. And I can also, what you say about that, try to explain race. That is not only like an academic or scientific category, but it's also personal. And I can imagine how this is going to resonate among readers not who are trying to figure out what happens with them or how can I figure out, find their own way in society, especially with this specific category. So when you were writing a book like this, so did you train yourself in a different way from an academic monograph? Did you have a model in mind, saying, I want to let my book be like, of this author or like this book or what you are thinking in terms of what do you want that the readers take away when you are.
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Professor Rena Bliss
Yes, I didn't train myself, but I did have to find what the. I guess, kind of the publishing industry would call my voice. And that was a process. And that didn't involve looking at other people's voices, but rather it was me trying to figure out, like, how I wanted to relate to my public. Because it wasn't just the audience, wasn't just going to be other scientists of genomics, ethical, legal, social issues and implications and race and race studies and, you know. Right. Like it was going to be anybody. And what I like to say is that I went into this, writing this book and also rethinking Intelligence, which was also my. It was really my first public facing book, writing it for people who are 17 or 71. Right. And the whole everything in between. But actually what I found was that my kids, who were like seven, you know, and. Or like, you know. Yeah, like I. I had. I had kids who were just being able to, to read and they would pick up the book and they would ask me things from it. So I was like, oh, it should be more like, you know, 8 to 88 or something like that. I thought, like, this is whom I want to reach. And now how would I talk to a person who is seven or a person who is 17 or whatever. Right. And actually some of the people I teach are 17. Right. So, like, there is an issue here with this book in particular, what's real about race, which is academic and trade. Right. So it's both public facing and it's also used in classrooms. So I was like, I want to. I really, really want to talk to these, these folks who I myself teach. And so Finding My Voice was about realizing that for me, it was realizing that I just needed to talk. Like I speak in real life. I speak like how I would tell, like, what story would I tell to motivate my students and what kind of information would they need before they get involved with the research part of the text. Right. And so Finding My Voice was just saying, like, letting myself say, yeah, I'm just gonna speak conversationally in a way. Right. And so that's why this kind of book, and this book in particular, starts with personal story and just saying, like, this is who I am and this is where I come from and then ends on that note as well. Like, this is where I'm at right now and this is where I'm going forward with things and this is what I want for my kids. So it's like just having that, in a sense, taking the reader along on a long conversation that provides them with the research so that they can understand that this isn't just like me musing on race, sitting in a room by myself, but rather this is based off of decades of research that I've done, but also being able to keep that conversational way for us to go forward together. And so when I think of also my parents, we also in our family have a grandparent who's still alive. My husband's grandmother is still alive and she publishes and she's 96 now. So it's like, basically I had to think about what she was going to think about reading this and she loved the book. And so it's reaching. Everybody involves being myself. Right. And so I think that that was a big part of it, more so than looking at other people's way of doing it, because I have a really great friend who is going through the process of writing. Like, we basically were writing these first trade books together and then the second ones and whatever. You know, it's like we've been on this path for a very long time together. And, you know, her way of writing and her voice and her stories are different from mine, even though we both come from the same city and we both. You know what I mean? And we've been together for so much of our lives, but it's still like we're all different. Right. And we all have a different set of stories to draw from and to personalize things. But personalizing was very important because that is the way to, again, motivate people who might be interested in, as far as, like, the title. They're interested, but they don't know if they want to, like, really read far into a book. Right. About this topic. Yeah.
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Narrator/Host
Okay.
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Graduate Student/Interviewer
Thank you.
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Across the book, you trace the history of race from its colonial origins through scientific reifications in the work of people like Linnaeus, to more recent enforcement in immigration acts and many other medical, political, and cultural structures. Across this history, there is so much material power put into racial categories and racial hierarchies through these systems and structures. Why then do you think there seems to be such a need to find a biological backing for race as well? Why do you think that race needs to be a scientific or a genetic fact when the social structures and the material power are already there?
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Professor Rena Bliss
Such a great question. I know. It's like, if. If it's already structurally in place, why continue to legitimize it with every new turn in science? Right. I think that we still give a lot of authority to scientific data and to scientific interpretations. And in America, even though we see a great devaluing and almost dismantling of science, of science, like big science, it still holds this kind of authority in our culture and in our society. And I mean, yeah, I don't want to take us on too much of a detour into the political side of things, but I do think that at this moment, you know, there's a kind of neck of the woods in science and technology studies that likes to talk about, like, the, you know, double helix or a triple helix or whatever of, you know, like, the institute of the mainstay institutions of our society. And science is one of Them, Right. It's like one of the, the main knowledge producing and again, authoritative parts of our society. And government is another one. Right. And industry is another one. But they all actually really cross pollinate and they all rely on each other. One of the things that I teach about in my classes is medicalization. Right? And so when we talk about the creation of categories and then the dissolution of categories, transformation of categories, it's always like, it's not just the people or like say, going into my own research area, like IQ tests, it's not just that schools are mandated to use specific tests versus other tests, right. Or that test, standardized tests happen at a certain kind of rhythm of the school year or whatnot. And that special education or mainstreaming or whatever is the kind of set version of things at a given time or whatever. But it's also that there's an industry that makes these tests and that sells these tests. And they're the people who make the SATs and they're the people who make the standardized tests. Right. And then there's also the. And why do they use those tests? Well, because the academics who study intelligence are like, these are the metrics that we're going to tell you to use, especially when they're trying to make them less racist, supposedly. Right? Well, here's how you're going to make them less racist. This is the derace version of this IQ test. As if you could deracialize IQ testing. So it's like all of that is that kind of all of these different institutions that work together. And so science still has a role to play, in a sense. And because we put so much value on what scientists say about the genome and because genomics has been a kind of exalted part of American science, and science in other countries as well, global science, but especially in American public health, has become a very big figure. I think that we have seen science remain at the center of saying what is and what isn't. And that's why for me, doing my dissertation and then writing these books, I was like, I need to go straight to these folks who are producing those truths because people seem to buy those truths. And again, to bring it back to something I was saying before about the, the cross pollination really with industry, it's, you know, it's not like there are people who get a science degree and then, or like, you know, biostatistics or whatnot, you know, and then they just go and they're like, I'm just all industry. There's a lot of like, you know, back and forth or collaboration. And many of, I mean I work at a, at a university that highly values patents. They encourage us to create basically industrial wealth applied kind of science. And so it's all of it is mixed together and it's all part of that. So I think that that's why we still have this resorting to what the geneticists in the labs have said. And then it's also like the, because the kind of structuring and structuralizing, if that's the right word, of race was always this process of the scientists say this and then you know, we the people in power, the governance folks, you know, do this with that and the industry sells this stuff or helps the government with disseminating whatever they need to disseminate and controlling the population and organizing things with whatever their products and their stuff is. It's because that's the way things get structured. It's still the way things get structured. So I think that's part of it too. This next question kind of follows up a lot about that structuralism that is so baked in. So throughout the book you recount your interactions with leading genome and social scientists and you question the ways in which they grapple with the reification of race or the refusal of it in their work. Many of these scholars, you point out, seem to simultaneously disavow genetic race while publishing findings that describe social and health outcomes as pattern by genetic or OMB race rather than as the structural effects of racialized marginalization. Is this an inherent and or irresolvable contradiction in the field? And what seems solutions, if any, do you see? And how might they be implemented amongst the next generation of scientists? I definitely think that if the scientists who have that authority that we've just been speaking about don't change the way that they do things and don't say, use their power to say to journals who have certain categories that they ask their scientists to publish with or use or if they don't push back against the, the NIH or the NAS or you know, NAZEM or they don't push back against the CDC or whatever powers that be, then it will just be, you know, forever like this. And you know, there have been a few scientists who have taken it as their kind of almost like bucket list thing to do to like rectify some of what we're talking about and to create policy shifts within the science so that it's like top down enough that everybody can change their everyday practices. So I want to give credit to the people that I often work with in these settings that I just mentioned, like National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, nazm, National Institutes of Health, I regularly speak with people and work with people to make these kinds of policy shifts, or at least analytical shifts. Right. And white papers and all of that kind of thing. But I also think that across the board, in pharma, biotech and in academia, we all need to agree to only use racial categories when we're studying racism, when we're studying discrimination. If there is some kind of part of our model that ascertains racial discrimination, then it's good to use racial categories. But anything else, we need to use categories that don't smack of race. Right? So something I write about in the book are like, I talk about quasi racial categories. That's where a lot of the scientists who disavow race get in trouble. It's where they go to publish in say, New England Journal of Medicine. And then they're told to use white or black, right? And so, you know, it's that, that kind of thing where that's like all out racial, you know, color coded as racial, but. Or they go to nature genetics and they're told European American versus African American. So it's like those kinds of quasi racial categories are just as damaging. Research that I've done in the past with my collaborator Aaron Panofsky at the institute, he's the director for the Institute for Society and Genetics, he and I found that kind of quasi racial population descriptions were on the rise over the whole genome era. And so that, that's just as bad for us as just saying white and black, right? So even when we say like, oh, we're just talking about continental ancestry, I mean, continental ancestry reads as race. And when journalists get a hold of that information or your university sends out the press release, it becomes race out in the public. So the world sees genetic data as being carved up by race. And then also there's that other part of it that I early on mentioned about the databases being structured by race. So that's another place where literally people for decades have sent away for some of that data so that they could run certain studies on it. And the data has come with those labels affixed to it, right? So it's kind of like that is a problem for us. So there are different kind of parts that need to change of all of these systems. But I think that having all of us who do science and do humanities and do any kind of research pertaining to biology, medicine, genetics, anything at all, and even really social science, all of it we should agree upon that one tenet, which is that we will only use those categories and those quasi racial categories when we are studying discrimination closely
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Graduate Student/Interviewer
related to that prior question and moving forward in the book, in the fifth chapter you describe how race has been embedded in the infrastructure of genetics research, for instance, in algorithms that are being built on racialized data sets and even how anti racist researchers are sometimes using and building on this racialized data. Is it possible to do sociogenomic research without implicitly upholding a racist or racializing agenda? And even if we do the most anti racist research possible, is it possible to do this research without it being taken up or appropriated towards other ends?
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Professor Rena Bliss
I think that you could potentially do research that didn't reify race as we know it, but it would depend on what kind of social behaviors and outcomes you're studying and in a sense what the inputs are into your studies, right? So like if you're saying I want to look for a genetic association with intelligence and I'm going to measure intelligence by IQ scores, which is what many sociogenomics folks do, or not just sociogenomics, but like behavior geneticists, and that's just a common thing, is that when people are looking at, trying to predict or say these folks are more likely to finish school or this is whatever, it's all of that kind of, that input data on the upstream end of things that's all racialized already and that hasn't been racially unpacked. And so they might say, okay, I'm going to use an IQ score as a measurement. These are high IQ, they fit in the high IQ bracket, right? And what in the early 20th century would have been called genius or something like that. And then here the folks that are in the low, we call low iq, but would have been called moron or imbecile or something like so feeble minded or something, right? And so it's like they're, they're starting with that as the, like let's look for the genetic association with those high or low, genius or moronic, right? And so it's like basically we're not dealing with the fact that that part has already been tainted by a racialization that we are, are not acknowledging and not, you know, basically dealing with, right? So IQ scores. I don't know if we're going to be able to use IQ anytime soon ever, maybe in a way that's not racialized already on that input side of the upstream part. Maybe there are other things out there in society, other phenomena that are not. And I'M sure that there are some people who study things like, like aspects of fertility, you know, and that might be something that would be less racialized on the input upstream side of things. Right. So it's like that. That kind of thing. Yes. Like, people's ancestry might have something to do with it, and there might be a spectrum of variation, but it's not going to be race. Right. We're not saying, like, oh, yeah, everybody who is black has the same fertility rates. Right. It's like, that's. But I'm not even sure if there is anything that's not racialized in this highly racialized society, you know, so, like, I want to say, yes, there are some things. Right. And I had this article with my collaborator that I mentioned before, Gene Robinson, and another, actually a plant biologist, plant genomicist at, I mean, named Matt Hudson. And so we talked about how, like, with sociogenomics, you actually can do a lot of really interesting manipulation of the inputs. Right. And all of that with animals, you know, insects, bees, for example, as my colleague Gene Robinson does. And you can do a lot of, like, crazy experiments with plants, as Matt Hudson does. Right. But it's like, when you come to humans, we're in this racialized society. There is inequality baked into pretty much everything that happens in our lives. And so if you could somehow find a corner of life that is not racialized, then, yeah, sure. Okay, but find me that corner. Right? Yeah. You have pointed out in your book the race has a pattern of discrimination and assimilation. In the seventh chapter, you describe a shift to studies of ethnic groups over racial categories. How do you think these categories are different? Or what implications might this shift have? Are there other alternative that you think have potential? I definitely want us to move away from folk terms, and so that would mean moving away from ethnic terms as well, because using ethnicity instead of race, I mean, a lot of these companies that I have worked with and consulted for and also, you know, visited and, you know, like, all, all kinds of relationships I've had with these different companies, including 23andMe being one of, you know, the first companies that I, I got to go to and like, you know, hang out and, like, check it out and everything. It's like, basically a lot of these companies are using what they call major ethnicity, which is code for race. Right. And so they're the same as those quasi racial categories, and sometimes they even have racial names like white or black, you know, so it's like, usually they don't. Usually they say European or African. Right. Or. But so the, the companies use that term major ethnicity, and then you see ethnicity being used as a kind of metonym for race all over the place. And so I don't think that even using ethnic terms is going to be enough when we talk about our research. We're going to have to stick to that thing I said about using race when we're talking about racial discrimination and using ethnicity when we're talking about the social construction of ethnicity. Right. So that as well, and discrimination and, you know, different things that have to do with the social construction of ethnicity. And then in the realm of genetics, we should just be using things like, well, haplogroups I offer in the book are letters and numbers. They're just different sequences of letters and numbers. Right. And so imagine a world where we just use that for ancestry instead, as many population geneticists do already. Right. So it's kind of like the only reason why we go, like, move away from those, those letters and numbers and is when we're interfacing with the public and we're like, worried that people aren't going to know what we're talking about. Right. And so I think that it's irresponsible for us to go from letters and numbers or something that has no label whatsoever and then to just be like, okay, now I'm just gonna talk about it in terms of African Americans or something. Right. So, and I, I don't think it would be that hard for us to all agree to do this kind of thing. I know a lot of geneticists don't use those categories in the lab. And then it's more like I was saying, is a kind of interfacey kind of thing. Or maybe they use the categories when they're writing up their grant report and saying, this is the targeted population inclusion kind of protocol that we use and this is what. So it's like we don't need to keep on using categories that we don't really need or use. Right. So, yeah, that's kind of my, my hope is not just to move to ethnicity and call it a day, is, is to move towards anything that's so neutral that it's not going to smack of race. You and other scholars have powerfully shown the eugenics and harm that are enforced when we geneticize race. At the same time, there are certain medical diseases, for instance, that have been linked with certain racial categories. And more recently, scientists have developed these polygenic risk scores which calculate the risk of disease according to a biobank of representative samples, suggesting that there can be some clinical value to quantifying risk. What do you think of this new work? How can it be done well without racial categories and what considerations need to be put into place for them to be useful in clinical practice? Yeah. So the polygenic indexing is what the sociogenomic people have given us. Right. So that's their thing, that's their baby. Right. And so I think that we can. So most of that research actually based on assessments from within that field, you know, have been done on samples that were categorized in those databases as European or of European descent. And so most of those studies end up being kind of racialized on the back end. And then they, when they report on their findings, the scientists will end up kind of racializing the. The reports in a sense. Right. Because it's like we found this for people of European descent. Right. And we can't say what it would be in people of African descent or whatever. So that's a common refrain in the area of polygenic indexing or indices is to say like, these are these indices only for white people in a sense.
- [45:08]
Graduate Student/Interviewer
Right.
- [45:09]
Professor Rena Bliss
And so I think that if we could somehow have all studies explain that only for white people is only because of these structurally racializing and racist kind of practices that are in our current field today, then maybe that would help a little bit. But I don't know. Again, because of the inputs being racialized and not being acknowledged as racialized, I don't know if we're going to get like any kind of like accuracy from these scores. Right. When we haven't dealt with the fact that it's like the biggest. I kind of think of the biggest win for that community as being the educational attainment research. And so that has been like using these school statistics. It's just like people who get a high school diploma, people who get a college degree, people who get a graduate degree, people who drop out from their PhD program, all of that kind of data. Again, we haven't dealt with the ways that structural racism affects those scores or those numbers. Right. And so we could say, like, at the end of all of this research, you've got this score and you're being really careful to say this is only what we know about people of European descent. But you still have to have this conversation about what happened upstream that you didn't account for. And then you have to have this whole conversation about downstream how saying people of European descent is re racializing. And yeah, I would love it if that area of research were the first to come out. Because actually, if you're the first to do polygenic indexing or not the first and only. Because they're not the first and only. But if you are the first to say, I think they feel like we've brought in all of these cohort studies, sutured together all this data from all over the world and all this, like, we've done this, this methodological innovation that's been really amazing and helpful for the whole field of genomics and medical genomics. It's like, so if, if they're owning that, like, I think it's good to be like. And we're going to be pioneers in this whole other way. We're going to actually be the first people to acknowledge how race figures into our science and try to like, heal some of this.
- [47:53]
Grace (Moderator/Interviewer)
Thank you so much for sharing so much about your book. We wanted to ask one last question as we close, which is if you might be willing to share anything about what you're working on next or what the next book project might be.
- [48:04]
Professor Rena Bliss
Absolutely. I am working on a book on sort of a how to tech and how to live in this world that is really structurally becoming embedded. And we are having embedded in us like this kind of whole system of artificial intelligence and like new digital technologies that are just, yeah, kind of swallowing up our schools and swallowing up our, our workplaces, swallowing up our healthcare facilities, clinics, and also kind of us in a sense. Right. So I am writing about how things like AI genomics, which is like part of the whole field of sociogenomics that's out there in industry that we call embryo scoring, the kind of like embryo scoring and implantation of embryos that are supposedly fitter, have a higher iq, have a higher likelihood of having higher iq, all of that kind of stuff that AI genomics, like how we should navigate all of that being out there and just the kind of broader structural implications, but how to, in the sense of even everyday people, what we should do. Every time that I write a book for the general public, I am again, thinking of my kids, I'm thinking of my grandparents, I'm thinking of my, like, all my students and everybody who needs to know this information. So, yeah, the next book will be on all of these new technologies and what we can do and how we can make sure that we set up our institutions in a way that serve us and don't just make more dependency for us and our whole families and everybody we love on companies that are just really as, as my colleague who is here at Princeton, Jennifer Tezzi, says, they sell your data. You know, it's like we don't. I don't want to just, like, be another person who lets everybody just, like, take advantage of me, my kids, my family and creates all these predatory technologies. So, yeah, that's what the next book is about. And I'm really excited that I'll be writing it here next year at the center for Health and Wellbeing Policy and just continuing the conversation with you all, hopefully. Yes.
- [50:56]
Grace (Moderator/Interviewer)
Thank you so much for your time for doing this work.
- [50:58]
Professor Rena Bliss
Thank you. Thanks so much.
- [51:00]
Grace (Moderator/Interviewer)
Thank you.
- [51:01]
Professor Rena Bliss
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