S9E1: Nicholas Freudenberg

Nicholas Freudenberg is Distinguished Professor of Public Health Emeritus at the CUNY School of Public Health.  Freudenberg has written about corprorate influences on health since 2008 and is the author of  Lethal but Legal Corporations, Consumption and Protecting Public Health (Oxford University Press, 2014), At What Cost Modern Capitalism and the Future of Health (Oxford University Press, 2021), and the forthcoming Fighting for New York Health and Social Justice Activism since the 1960s (Columbia University Press, September 2026).  Freudenberg is a member of the Editorial Advisory Group for the World Health Organization’s Report on the Global Status of Commercial Determinants of Health, due to be released in 2026,  and a co-author of the 2023 Lancet series on commercial determinants of health.   At CUNY, Freudenberg has served as  founder and director of the Hunter College Center on AIDS, Drugs and Community Health,  CUNY CARES (Comprehensive  Access to  Essential  Resources and Services), the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute, Health LINK , a reentry program for people leaving Rikers Island to return to their communities, and the CUNY School of Public Health doctoral program. 

S9E2: Daphne Martschenko and Dr. Sam Trejo

In this episode, our previous guest Dr. Daphne Martschenko returns with her co-author Dr. Sam Trejo to discuss their new book What We Inherit: How New Technologies and Old Myths Are Shaping Our Genomic Future.

Dr. Martschenko, who earned her PhD at Cambridge, was studying how genomic scientists understood their motivations, responsibilities, and the risks of their work. More skeptical of the field’s claims and concerned about premature industry applications, she, like Dr. Trejo, was frustrated by polarized academic debates in which opposing sides rarely engaged productively. Their shared desire for more constructive dialogue shaped their collaboration and ultimately their book. In this work, they discovered more common ground than expected. Although disagreements remained, that didn’t hinder their ability to think together about regulatory frameworks that should be in place.

They highlight two myths that distort public understanding of genomics:

• The Destiny Myth—the belief that genes unilaterally determine life outcomes, historically used to justify harms such as involuntary sterilization.

• The Race Myth—the false idea that humanity is divided into discrete biological races whose genetic differences explain behavioral or social outcomes, a misconception that has fueled discriminatory policies and continues to underlie white supremacist ideologies.

Their work aims to help the public interpret genomic data and understand both its promise and limits. They note that polygenic scores remain a “black box”: even when predictive in certain contexts, their biological pathways are unclear and may operate differently across environments. Their remaining differences center on how scientific advances might counter—or inadvertently reinforce—social harms, and where scientific effort should be focused to meaningfully reduce health disparities.

Find their book here: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691237756/what-we-inherit?srsltid=AfmBOoppBsKJ5iKykfO2MzqGseQw_3EF028_8tMTrAB9G0trgMdqIUSe

Other joint publications: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35047864/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37695009/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34493865/