Catherine Page Harden

They're bad to the bone.

They're a bad seed.

And that tends to make us more punitive or at least less likely to trust that there's hope for rehabilitation and change in the future.

Genetics is a very, very new science.

And our ideas about heredity and sinfulness and can we inherit something that makes us blameworthy are much, much, much older.

And so the new science is kind of being grafted onto these much older debates that we have.

So I won't say how I think everyone should approach this, but I will tell you how I have ended up approaching it.

As someone who has spent most of her adult life thinking about how her genes connected to the bad things or the things that are called bad that people do.

And I would say that it has made me much less punitive.

And I live in one of the most punitive states and one of the most punitive countries in the world.

Because I see how my life could have gone differently, not just if I had been born into a different family or different environmental circumstances, but if there had been a different combination of DNA letters when, you know, the egg or the sperm that made me happened.

I don't think of people as inherently bad or inherently good.

I'm just continually reminded of our common fallible humanity when I think about genetics.

Thank you for having me.