Osagie Obasogie

Osagie Obasogie, JD, PhD, is the Haas Distinguished Chair and Professor of Bioethics in the Joint Medical Program and School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, where he chairs the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society's Diversity and Health Disparities Cluster. He is the author of Blinded By Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind (Stanford University Press, 2014). His writings have spanned academic and public outlets, with journal articles in the Fordham Law Review, Stanford Technology Law Review, and Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, along with commentaries in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and New Scientist, among others. He contributes regularly to CGS’s blog Biopolitical Times and is the former director of CGS’s Project on Bioethics, Law, and Society. Obasogie received his B.A. with distinction from Yale University, his J.D. from Columbia Law School where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, and his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley where he was a fellow with the National Science Foundation.

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Publications

Police in Phoenix, ready for protestors
By Osagie Obasogie, The Washington Post | 06.05.2020

Photo by AJ Colores on Unsplash

Pandemics are often thought to be unforeseeable acts of God that emerge suddenly to...

Transparent glass frames, with the repeating letters ATCG in bold black font.
By Osagie K. Obasogie , Scientific American | 11.01.2017

What would it mean to embrace new gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR–Cas9 at the very moment white supremacy is, once again, on...

Landscape photo of the US Supreme Court building. with the sun and blue sky above.
By Osagie Obasogie, The Atlantic | 06.12.2017

Fifty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state laws banning interracial marriage, but the issues involved in the

...

In the News

Osagie K. Obasogie
By Gwyneth Shaw, Berkeley Law | 08.23.2024

In this episode, host Gwyneth Shaw talks to Professor Osagie K. Obasogie, a professor of law and bioethics and...

Red and yellow poster stating: "Only healthy seed must be sown! Check the seeds of hereditary disease and unfitness by eugenics."
By Sheila Kaplan, UC Berkeley School of Public Health | 06.20.2024

Image by Gennie Stafford from Flickr

These days, it’s a rare scientist who would admit to working in eugenics.

The...

Police in Phoenix, ready for protestors
By Osagie Obasogie, The Washington Post | 06.05.2020

Photo by AJ Colores on Unsplash

Pandemics are often thought to be unforeseeable acts of God that emerge suddenly to...

Biopolitical Times

Between numerous newspaper and magazine articles, a report by the World Health Organization, and Mara Hvistendahl’s new book Unnatural...

Talks and Testimonies

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Long-discredited notions of race as rooted in biology fueled eugenics policies and the Nazi extermination project. And yet,Osagie Obasogie...