David Reich

David Reich

A middle-aged man with short gray hair, light skin, and a trimmed beard wearing a light blue sweater over a white collared shirt, standing against a plain light background.

David Reich is a geneticist and Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School whose lab studies ancient DNA, human evolutionary biology, and disease. He is widely known for pioneering large-scale analysis of ancient human genomes and for showing how population mixture shaped human history. Reich is also the author of Who We Are and How We Got Here, a book that explains how ancient DNA transformed our understanding of the human past for scientists and general readers around the world.

A man in a blue sweater and dark pants sits on a chair against a white backdrop with illustrated tree branches in the background.
49mins
What if one of our oldest ideas about ancestry is simply wrong? Harvard geneticist David Reich argues that ancient DNA has exposed the myth of purity and uncovered a far messier history of who we are and where we came from.