When you were growing up, you probably heard about famous inventors. Maybe you thought they were brilliant. Rigorously trained. Confident. Capable. And that their inventions advanced humankind through and through.

But Dr. Ainissa Ramirez spent the last 5 years writing a book that strips away those presumptions. In The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, she paints portraits not of how inventors settled questions of the limits of technology - but of how much further we still have to go.

This hour, You’ll hear about how these big thinkers so often solved only the problem directly in front of them - and how other tinkerers, brainstormers, and everyday people made those inventions more equitable.

GUEST:

• Dr. Ainissa Ramirez is a science evangelist and the author of The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another

Illustration by Chion Wolf

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