Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield and my guest today is Spencer Wells.

Spencer is a leading population geneticist and he's the director of a genome project

that he'll be telling you a little bit more about in the podcast today.

He's not only a scientist as well as a documentary filmmaker but he's also an author.

He wrote a book called Pandora's Seed which I actually read last month after meeting

Spencer at the ancestral health symposium in Boston a couple of months ago.

Fascinating book, so fascinating in fact that I wanted to get Spencer onto the show to

talk about it a little bit and kind of the whole link between modern agriculture and

health where it's brought us and where it's bringing us.

So Spencer, thank you so much for coming on the call today.

Great to be here Ben.

So you know the title of your book kind of sort of hints at what it's about but can you

go into why you called this book Pandora's Seed?

Yeah, well so let's just look at the title Pandora.

If you think about the myth of Pandora and actually tell that in the forward to the book,

Pandora was a woman who was given to the gods and she was innately curious and there was

this box that had all these sorrows and travails for humanity and she opened it up because

she was curious about it and they all flew out and that's the reason we have so much trouble

in the world according to the myth.

But the one thing that was left in the box was hope and she clapped down the top and managed

to preserve that.

So it's basically a story of what happens when you are in the case of Pandora curious

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