Genes and Frederick Douglass

How Our Genes are Hurting Us (1:03) Guest: Lee Goldman, MD, Dean of Medical School at Columbia University  We have some bad news about our health: our genes are out to get us. Traits that our forefathers needed to survive in a violent, dangerous world now conspire to cause the diseases that explain nearly half of all deaths in the United States: obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attack and stroke--even depression and anxiety. Dr. Lee Goldman explains how this works in his new book, “Too Much of a Good Thing: How Four Key Survival Traits Are Now Killing Us.”  Picturing Frederick Douglass (50:17) Guest: John Stauffer, PhD, Professor of English, African, and African American Studies at Harvard University  Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave who became a leading abolitionist known for speeches as eloquent as Lincoln's or Emerson's. Frederick Douglass was also obsessed with having his picture taken. He was photographed more than any other American of the 19th Century. More than General Custer, than Abraham Lincoln, even the heroic Union General Ulysses S. Grant. Everywhere he went, Douglass popped into portrait studios to have his image made. Then he’d distribute them far and wide in his own newspapers, as calling cards, as signed souvenirs for fans. Why? Was Frederick Douglass simply vain? Or just a geek for new technology? Or did his passion for photography have a part in his campaign for freedom and justice? The answer is found in the new book, “Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American.”