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The Rap Guide to Medicine Album Release

By April 30, 2015 No Comments

ASU CENTER FOR EVOLUTION AND MEDICINE COMMISSIONS A “PEER REVIEWED” RAP ALBUM TO COMMUNICATE SCIENCE

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April 30, 2015 (New York, NY) – The Center for Evolutionary Medicine (CEM) at Arizona State University has combined resources with the International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health (ISEMPH), San Francisco’s Perlstein Lab, and the Society for Applied Microbiology (SfAM) in the UK, to sponsor the creation of a unique art/science collaboration. The result is The Rap Guide to Medicine by award-winning rap artist Baba Brinkman, a collection of songs that explore themes of health and disease from an evolutionary perspective – both a hip-hop gem and a great teaching resource.

The Rap Guide to Medicine takes a hard-edged look at the roots of illness, tracing many of the body’s vulnerabilities back to its evolutionary history. As the opening track declares: “Disease itself is not the adaptation, but you need adaptations to explain why we get sick.” The album features clever parasites, rebellious cancer cells, diseases of modernity, the evolution of aging, and a sufferer of cystic fibrosis who uses the “gene’s eye view” to come to terms with his illness. Baba Brinkman’s premiere performance at the 2015 ISEMPH Conference in Tempe, AZ received a complete standing ovation from a room full of 300 scientists.

The album was produced by the UK’s Mr. Simmonds and vetted for scientific accuracy by several experts from the Society, led by Randolph M. Nesse, co-author with George C. Williams of the seminal evolutionary medicine text Why We Get Sick. Nesse commented: “This is amazing. I won’t need to teach my course, I’ll just have students listen to the album! Seriously, I’d like to see every doctor in the world get a copy, as a gift from their patients.”

The Rap Guide to Medicine is now available from iTunes, Amazon, and Bandcamp. Watch the music video for the lead single Gene’s Eye View here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qo2Gyr9qTY and the video for “So Infectious” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swoDROzsjXg.

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