The Genographic Project Transcript
18 September 2006
Narrator: As anyone who has ever put together a genealogy knows, it’s all about connections. You uncover a birthplace of one ancestor, and then you continue working backwards, searching for missing clues to the family that came before that. Eventually, you find yourself branching out into far corners of the world.
But try reaching back thousands of years ago, in pre-history, and your imagination has a lot more to ponder -- in what corners of the world did our far distant ancestors wander way back then? And how did I get from there to here?
National Geographic, the Waitt Family Foundation, and IBM are exploring this trail through an ambitious five-year experiment called the Genographic Project. It’s part of an effort to trace the route and timing of human migration ….from our earliest homes in Africa to the places where we live today.
Traveling backward through time from the billions of people scattered all over the earth to the handful of early humans who are ancestors to us all, a team of research scientists and technology experts have set out to collect hundreds of thousands of DNA samples from people all over the world, both from indigenous populations in remote locations and from the general public.
The director of the Genographic Project is an anthropologist and geneticist named Spencer Wells. His team’s discoveries represent a kind of time travel as recorded in our DNA, but with a bold reality outside the pages of a science fiction novel.
Wells: Most people really, when you start to explain that they’re carrying this history book in their DNA, and that you can help them read it using the techniques of genetics, they’re fascinated and they want to take part. And you tell them, you’ve also got this genetic thread that connects you with people halfway around the world, and to me, and to people you’ve never met before and that I’ve never met before. And we can actually track that using DNA. They say, yes, that sounds really cool.
Narrator: Archeologists digging for human fossils have discovered all kinds of hints of mankind’s early history.
Dr. Wells is a kind of fossil hunter too. But he seeks his fossils not among rocks and stones but in living people, hidden away in the genes that make us what we are.
How it works • 18 september 2006 By comparing DNA samples from different populations with the help of the latest in testing technology and computer analysis, patterns begin to emerge.
These DNA “markers,” as they are known—tiny changes that occur in DNA over time—can provide a roadmap for Wells and his team that shows how hundreds, even thousands of generations that came before us moved out of Africa and populated the globe.
Wells: You get your DNA from your parents, and they get their DNA from their parents and so on. So you have a line of descent traced through the passing on of this genetic information. Now, when you’re passing on this information you have to copy it. And when you do, because it is very, very long, occasionally you make a mistake. They don’t occur very often, but when they do occur and you pass them through the generations, they become a marker of descent. Then if you share a marker with someone else in the world, then you share an ancestor at some point in the past.
Narrator: According to Wells, the mitochondrial DNA—passed from mother to offspring in a long maternal chain of descent—dates back to eastern Africa, roughly 150,000 years ago. The Y-chromosome— passed from father to son—traces back to eastern or southern Africa, around 60,000 years ago.
Critical to this project is the gathering of DNA samples from indigenous people—distinctive and unique populations who have long inhabited certain geographic areas. DNA from indigenous populations contains key genetic markers that have remained relatively unaltered for hundreds of generations, and are reliable indicators of ancient migratory patterns.
It’s not often that the public has a chance to participate in a worldwide scientific effort. Yet through the Genographic Project, anyone curious about their genes can, in essence, become an associate explorer on the team.
Wells: Those of us who work in the field, we’ve been approached by the public a lot in the past, people who have read about a paper, something that comes out in the New York Times, and they’re like, that’s really cool, I want to get tested. Can you test my DNA? And academic labs are not really set up to do that. So we wanted to put a mechanism in place that would allow the public to take part and also add to the database.
How it works • 31 July 2006 Narrator: Here’s how the public part of the study works. You go to genographic.com and purchase a kit that comes in the mail. It contains a couple of cheek swabs. You rub the inside of your cheek with the cotton swabs. Put them inside a tube. Mail the tube back for analysis. It’s that simple.
The tests are stored anonymously, but people who purchase the kits are able to track details about themselves on a secure Web site using a special ID number assigned to each kit.
The results won’t tell you the names of forgotten ancestors, or where your great-grandparents lived. Rather, they indicate the maternal or paternal genetic markers you share with people in other parts of the world.
You’ll be able to see, for example, that you are in a particular group of descendents from Africa, called a haplogroup; where the population of that group is in the world today; and how it ended up in certain locations in the world.
But the project’s public participation is doing more than just creating this database of genetic travel. The funds raised by the sale of the swab kits goes back to pay for more research among indigenous people and it also goes into a Legacy Fund. The Legacy Fund is a way to “give back” to these local cultures in appreciation for voluntarily contributing their DNA histories to the Genographic Project. The money raised will go toward things like education, cultural conservation, and the preservation of their original languages.
As you might guess, technology plays a critical role in this project. And as the technology partner here, IBM is providing research assistance and software that’s able to collect, store and make sense of the massive amounts of information collected -- hundreds of thousands of genotypic codes.
The resulting public database of anonymous data will house one of the largest collections of human genetic information ever assembled and will serve as an unprecedented resource for geneticists, historians and anthropologists—making this project an ongoing discovery.
How it works • 31 July 2006 The Genographic Project tells a fascinating story of the human journey. Thanks to Spencer Wells and his team of scientists and technologists, we’re able to peer deep into our past, imagine the routes early humans traveled and who they met along the way, and see a shape begin to emerge—the shape of the human family tree, from twigs back to root, as encoded in our genes.
And that’s how it works.
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How it works • 31 July 2006