If I have an extra hundred bucks lying around, I plan on using it to participate in National Geographic’s Genographic Project. You send them a DNA sample on a cheek swab and they’ll sequence it to determine your deep genetic ancestry. In other words, the results won’t tell you the identity of your great-great-grandmother, but it will show you your genetic connection to the earliest human beings and the specific migratory path of your ancestors as they journeyed from Africa and spread around the globe. If I had to guess the trajectory of my own ancestral migration, I would assume that they crossed from Africa into the Arabian peninsula and eventually into Eastern and Northern Europe. But I’d be really curious to see the actual results. I hope this project gets participation from a wide cross-section of the population, including indigenous peoples. Some people are already accusing the project of bio-prospecting for future genetic patents, a charge which the project directors vigorously deny. I can only imagine the number of hoops the directors had to jump through to get approval from their IRB (Institutional Review Board). Still, the collection of thousands, or even millions, of DNA samples will one day be attempted by a for-profit corporation with substantially fewer scruples. If we’re not careful, we could see human genomic research become the basis for future military or weapons applications. The general public gets all in a tizzy about cloning, but I think the real concerns lie in the fact that governments and corporations will eventually figure out how to make all those As, Ts, Cs, and Gs in the human chromosome do their bidding.
