Transcript: What we’re doing in Genographic is really in some ways kind of a new model for doing a big science project, you know, instead of hiring a lot of scientists and centrally to one particular geographic location and building a big brick building or whatever it is and sending them out and having them do the sampling and then bring it back to a central repository and we publish only in the scientific literature and that’s that.  It is very much a collaborative defuse effort among many scientists and collaborators around the world, a web of collaborators numbering into the hundreds now, all over the planet and in effort to answer this questions, in my opinion that’s the only way this could really properly be done because we’re working with human beings, with working with cultures all over the world and they’re different cultural sensitivities and so, you know, I as somebody who was raised in American, European tradition wouldn’t necessarily understand all the cultural sensitivities in Southern India or the Philippines or wherever it might be and so we have regional centers, scientists set up doing this work.  But it’s also in a broader sense, a collaboration among anybody who’s interested, you know, so you can log onto our website, you can get yourself tested, it’s interactive in that sense, kind of web2.0 sense, you can get your DNA tested, be a part of a big scientific effort which doesn’t happen very often and by doing that, you help us to fund the third component of the project, so we’ve got the field science, we’ve got the public participation.  The third component is the Legacy Fund, which is a grant giving entity in the project that provides us with a way to give something tangible back to these indigenous groups around the world whose way of life is as I said before in many ways endangered and so, you know, groups will apply to us, you don’t have to be a participant in the project, any indigenous or traditional group around the world can apply, grants typically in the range of $25,000 or so often seed grants to get a project off the ground.  To fund a cultural or educational initiative aimed at raising awareness about the challenges facing that group, saving a language, teaching the language to their children, preserving traditional knowledge about plant resources, whatever it might be.  But it’s a way to give something back to these groups and in a small way, you know, perhaps make the world a better place, I mean actively go out and try and preserver some of this amazing diversity that defines us as a species.  So, you know, these three components are critical to the success of the project, we can’t take one of them away, they’re all three very important to what we’re doing.

What drives me to do this, it’s an obsession, you know, for lack of a better term, it’s not a job, you know, I think about this stuff constantly, I think about it as I’m, you know, driving to work, I think about it when I’m sitting on airplanes, I think about it when I’m, you know, driving out to some remote location in the Sahara Desert.  I think about it, you know, as I’m lying in bed at 3 in the morning worrying about things, but I’m still obsessed with the science that drives it, trying to figure out the answers to these things.  I think, you know, that’s what drives any scientist, you know, you have this desire, not just a desire, a need to find the answers to these questions and I don’t think that that’s gonna go away, I mean I think once we figure out some of the answers to questions that we’re asking in the Genographic Project, there are gonna be new questions that come up and there’s always gonna be more to do.

Recorded on: 5/22/08

Question: What gaps would you like to fill discoveries?

Transcript: Yeah I mean there are a lot of holes that I think we need to fill.  The first one being what happened in Africa around 70,000 years ago that allowed us to survive the near extinction, so the genetic evidence is that we dropped down to 2000 people, perhaps even fewer, don’t know for sure but, you know, a relatively small number compared to the number of people who are alive today and that might have been driven in part due to extreme climatic shifts some ice age and mega volcano in Sumatra and we came back from that and we came back in spades, we succeeded far beyond our wildest dreams if you will, so we not only survived in Africa but we expanded and we started to populate the rest of the world and the correlates with a change in culture which is the dawn of the late stone age where tools become more finely crafted, art makes its appearance, some linguists think that fully modern language appeared around that time, hunting techniques become more sophisticated. Evidence for a change perhaps in the way our brains our wired, debate about this, what caused that change in culture that allowed us to start to expand, to not only survive that really tough period but to come back from it and start to expand and succeed, we don’t know.  You know, to me that is one of the Nobel Prize winning questions in anthropology, you know, what set all of this in motion, you know, for so long, for ¾s of our history as a species, we’re limited to Africa largely and a little bit of the middle east but basically we’re limited to Africa, ¾s of our history was spent on one continent and then in the space of no time at all, 2000 generations we explode around the world and we’re everywhere.  You know, you think back to the European age of exploration, 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, people going all over the world exploring, finding remote islands out in the middle of the pacific.  Think of Captain Cook discovering the Sandwich Islands, now called Hawaii.  In every place they went there are people living there and they don’t question why that is, you know, it’s just normal, humans live everywhere, they’re I don’t know, like air, you know, just humans are expected to be everywhere and, you know, the question is why are we everywhere, how did we get there, you know, why was it normal for humans to be everywhere and, you know, again that is the thing that really motivates us to do the Genographic Project.

Question: Why did humans suddenly start to migrate?

Transcript: I don’t know, I mean some people think that what lead to that explosion would have been the development of language; that probably was a precondition for it, i.e. it was necessary but not necessarily sufficient, you know, creative thought whatever that means, however you define creativity, abstract thought which is probably why we see art appearing around that time and not before.  We’re thinking about the way the world is and creating depictions of it which means we’re fully taking on board what it is and trying to modify perhaps in some way we realize that we have some control over it.  What happened around that time is that we probably became innovation machines in a sense and innovation to me has a couple of components, one is that crazy person who, you know, stays up late and has the off the wall idea that nobody’s ever had before and the other is figuring out a way with the rest of the group to actually make it work okay.  So you have the idea, the initial seed of an idea that perhaps occurs to one person, perhaps it happens to a group, but often it’s one person and then the group has to work out a way to make it something that’s applicable to create a technology from the idea and that’s what seems to have occurred around that time.  We became much better at innovating to, you know, develop new tools or to hunt with more, you know, with better methods or whatever it might have been.  So, you know, to me was it a genetic change, I don’t know, it could have been genetic, it could have been driven by the cultural shifts by, you know, the need to, you know, survive in these rough conditions.  Will we ever figure it out, I hope so, we might not, you know, there’s a lot of speculation, this is one of the big debates in physical anthropology, what happened around that time but it would be great to know the answer.

Recorded on: 5/22/08

Transcript: You know, every region we study has interesting tales to tell, genetic tales to tell and it’s piecing together the details of all of this and then kind of stepping back and looking at the broader picture, doing a kind of meta analysis and that’s where, you know, taking into account other fields of scientific endeavor like Paleoclimatology and seeing those correlations, that’s what really excites me right now, it’s, you know, the genetic data, yes we’ve got it and it’s gets more and more fine grained and, you know, we get more and more details and then we start to ask the how and the why.  So we’ve got the who, where, when over on the genetic side and then the how and the why is where we have to start to kind of fit in these other areas of research and that cross disciplinarity is what gets me so excited right now, it’s not any particular genetic result in isolation, it’s the sum total of this amazingly complex story we’re flushing out and then trying to explain it, trying to explain why people were moving from a certain point to another point at a certain point in time. Well linguistics is a really good example, you know, we tend to get the language that we speak from our parents, 80, 90% of the time perhaps and so languages in a way are inherited almost like genes.  So a priori you would expect there to be a correlation between linguistic patterns and genetic patterns and we typically see that so, you know, in a broad scale, language, families tend to occur in the places where the genetic data would suggest they would occur and show similar relationships to what the genes are telling us.  Sometimes they don’t and that’s when things get really interesting, you have a language moving into a place without the spread of genes or vice versa, tells you something about the, you know, the mode of cultural change, you know, why people are moving and how they moved and all of these things.  But in general linguistics is a really important field of research to make sense of the genetic data.  Archeology obviously, you know, the other fields of, you know, human history and pre history so archeology, history, paleoanthropology for things that happened prior to the archeological era if you will so, you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago.  What else, Paleoclimatology, clearly, you know, the climate changes again as I’ve said several times here, you know, climate change is often the motivating factor for people to move.  Not just because you have to move, because a desert is chasing you out and there’s no food and no water.  But also because it opens up new opportunities so it creates a land mass out of the, you know, 18,000 islands in Indonesia and South East Asia which allows you to populate New Guinea and move to down to Australia.  Okay wow, so that opens up a new route of migration or literally you are chased out, you are chased out of North Africa, 45,000 years ago or so as it shifts back to desert, as it comes out of that wetter phase and you’re forced to move further afield, perhaps that’s what forced some people into Central Asia around 40,000 years ago because you literally couldn’t live there.  So yeah it’s both a carrot and a stick in a sense, so climatology very important.  Other fields, god, you know, something I would like to study a little bit more and look at in more detail as we get further into the project and we have time to kind of sit back more and look at the broad patterns would be other cultural attributes.  So more cultural anthropology, musicology, do musical styles tend to track the spread of particular genetic lineages.  If you have particular weaving patterns that, you know, link groups, you know, people in Turkmenistan, the carpets they make, the particular design motifs are very specific to the tribal groups.  But perhaps you could find similarities that reflect a shared origin, does that track the genetic patterns, perhaps.  That would be an example of something that I’d like to incorporate into the work we’re doing, you know, it’s really in some ways almost an excuse to be a dilettante, after you do the basic work in genetics, which is, you know, obviously my area of expertise that’s what the project is grounded on, you then get to sit back and start drawing on all these different fields, drawing on experts in all these fields and say “Listen we’ve got this cool pattern over here, we can’t really explain why it is the way it is, this is, you know, what we think was happening, what was going on, do you have any similar pattern in your field of research, in archeology or, you know, a study of embroidery, whatever it might be.”  Yeah I mean that’s part of the fun of doing this work, being a multi disciplinary scientist.

Recorded on: 5/22/08

The National Geographic portal.

Question: How can people access the Genographic Project’s findings?

Transcript: Yeah so how are we telling the story, we have a website, that’s the primary portal of communication for so many people and entities these days.  Nationalgeographic.com/genograhpic, you can go onto the website, find out what it is we’re doing, what the project is all about, you can decide to participate, you can order a kit, swab your own cheek, see how you fit into this growing family tree, become part of this massive database.  But that’s primary means of communication, then of course, you know, one of the real benefits of working at National Geographic is we have all these media outlets, so we have the National Geographic channel and we’re making documentaries and we have the magazine and we can tell stories through the magazine and, you know, we have dot.com which has a news site so we can, you know, publicize the new scientific findings and then of course there’s the general media and then, you know, the scientific results clearly are published in the peer reviewed scientific literature.  But yeah I mean it’s using the media as a means of communication to educate people, so it’s not an ivory tower project at all, it’s a very much a project in the public domain that’s meant to educate people as well as make discoveries.

Question: What are some favorite stories you’ve experienced when traveling?

Transcript: I spend a lot of my time on the road, more than half of it these days and have been to some interesting places, I guess I’ve been to about 60 or 70 countries now, some of the more interesting places have been for instance the Russian far east, Chukotka, I was there in November and it got down to -70C in the morning, which is just ridiculously cold, I mean if you’ve ever been in temperatures like that you know what I’m talking about, it’s almost like the power of a wave washing over you in the ocean when you step outside, you can just feel the cold start to permeate your body and you know that if you don’t cover up and you don’t get back inside pretty quickly, you will die.  So that’s amazing and, you know, to see people living out in these conditions and pulling their gloves and tying together little sinews on their sleds to repair them and, you know, it’s just amazing to see people living in those conditions.  A lot of the work we do is in very poor places, a lot of the world’s indigenous people are the poorest of the poor in already poor parts of the world and they live in very remote locations, many of which have been subject to battles, civil wars, invasions, whatever it might be.  So it’s not always the safest job, you know, I’ve worked in minefields in Northern Chad and, you know, places along the Afghan border where the Taliban were, you know, making advances at towns that were just a few miles away and, you know, you do sometimes take risks but they’re calculated risks and they’re risks that allow you to get out and work with these, you know, fascinating people who, you know, as I mentioned before, many of these groups are disbanding, they’re moving away, their children are not gonna be part of the culture anymore, they’re gonna enter the dominant culture and, you know, it’s a tremendous opportunity and, you know, just an amazing chance to be able to go out and see the world’s cultures before in a way they’re gone.  You know, I very much am cognizant sometimes as I’m travelling to some of these remote and dangerous places, you know, you are so lucky to be able to do this.  Yes it’s uncomfortable sometimes, yes you have to eat some kind of dodgy food and it may not taste good, yes you may get sick, yes you may be shot at perhaps or there may be a risk of running over a landmine or whatever it is but my god when you get out to these places and you see some of these people and talk to them about their way of life and you realize that your kind of glimpsing something that may not exist in a generation or so, you know, you just you kind of say wow, I’m incredibly lucky to be alive at this point in time.

Recorded on: 5/22/08

Transcript: For the work that we’re doing in Genographic, the challenges are not so much technical as they are for lack of a better term, social or cultural, you know, it’s not really a challenge to get the genetic information once the DNA sample is in the laboratory, you know, that technology has advanced so much in the last decade, really is a spinoff of the human genome project that generating genetic data these days is not that hard.  It’s getting the sample in the first place and so that’s why, you know, the Genographic Project, yes it is a genetics project but really the hard part of what we do is going out around the world and making contact with indigenous peoples and sometimes very remote locations, sending teams out, doing outreach, talking to people about the work we do and, you know, convincing them that it’s worthwhile to participate in this project, getting those samples.  That is really the challenge, you know, it’s the challenge in what we do but it’s the challenge in all fields of genetics these days.  It is, you know, building your cohort if you’re doing a medical genetic study, it’s getting enough people with the disease and without the disease who are matched for age and body mass index and everything else you do in order to find those disease associations.  It’s getting those samples that is the real challenge and so, you know, for me I don’t see any massive changes in technology affecting what we do scientifically, it’s really, you know, creating the logistical framework in the project to allow us to get the samples we need to tell this story, that’s the tough thing in the field of research that I’m in.

Recorded on: 5/22/08

Scientists need to be better advocates of their work, says Wells.

Transcript: You know, I think we’ve got a lot of scientists working in the United States certainly already, would we like to have more funding, of course, everybody wants more funding for their particular area, you know, if I were in the theater I’d demand more government funding for, you know, theater productions.  So yeah more money would be nice but I think that the real role that the President can play in this broader kind of theme of science literacy is in education, using the Presidency as a bully pulpit to get out the message that science is important.  It’s not just something that’s done by the scientists for the scientists, it’s done by the scientists who are citizens for everybody else in the country and with the collaboration of everybody else in the country because at least in terms of government supported science it’s paid for by the rest of the country.  So, you know, I think scientists have a role to play as well, I think scientists should perhaps make more of an effort to communicate with the public at large about the work they’re doing and the implications and why it’s important, you know, it’s perhaps easier to ask for more money than it is to explain to people who don’t have a scientific background why you need more money.  But I think the latter is at least as important and, you know, these days in my opinion part of being a scientist, a responsible scientist.

Recorded on: 5/22/08

Transcript: Well, you know, I’m not an expert on genetic modification, it’s certainly not the sort of genetics I do, it is possible to do some very interesting and perhaps depending on your perspective, scary things to genomes these days including inserting genes that were never before, you know, the standards I think should be relatively tight for allowing these things to get out into the food supply.  The problem is, you know, often that the tests don’t go on perhaps as long as they should, so how long is long enough, we don’t know, that’s one of the big questions.  I mean is two years long enough, is five years long enough, is 20 years long enough, you know, I think that again is part of the social debate that we need to be having and I think, you know, citizens, people who should be able to vote on these possibilities, these topics, should be part of the debate, need to understand the pros and cons, you know, by inserting genes into plants, maybe we can up the protein content and that, you know, saves another hundred million people a year living in Sub Sahara in Africa.  On the other hand, you know, is it possible that we’re inserting the wrong genes or that they might do something that, you know, we can’t anticipate at the outset, it’s a possibility, we need to know, you know, what those possibilities are, how this stuff really works, you know, the underlying mechanism I think that is part of being a scientifically literate citizen today.

Recorded on: 5/22/08

It's important to understand the tremendous impact science has on our lives, says Wells.

Question: What makes a scientifically literate citizen?

Transcript: Yeah, are we scientifically literate, I think that would be a resounding no overall, I hope that it’s getting better and I see some evidence that it is among the high school kids that I talked to.  But we live in a society that historically has favored the humanities and the trades over science, science is thought of as being something esoteric that goes on behind closed doors, guys in white coats speaking a secret language, it doesn’t affect our everyday lives.  In fact science has much more of an effect on everyday life than any other realm of human endeavor because the stuff that we do in the lab ultimately makes its way out into the market place or it changes people’s notion of who they are and how they’re related to each other, whatever it might be.  Science does have a very profound effect on human life and, you know, the pace of scientific change is accelerating, you know, we’re discovering more these days than we ever have in history, scientific history, human history and, you know, the pace of change is so high that even scientists can’t keep up with it, so we can’t expect the public to know everything but I think people should be somewhat literate in science, they should be able to, you know, tell you something about the way the universe works, about the way the earth orbits around the sun, describe DNA and actually be able to define what it is and what it does, you know, know what a mutation is, know the basics of medicine, the diseases that you come down with that most people will come down with and how they work so that you can keep on the lookout for them.  I mean I think that a certain basic level of scientific literacy is simply necessary in the same way that, you know, we learn to do addition and subtraction, we can balance our check books, I mean to me these are just basic everyday things that every citizen needs to be aware of, in part because of that incredible pace of change at the moment and the idea that science is becoming so powerful now that the debate is really not about can we do this anymore, it’s more about should we do this.  Should we be making these choices, discovering these things, using the technology in this way or that way?  These are broader social questions, they’re not simply things that should be left up to the scientists, there’s something every citizen has a stake in, genetically modified foods, do we want that as a society, you know, there’s a lotta debate and I think there’s a lot of misinformation on both sides, some people who oppose it, they don’t really understand it and people who, you know, perhaps have a vested interest and think that it’s completely safe, but it is a debate that we need to have as a society and to have a debate you need to have some background knowledge to be able to discuss things.

Recorded on: 5/22/08

Question: What are the risks of access to genetic information?

Transcript: We are entering a realm or an era like it or not of personal knowledge of your own genome in the next 5 to 10 years, I suspect, I very strongly suspect.  As a matter of course educated people in western countries, i.e. people who have access to these resources and its relatively expensive right now but it will get cheaper and cheaper over time.  People in these places will have access to their own genetic code, they’ll understand their risks of various diseases, they’ll know more about their ancestry, all these other things.  But it’s really the disease stuff that I think gets people a little bit concerned that’s because ancestry is, you know, it’s one part of who you are, it’s what you’ve inherited, these genetic markers that don’t necessarily affect any phenotypic trait the way you appear in a disease state, whatever it is.  They simply connect you with your ancestors and so, you know, I think that’s a story that in a way people can kind of accept.  But the medically relevant genetic traits that are being tested for now by some of the companies and more and more that’s gonna move into the clinic and you’re gonna get it done when you go to visit your doctor very early on in life very likely.  That tells you about your future, that’s not just about where you came from, that’s about where you might be going and I think that’s what scares people a little bit about this.  Now what people should understand and we as geneticists I think, you know, we have to take it upon ourselves to educate people about why this is important and why it’s worth doing.  These are not genetic variants that for the most part are a death sentence okay.  Yes there are genetic variants that have, you know, 100% penetrance if have them you are definitely gonna come down with a particularly nasty disease, whatever, those are relatively rare.  For the common diseases, the ones that affect most people that most people will be afflicted by in their lifetimes, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, stroke, etc.  For those disorders the genetic variants are a little bit iffier, i.e. you’re carrying a variant but it doesn’t mean that you have a 100% chance of coming down with the disease, it just increases your risk and in fact you can modulate that risk, you can reduce it by changing your lifestyle.  So if you’ve got a lot of genetic variants that predispose to obesity, if you’re really careful about what you eat and you exercise a lot, you can probably avoid that that’s the power of the genetic knowledge, it’s not the idea that it’s gonna tell you what your future definitely will be.  It tells you one possibility that you can choose to change, you can take your life into your own hands and you can change your behavior, you can modulate your risk.  So if you’re tested when you’re 3 years old, 5 years old, 10 years old, whatever it is, you can actually live your life in such a way that you could probably reduce, mitigate those risks to a large extent.  Potentially in the future there might be drugs you could take that would help to reduce those risks.  But the idea is that this is meant to be empowering information, it’s not meant to take away your choice, I think that’s the fear, it’s this idea that you’re gonna get a test result and it’s gonna kind of force you into a corner, you’re not gonna have any choice, this is what you’re gonna die of, like you’re gonna get a little certificate that says you’re gonna die at age 62 on April the 17th of this particular disorder, no it’s not like that at all.  It tells you about your relative risks, relative to everybody else and I think that is, you know, something that’s tremendously powerful and I think that future generations, our children’s generation, my daughter’s generation or perhaps their kids will look back on this era and say “I can’t believe that people were debating this, I mean honestly, how could they live their lives blindly, knowing that there were risks out there.”  You know, think about parents these days, women who are in their 40s who decide to get pregnant and they want to test the fetus to see if it has Down syndrome or another trisomy or whatever it might be, a genetic problem, which we know the risks of because we know that older women have higher risks into these things.  So women choose not to get tested but most do get tested, they want to know what those risks are.  I think that people will have a similar view in the future of broad genome scanning, knowing your overall risks of all these common diseases.  I don’t think it’s a bad thing, I think again it’s a very empowering thing.

Recorded on: 5/22/08

Transcript: Climate change is in my opinion one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century.  It is not in my mind just a scientific or technical challenge it’s not necessarily something that we’re gonna be able to solve by inventing something.  I think it’s more of a social challenge and that is in part because of the migrations that are gonna be driven by climate shifts and, you know, whatever we decide to do today, many of the things that happen going on, increasing, you know, carbon emissions, increasing greenhouse gases, will take a generation or two to play out and so, you know, even if we decided in 2008 to freeze our carbon emissions at a certain level or even back it off by 20%, probably this process would go on for another 20, 30, 40 years perhaps.  We don’t know, lots of speculation and the idea is that we have set in motion events that our children are gonna have to deal with and I think that, you know, we have to shift our thinking away from next quarter or a year or two down the line and start to think in terms of well, you know, so how will we deal with climate refugees in 20, 30, 40 years when things get really bad.  How will our children and grand children deal with it, you know, we’re bequeathing to them this world that we in part created and so I think, you know, we need to think about educating them, you know, about these events, not simply the science of climate change but also the social impact of climate change and how it might affect the world they live in.

Recorded on: 5/22/08

Transcript: Okay a nice simple question, what’s gonna happen in the next 10,000 years, okay.  Yeah I mean listen what is very clearly happening to a much greater extent now than it ever has throughout human history is that people are moving around much more, the rate of migration is increasing exponentially, you know, think about the person you might be dating or married to and think about how far apart you might have been born, you know, typically these days it’s hundreds or even thousands of miles.  If you go back through European church records which, you know, go back several hundred years so they’re a good place to start and you look at the distance between spouses birth places, you have to enter that in the church record when you get married, for most of recorded history, so this is starting kind of the 15th, 16th century and going up to the present.  For most of that time people were born 5 to 10km so a few miles apart, you’re marrying somebody from the same village or somebody from the next village over and then in the industrial revolution around 1800 that explodes. Suddenly people are moving around and that’s happening even more today, people are moving around to a much greater extent and so everybody’s entering this melting pot and I sometimes jokingly say “We’re all becoming more like Tiger Woods” you know, we’re meeting people from all over the world and we’re mixing and, you know, the kids are mixed and their children are even more mixed and so, you know, clearly that is a prediction of what is going to happen over the next few hundred years.  What is also gonna happen and this is something that comes out of the work that we’ve been doing recently in the Genographic Project and the results we’ve been getting.  It’s becoming more and more clear to us that when we look at the timing of these migratory events, the big events particularly in the Paleolithic but even as we move into the Neolithic, the last 10,000 years with the advent of farming and expansion of empires and so on.  Many of these migratory events, the big ones seem to have been driven by shifts in climate and, you know, this could have to do with the ice age, it has to do with the way the earth precesses in its orbit and shifts and the Sahara patterns, you know it’s wetter sometimes and drier other times, changing sea levels in South East Asia, changing sea levels, allowing the Baring Land Bridge to be created between Asia and the Americas, allowing people to populate the Americas.  I mean time and time again we see these major migrations driven in large part by climatic shifts and obviously we are going into another period of climate change, you know, you can debate the extent to which humans are causing this.  In my opinion yes we clearly are contributing to it but we’re also in a broader warming trend which has been going on for the last few hundred years and is probably gonna continue for many more hundreds of years and that’s gonna have a huge effect on the areas, the climate of the areas where people live and places like the Sahel region in Africa which is marginal at best, are being replaced by desert and so what are these people gonna do when they can’t grow food anymore, well they’re either gonna die or they’re gonna have to move somewhere else.  What about the people living in low islands like the Maldives and Tuvalu, which I visited about a year and a half ago during some research for a book, you know, 10 feet high at the highest point and as sea levels rise, what are people gonna do, well they’re gonna have to leave or they’re gonna drown.  So, you know, climate change is going to continue to influence and motivate people to migrate around the world and, you know, I think one of the big issues in the next century is going to be dealing with these climate refugees.  What are you gonna do with millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions of people driven to leave the place where they live today by a climate shift which makes it untenable to live there anymore.

Recorded on: 5/22/08

Unlike faith, science is about asking questions, Wells says.

Question: How do people of faith view your findings?

Transcript: I think that science and faith, you know, do have somewhat of an adversarial relationship in that faith is based as the name suggests on faith, you’re not testing anything, you’re given the answers in a book or by your elders and it’s about accepting those answers.  Whereas science is about always asking questions, it’s about testing things, it’s about assembling evidence and saying, you know, do we come down on this side of the argument or the other side and so I think there’s always going to be some tension there.  Now that said I think it’s possible for people to have religious beliefs and still believe in evolution and, you know, the genetic details that we’re discussing in the lectures that I give and the books and films and everything else we do as part of the Genographic Project.  I would like people I suppose, you know, if you’re talking in particular about the Judea Christian story, the story in the bible, book of Genesis, perhaps to see that as a metaphor, you know, and if you see Genesis as a metaphor the story is actually not that different from the one we’re telling using the genetics, the ideas that we all come from a common source, we trace back to a few people living in a particular location in the world.  You can call it Philadelphia or East Africa or the garden of Eden, wherever you wanna place it, I mean the genetic evidence is that we come out of Africa that is our scientific garden of Eden and we scattered to the wind, you know, we are the descendents of that small group of people living in that one particular location and so, you know, it’s not that different from the story in Genesis.  Now the Judea Christian story’s not the only one and there are lots of creation stories, every group around the world has some kind of a story that explains its existence and, you know, it’s probably something inherent in human beings that, you know, makes them want to provide answers and science is one way of answering that question, faith is another way of answering it and traditional stories and so, you know, we do sometimes come into conflict to a certain degree with traditional stories, traditional notions of creation, the idea that people have been living in the same location forever, you know, that they were created de novo out of the earth or out of the animals that live there, song lines in Australia, people being created out of goannas or witchity grubs or whatever it is and, you know, you have to say that yes of course you have this particular, you know, attachment to the location, the geographic location where you live and that’s very strong and, you know, in the case of Australia, you’ve been here for 50,000 years, longer than Europeans have been living in Europe.  But in addition you have a deeper connection, just as everybody else does around the world to our ancestors, all the way back in Africa and so we’d like to see the stories that we’re telling using science as complimentary to the stories that people are taught by their elders.  Not as a replacement but as a compliment to the traditional notions of where people came from.

Recorded on: 5/22/08

 Transcript: Yeah well the indigenous peoples of the world are in a way kind of endangered today for a lack of a better term.  It’s not so much that people are literally dying off; it’s that the cultures are being lost.  We’re actually going through a period of culture mass extinction at the moment.  Now we don’t know exactly the rate at which this is happening, linguists tell us that of the 6,000 languages spoken around the world today by various people, by the end of the century between half and 90% will no longer be spoken, they’ll be extinct and how this typically occurs again is not that the people themselves go extinct but they, you know, they leave behind their ancient villages, they move to perhaps a growing mega city, Sao Paolo or Chennai or whatever it might be and when they do they enter the dominant culture and their kids start to speak the dominant language and they lose touch with the old ways and pretty soon that language and that culture have died, they cease to exist.  The people are still there, their DNA is still there, it’s entered the melting pot, you know, the molecules are still floating around but they’ve lost that geographic context.  So in effect the trail, the genetic trail that our ancestors left in the DNA of indigenous peoples around the world is being subsumed into this global monoculture as this happens and so we actually have kind of a closing window of opportunity in which to do this work, you know, we’re trying to get this genetic snapshot of what our ancestors bequeathed to us, these genetic trails that lead all over the world before they’re mixed and mashed together.  You this is probably a good thing, socially, everybody’s coming back together and mixing up and it’s gonna be harder and harder to tell one group from another but it makes our lives very, very difficult as population geneticists because we can’t trace these distinct migratory routes; they’re in the process of being lost.

Recorded on: 5/22/08

Question: What conclusions have you been able to gather from the data so far?

Transcript: Probably the coolest thing to come out of the genetic results is how small the human population probably was.  If you go back to around 70 to 80,000 years ago, we were very nearly extinct, probably the total number of people living in the world at that time and again we were still all living in Africa could have fit into a small symphony hall, around 2000 people, maybe even less and so we nearly went extinct and this was probably due to climate shifts that were occurring around that time.  We were in the midst of the last ice age, things really started to get bad between 70 and 80,000 years ago. There was a massive volcanic eruption in Sumatra that is Mt. Toba that erupted around 74,000 years ago.  The combination of these factors probably drove the human population very close to extinction and we came back from that and we figured out a way to survive these horrible climatic conditions and that probably primed the pump if you will to allow us to go out and explore the rest of the world and actually make proper forays into the part of Asia, off into Europe, South East Asia, Australia and ultimately into the Americas between 15 and 20,000 years ago.  So the evidence is that we started to leave between 50 and 60,000 years ago following a coastal route along the south coast of Asia, beach combing our way along, living on, you know, marine resources, shellfish, probably doing a little bit of fish trapping.  We rapidly made it down to South East Asia to Australia by around 50,000 years ago when humans show up in the fossil record there.  There was a later migration between 45 and 50,000 years ago according to our data that came via an inland route, cross the Sahara at a point when the Sahara was actually a very nice place to live.  Every 20,000 years or so due to fluctuations, the way the earth precesses in its orbit, the way it rotates and this causes shifts in the way the monsoon rains fall in Africa.  Every 20,000 years or so the Sahara’s actually a pretty nice place and it was an extension of the grasslands of East Africa around 50,000 years ago and this allowed people to slowly move up into northern Africa, out into the middle east and that led them on their way to the rest of the world.  So it’s really kind of these grand sweeping Paleolithic migratory routes that we’re following but also very specific details, I mean all the way up to the present day nearly, historical events.  We published a paper about a month ago in the American Journal of Human Genetics showing that the Christian population of Lebanon is carrying genetic markers that tie them to the crusaders from Western Europe who came over only about 800, 900 years ago and so these are events that we knew about from the historical record, hadn’t seen a genetic trail, prior to this because we didn’t have enough samples but now we’re seeing it, you know, as we increase the sample size; everything from the very earliest days of our species up to very recent events.

Question: How do you know where a group of people was 35,000 years ago?

Transcript: Okay what underpins the work we’re doing, the scientific work is the idea that DNA changes over time at a regular rate, so DNA is a very long linear molecule, it’s a coded molecule, there are 4 sub units, so think of it as Morse code but with 4 different possibilities rather than just dots and dashes and it’s the sequence of these sub units that is basically a blue print to make another version of you and if you choose to have kids, as your parents did, you have to copy this very long molecule or document to pass it onto them and when you’re copying it, because it is so very long, there are billions of these sub units, occasionally you’re gonna make a mistake, a typo.  So imagine copying the longest text you can think of, War and Peace but multiply it by a hundred and you’re copying it by hand, staying up late at night and you’re very, very careful but occasionally you’re gonna make a typo, substitute and I for an E or in the case of DNA, a C for G or an A for a T.  These don’t happen very often at the genetic level, they’re called mutations, when they do occur and they occur at a rate of around 50 per genome per generation.  So not very often, 50 out of the billions of sub units we have.  But when they happen and they get passed on through the generations, they become markers of descent and that’s how we place people into these lineages.  So again if you share one of these markers with someone, you share an ancestor, the person who first had that change in their DNA.  Now because we know the rate at which they occur, by looking at the number of changes that have accumulated on a lineage, we can estimate the age of that lineage and by comparing the distribution of the lineage to populations all over the world, seeing which population’s it’s found in, in which population’s it’s not found in.  Indigenous groups, people who’ve lived in the same place for a long period of time give us an insight into their ancestor’s genetic patterns.  By looking at the distribution in those groups all over the world we can actually map where it originated and how it spread around the planet.

Recorded on: 5/22/08

Question: How do you go about collecting data?

Transcript: You know, we’re building on the work of many, many people, particularly the work of the man who was my post doctoral advisor at Stanford, Lucca Cavalli-Sforza who really kind of created the field of human population genetics, starting back in the 1950s, studying blood groups and other so called classical polymorphisms, these are protein variance and cell surfaces like the blood groups and, you know, so studying things that were studyable in those days before the DNA era before, you know, molecular genetics really came along and he started to ask questions like, you know, does this genetic information tell us something about how human populations are related and yes it did but it was kinda vague.  And it was really only with the era of DNA sequencing which came about in the 1980s that people could start to get out some of the details of this. 

Question: Where do you get blood samples?

Transcript: Yeah and so, you know, the question that has been asked since that first, you know, era back in the 1950s and even before was just an open ended one, you know, so what is the pattern of variation look like and, you know, where does it lead us.  We’re starting in the present in effect so we’re kind of answering the question in reverse, we’re searching for origins in people alive today and so there’s some theoretical framework built into it.  But basically what you’re looking at are shared genetic variance.  So if you share a genetic marker with someone, these are changes that occur from time to time as DNA’s been copied to pass on through the generations, if you share one of these markers, you are part of the same lineage of the human family and by looking at the pattern of shared markers all over the world we can trace further and further back into time.  So we place even to ever deeper branches on the human family tree and so we wanna take as wide a survey of human variation as possible.  Ideally we would sample every person alive today and sequence their entire genome, now that’s, you know, literally impossible, it’d be way too expensive.  We have, you know, to spend the money on other perhaps more important things but in effect we wanna take as broad of a survey of human diversity as possible.  So we sample people from around the globe and just ask what do the patterns look like and in particular we ask where are those deepest branches on the tree.  So where is humanity most diverse, where has it been accumulating variation for the longest and that leads us back to Africa and the story that the DNA tells us is that we all came out of Africa very recently and, you know, it’s nothing new to say that we are an African species.  Darwin said that 130 years ago in The Descent of Man, he wrote that we most likely came from Africa because our nearest cousins the apes appeared in Africa first and so we most likely appeared there as well.  The key is to give a time and so was it 23 million years ago when apes appear in the fossil record, now as recently as 60,000 years ago.  Every human alive on the planet was living in Africa and it’s only in the last 60,000 years that people started to scatter around the rest of the world and so the idea is you sample as many people as possible, the more the better.  2000 is good, 20,000 is better, 200,000 is even better and you ask where did their lineages trace back to.

Recorded on: 5/22/08

Question: Why is the information you’ve gathered so powerful?

Transcript: Why is it powerful to individuals? I think particularly in a society like the one we have in the United States, we are a nation of immigrants and, you know, I was talking to some school kids this morning, giving a talk to high school kids who had migrated here, you know, their parents had come here from all over the world, we had kids from Sri Lanka, we had kids from Korea, we had kids from Hong Kong, you know, all over the planet, Puerto Rico and everybody has kind of a vague notion that they’re a hyphenated American, I’m African American, I’m Irish American, whatever it might be and beyond that they don’t know that much about their ancestry and so I think there’s a real desire particularly in places like the US, nations of immigrants to connect with the past, to connect with the ancestral homeland.  And so I think that’s why individuals at least in part are interested in testing their DNA because it allows you to go back beyond traditional genealogy and get into the kind of deep aspects of your ancestry, where you’re really deeply connected to around the globe.  Scientifically, you know, this is an effort to answer a key philosophical question, I mean it’s something philosophers and people who study religions and, you know, thinkers in general have been pondering for years, for a millennia, you know, where do we all come from, how do we relate to each other, why do we speak different languages, all of these basic things and, you know, now we have the tools of science that actually start to chip away at that and answer some of these questions.

Question: How do people react your story?

Transcript: Yeah, you know, as I tell the story, it is interesting to see people’s reactions, particularly the idea that we’re all still living in a small African family, 60,000 years ago, that’s only 2000 human generations.  I mean that’s a very close degree of relationship or degree of separation among everybody alive today.  The idea that we’re all cousins, separated by no more than 2000 generations and you see this light go on in people’s heads and they sometimes gasp and go “Wow, that’s amazing” I mean I think inherently most human beings looking around at this incredible dizzying barouche diversity that humans exhibit all over the world, the languages and the skin colors and hair types and morphologies, you know, I think the knee jerk reaction would be “God we must have been diverging for millions of years” and that’s what physical anthropologists thought until quite recently and so the genetic results really kind of tossed that out and they say “No, all of that is literally just skin deep” and when people really take that on board and they realize that underneath the skin we’re all effectively members of this small African family, I think it sometimes boggles their mind and that’s, you know, that’s one of the great things that I get to do as a scientist is to go out and tell the story to people and, you know, obviously the details of how we made the migratory journeys and all these other things, that’s really cool stuff but this underlying theme of similarity, near identity, you know, battling adversity, coming back from a near extinction event as a family that’s the take home message and that’s the thing that really gets people excited and really kinda blows their minds and it’s amazing to see it happen.

Recorded on: 5/22/08

It's one way to answer a deceptively simple question: where did we come from?

Question: What is the Genographic Project?

Transcript: Genographic is really a concerted scientific effort to make sense of what is in many ways a deceptively simple basic human question, where did we all come from, you know, I think everybody asked themselves at some point, you know, how did we get here, why are there so many different types of people, languages, spoken around the world, why do we look so different and so on.  And we’re using the tools of science, in particular the tools of molecular genetics to answer that question, to tell the story of our species in effect, how we started off as a small group of hunter gatherers in Africa, 60 to 70,000 years ago and how within the last 60,000 years we’ve scattered to the wind to populate the world and in the process increased to 6½ billion people.

Question: Where did it all begin?

Transcript: Well, it depends on how far back you wanna go, I mean when I was a kid I was fascinated by history, I saw the King Tut exhibit that toured the states back in the late 70s and, you know, came away from that just totally obsessed with the past and the idea that maybe I could travel back in time and imagine myself at the time of King Tut 3500 years ago.  And read everything I could on ancient history and the middle ages and all sorts of other things and was convinced that that was the direction I was headed in and around the time I was 9 or 10 my mother went back to school to get her PhD in biology and as you do sometimes, you know, your kids go into work with their parents, I went to lab with her and I discovered that science is really kinda cool, it’s really fun, you know, it’s about solving puzzles on a daily basis and what kid wouldn’t like that.  And so I decided that I, you know, I was interested in science but I didn’t wanna give up history either and I wanted to combine the two so I used science as a tool to study the past and that led me to study genetics in college which is kind of the historical branch of biology if you will, we get our DNA from our parents, they get it from their parents and so it traces this lineage back in time and uhm.. studied population genetics which is the study of genetic variation in natural populations for my PhD and by the time I was finishing up my PhD, was convinced that this was gonna be, you know, the main tool for studying human origins and how we populated the world and went out to Stanford and did a post doc there and ran a research group at Oxford and followed a typical academic path and then ended up making a film, “The Journey of Man” which aired on PBS in 2003 and off the back of that film which was a co-production with the National Geographic Channel I started talking to National Geographic, not the media people but the missions people, the people who funded over 8000 research grants, who funded the Leaky family, who funded Jane Goodall, all these people over the years about the work we were doing.  The scientific work and they literally asked me this open ended question, if you could do anything next, what would it be and I said “We need more samples, we need to sample the world’s DNA, we need to increase our sample size by at least an order of magnitude, study hundreds of thousands of people around the world in an effort to figure out how we populated the planet” and that was the genesis of the Genographic Project.

Recorded on: 5/22/08