Description: 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