Testing Blood to Track History
By Stephen Leahy

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,67250,00.html
02:00 AM Apr. 19, 2005 PT

An ambitious and controversial genetics project that uses blood to trace the migration patterns of ancient humans faces a possible boycott as it launches this week.
The Genographic Project will collect 100,000 blood samples from indigenous populations and analyze their DNA. Through this project, researchers hope to answer questions about where the aborigines of Australia came from, or whether it's true that Alexander the Great fathered the blue-eyed blonds who have been in Afghanistan for more than 2,000 years.

But collecting the blood may not be so easy. Burned by earlier for-profit DNA collectors who patented indigenous people's genes, a small but influential organization, the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism, has asked indigenous people to boycott the project and its sponsors.
"We're not in the blood-selling business," said Debra Harry, the group's executive director. "We don't need this speculative information -- we already know where we come from."

The Genographic Project is the brainchild of the National Geographic Society and features IBM as its key partner in building the world's largest and most sophisticated human DNA database. The program will cost at least $40 million over five years and includes support from the Waitt Family Foundation of San Diego (which was founded by Gateway founder and chairman Ted Waitt).

The first humans are believed to have left their birthplace in northeastern Africa and spread across the globe between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago. Using DNA samples from indigenous peoples, researchers believe they can trace the various routes these early people traveled to reach the four corners of the Earth.

The key to this genetic archeology is that some components of our DNA change very little from generation to generation. Each parent contributes half of a child's DNA, which combines with the other parent's DNA to form a new genetic combination. This gives each of us a unique set of attributes: hair, eye and skin color; our athleticism or lack of it; and so on.

But not everything genetic goes into the mix. All males have Y chromosomes as part of their DNA, and these are passed from father to son unchanged for generations, except for random mutations. In a similar fashion, both sons and daughters inherit mitochondrial DNA, which also does not change from generation to generation, directly from their mothers.The naturally occurring random mutations in DNA provide unique markers that geneticists use to trace the DNA back to the point at which a particular mutation first occurred. If it tracks back to a particular region, then the genetic lineage with those unique markers can be used to track prehistoric migration patterns.

Time is running out, however, because more and more indigenous people are leaving their ancestral villages and heading into the great genetic mixers called cities.
"It's a large and technically challenging project, but nothing IBM hasn't done before," said Saharon Rosset from IBM Research. IBM will create a secure, scaleable database that will store the data centrally, and will provide sophisticated online collaboration tools.
The results and data will be made public through the National Geographic and Genographic websites so that both indigenous people and the general public can follow and participate in the project, Rosset said. "While the data will be public, privacy will be ensured."

The project is making extensive efforts to obtain informed consent from indigenous people, as well as establishing a legacy fund so native communities can benefit from the project, he said.
Harry, of the Indigenous Peoples Council, is irked by the considerable references to how the Genographic Project will help indigenous peoples. "I can think of better ways to help us," she said. She doesn't think informed consent is possible with some of the very vulnerable native communities who likely won't understand the ramifications or implications of the project.

The whole project is fraught with ethical issues, said Harry. Similar issues killed a similar venture, the Human Genome Diversity Project, 10 years ago.
"What's to stop some company from taking information from the Genographic database and using it for commercial purposes without compensation to the original donors?" she asked.

This a historical and geographic project, Rosset said. "We're not looking for genetic markers of medical interest. There is no medical research going on here.
"I think many people around the world are very curious about their story, their people's story and our story as a human family," he said.