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Bradshaw Foundation, Stephen Oppenheimer, INORA

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Bradshaw Foundation
www.bradshawfoundation.com

A Phoenix business contact recently turned me on to the most fascinating website I have yet encountered devoted to prehistoric times and the migrations of humans. Named after the age-old and stunning Bradshaw rock art inscriptions in Australia, the Bradshaw Foundation focuses on rock art around the world and the brilliant discoveries of Oxford geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer. Its website even offers films and podcasts. Here is how the organization describes itself:

The Bradshaw Foundation until now has been discovering, documenting and preserving ancient rock art around the world. In October 2004 it received the Science & Technology Web Award 2004 (Anthropology and Paleontology) from Scientific American Magazine. The award coincides with the launch of the Bradshaw Foundation's latest development on its website: "The Journey of Mankind -The Peopling of the World". The Foundation has created an interactive map charting the global journey of modern humans over the last 160,000 years. It demonstrates the interactions of migration with climate over this period. Based on a synthesis of the mtDNA and Y chromosome evidence with archaeology; climatology and fossil study; Stephen Oppenheimer has tracked the routes and timing of migration, placing them in context with ancient rock art around the world.

The Bradshaw Foundation until now has been discovering, documenting and preserving ancient rock art around the world. In October 2004 it received the Science & Technology Web Award 2004 (Anthropology and Paleontology) from Scientific American Magazine. The award coincides with the launch of the Bradshaw Foundation's latest development on its website: "The Journey of Mankind -The Peopling of the World". The Foundation has created an interactive map charting the global journey of modern humans over the last 160,000 years. It demonstrates the interactions of migration with climate over this period. Based on a synthesis of the mtDNA and Y chromosome evidence with archaeology; climatology and fossil study; Stephen Oppenheimer has tracked the routes and timing of migration, placing them in context with ancient rock art around the world.

Another delight I discovered at the Bradshaw Foundation's site was INORA, International Newsletter on Rock Art.

With 3 publications per year, in French and English, INORA presents an international forum on ancient rock art and associated areas of archaeology, paleaontology and anthropology.

Edited by Dr Jean Clottes, Former Director of the Chauvet Research Team, funded (or subsidized, or sponsored) by the Ministère de la Culture and the Département de l’Ariège, the newsletter presents the latest discoveries of rock art from around the world. It provides a platform for discussion and debate of current theories and controversies. It examines past, present and future documentation and dating techniques, and their interpretation. It provides online database sources for related literature. The bound copy contains photography, illustrations and bibliographies.

DNA Consultants customers and especially those who have taken the DNA Fingerprint Test will want to check out these resources for understanding human prehistory posthaste! The Bradshaw genetic journey is far more detailed, absorbing and convincing than National Geographic's National Genographic Project.

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Newest Research Confirms Beachcomber Route to Asia out of Africa

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Other Companies Must Revise Their Human Migration Maps

Since Stephen Oppenheimer's The Real Eve suggested that the main out-of-Africa migration of humans proceeded across the mouth of the Gulf of Suez and around the coasts of Arabia, India and Southeast Asia (the "beachcomber route"), controversy has raged about the origin of Asians, whether they split off from the first out-of-Africa groups, sometimes called macro-haplogroup M, in the north central Asian highlands or the Middle East or elsewhere. A massive project spearheaded by the Chinese has put that question to rest. The 40-institution HUGO Pan-Asian SNP Consortium "strongly concludes the southern route made a more important contribution to East and Southeast Asian populations than the northern route," says Li Jin, a population geneticist at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. Jin was one of the lead authors of a study reported in Science, vol. 326, no. 5959, p. 1470, "SNP Study Supports Southern Migration Route To Asia," by Dennis Normile.

DNA Consultants has always followed Oppenheimer's model of the settlement of Asia, but other companies, including the National Geographic Genographic Project with over 200,000 customers purchasing their product, inform their customers differently. Most human migration maps displayed by DNA companies and the news media show Asians splitting off from Europeans and Native Americans in the northern latitudes of Central Asia and do not depict a southern "beachcomber" route at all.

Newly proven southern migration routes.

In July of this year, DNA Consultants discovered ethnic markers it released in its 18 Marker Ethnic Panel that prove a southern divide and origin for Asian populations as in the new study.

According to the Science report, "Anthropologists, ethnographers, and linguists have long struggled to understand the patchwork-quilt diversity of Asia. Indonesia alone claims some 300 ethnic groups; the Philippines has 180 native languages and dialects. Where did they all come from?"

So the previously dominant theory of two major waves of migration from the Middle East must now yield to just one initial migration along the coastal route with populations moving north into East Asia from India and Southeast Asia (see map).

The new study is vindication for the Chinese genetics community, which has often been dismissed and rejected by European and American geneticists. Vincent Macaulay, co-author with Martin Richards of the seminal paper followed by most DNA testing companies, " Tracing European founder lineages in the Near Eastern mtDNA pool," (American Journal of Human Genetics, 67, 1251-1276), when asked about the new findings admitted that the southern coastal route now "seems very strong," as quoted in Science.

Human Migration Map from DNA Consultants' 18 Marker Ethnic Panel.

The study used samples from more than 1900 individuals representing 73 populations and involved 93 researches at 40 institutions in 11 countries and regions in Asia. It was "conceived by Asians in Asia and executed, funded, and completed by an Asian consortium," said Edison Liu, executive director of the Genome Insitute of Singapore. Researchers screened each individual for more than 50,000 SNPs.

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Sarah James commented on 11-Dec-2009 01:51 AM

I seem to recall that the debate about the beachcomber and other possible routes has been knocking around in anthopological circles for a while - at least since the 80s when I was studying anthropology in London. What's wonderful is that the beachcomber route has now been verified, but in the meantime one wonders how many NGGP clients, for example, may believe their ancestral migrations differed, and how widely this scientific breakthrough will be dissemintaed in the public media.

But well done DNA Consultants, and congratulations to the HUGO Pan-Asian SNP Consortium!

Dan commented on 11-Dec-2009 08:30 AM

Makes sense really. What would a regular person do other than follow the warm beach. It seems less likely that a person would go to a cold climate and say "aaahhh this is the place" unless the beach was already taken by someone else.

Nancy Sparks Morrison commented on 11-Dec-2009 03:01 PM

Don,
very interesting research. Makes sense. Explains a lot and glad you were able to realize it before most! :-) Good going!

I intend to do the rest of the DNA next year~ Have loved what you found for me so far!
Nancy

M. Moore commented on 15-Dec-2009 01:43 PM

While I can not extend my knowledge or understanding to the level of Sarah James, I can certainly agree with her comment. Very well written and explained. New discoveries or corrected history?

James R Carney commented on 23-Dec-2009 01:05 PM

This is a very interesting finding. As we have studied the coastal settlements in the south for quite sometime, your research has been fascinating and very plausible with the oral traditions of settlement of the Gulf Coast States in pre American (English Atlantic Coast Settlements). In this New DNA Study Science there is much to learn and most is theory. As students of any science, or academics, we must all keep an open mind and allow for discussion of all possibilities, otherwise we might miss the one great aha Moment. Your openness to research is very refreshing and rewarding.
Keep it up
DJ

Bookmakers commented on 30-Mar-2011 01:01 PM

Hello,I love reading through your blog, I wanted to leave a little comment to support you and wish you a good continuation. Wishing you the best of luck for all your blogging efforts

Does deCODE's Bankruptcy Signal False Promise of Genetic Medicine?

Sunday, December 06, 2009

Future Shock or Future Letdown?

New York Times reporter and DNA author Nicholas Wade raised an interesting question in his report on the bankruptcy last month of Iceland's deCODE Genetics, which attempted to make it possible for an ordinary consumer to buy the latest applicable information on the connection between their personal genes and their personal disease risk. The article was titled "A Genetics Company Fails, Its Research Too Complex."

In the November 17 edition in the Science and Technology section, Wade wrote: "The company's demise suggests that the medical promise of the human genome may take much longer to be fulfilled than its sponsors had hoped." But there may be more to the story. "The discovery that major diseases do not have any simple genetic pattern of causation has dealt a serious setback to the gene-hunting field as a whole," he added.

Signs of the deflation of the field of "gene hunting" over the past 10 years since the Human Genome Project was completed and the second phase of the HGP was announced as focusing on the "conquest" of disease are:

Discovery that genes are not found in continuous sequences or segments or even on the same chromosome.
Realization no DNA can be considered "junk DNA" and even "non-coding" loci have at least place-holder functions and hence their values are not neutral.
Greater respect for the role of environment in inheritance, including the nano-environments within the cell where DNA is stored and replicates.
Jumping the gun on numerous claims concerning genome-wide association studies in scientific journals like Nature and Science, and subsequent retractions by editors and authors.
Ever increasing sample sizes with ever increasing lack of robustness for the data and clarity for conclusions.
A push for extending genetic surveys to rare and under-represented populations, with few surprises in the analysis of the implications for medical research or consequent benefit for public health.
Diminishing returns on research investment (ROI) on nearly every front.
Not a single viable gene therapy product ever introduced.
Realization that only very rare genes are discoverable and selection usually takes care of them and extinguishes them over time; hence the bulk of medical research funds goes toward the rarest of cases and not widespread disease such as cancer or diabetes.

Harvard biology professor Richard Lewontin maintained as long ago as the 1960s, and continued to warn even on the eve of the completion of HGP I in 2000, that gene hunting was essentially a scientific fetish with little true power or efficacy. In 1992, he wrote "The Dream of the Human Genome" as a review article in response to The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project, edited by Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood, and seven other recently published books on the subject of genetics and medicine. The essay was reprinted in Lewontin's own book It Ain't Necessarily So (second edition, New York Review, 2001).

I think it is time to elevate gene hunting to the danger of something beyond a harmless fetish for the members of a narrow profession or scientific sect. Its waste and failures have taken on the proportions of a national form of folly and collective denial. While huge expense and sensational efforts continue to be thrown away on the molecular biology revolution, the need to renovate our neglected infrastructure and reform political mechanisms goes unanswered. Resources that might be better allocated keep dwindling. The supposedly most advanced society in history turns a blind eye on such relatively easy measures of public health as universal health care and uncontaminated chemical-free food and water supplies. While geneticists continue to cackle about inch-sized strides in their progress toward scaling the distant peaks of genetic medicine we are slipping into the abyss of logical disconnects.

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naturopathic physician commented on 06-Dec-2009 02:34 PM

The area of personalized genomics for health intervention has not really panned out. For example, the BRCA 1 and BRCA2 genes were hailed with great fanfare a few years ago as causal agents of breast cancer. But the true percentage of BRCA 1 and 2 mutations contributing to breast cancer are between 5 and 10%, leaving an astounding 90-95% of breast cancer due to other environmental factors. It is those factors that bear looking into, not the "faulty" genes.

The available personalized SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) panels that are available today for use without a physicians input, are leading people into unproven territory as the true associations between these SNPs and the disease they purport to contribute , is not supported by science.

FOX News Showcases DNA Consultants

Thursday, December 03, 2009

Dr. Yates was interviewed by WBRC reporter Jeh Jeh Pruitt of FOX News Alabama at the company offices in Phoenix on October 22. The report was broadcast on affiliate stations in late November. Watch it on MyFoxAlabama.com.

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M. Moore commented on 15-Dec-2009 01:44 PM

I hope there are many more interviews with DNA Consultants. Kudos and Cheers!

Acadian Anomalies

Monday, November 30, 2009

Anomalous Native American Lineages

Now Identified Also among Micmac Indians

After posting “Anomalous Mitochondrial DNA Lineages in the Cherokee,” and after being interviewed on the subject by an Internet radio show host, I was contacted by participants in the Amerindian Ancestry out of Acadia Project who were struck by similarities in results for the two groups.

Established in 2006, the Amerindian Ancestry Out of Acadia DNA Project mission is to research and publish the mtDNA and Y chromosome genetic test results of site participants who descend from persons living in Nova Scotia and surrounding environs in the 17th and 18th centuries, focusing specifically upon the early population of l'Acadie. As part of the mission, the Project develops a database of published mtDNA and Y Chromosome test results and encourages the sharing of this information among other similarly focused studies for the purposes of comparison and the advancement of science and research.

According to Project Administrator Marie A. Rundquist, “We descend from both Amerindians (mostly Mi’kmaq) and the early French settlers who arrived in Port Royal in the 1600s, many of them single French men who married Amerindian wives, whose families would become pioneers of the New World. Our family lines have extended well-beyond the original boundaries of what was known to the French as Acadia, but to our AmerIndian ancestors as Mi’kma’ki, as our ancestors settled the outer-reaches of Nova Scotia, including Cape Breton, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Quebec. Our family lines continue to extend, traversing the entire North American continent and beyond.”

She adds, “Many who live in the United States trace their genealogies back to the first Acadian AmerIndian immigrants who arrived in Louisiana after being deported from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755 (in the "Grand Deportation') -- and belong to a ‘Cajun’ community known worldwide for its food, flair, fun, and love of all things French.

Several members belong, as it turns out, to rare haplogroups X, U, and other "anomalous types" as compiled by me for DNA Consultants customers and reported in the previous blog post.

Some highlights from the study of Cherokee descendants are:

H, the most common European type today, is virtually absent, demonstrating lack of inflow from recent Europeans
J present in lines explicitly recognized to be Cherokee
X the signature of a Canaanite people whose center of diffusion was the Hills of Galilee, hypothetically correlating with Jews and Phoenicians
U suggesting Eastern Mediterranean, specifically Greek
K also suggesting Eastern Mediterranean or Middle Eastern, hypothetically correlating with Jews and Phoenicians
T reflecting Egyptian high frequencies found almost nowhere else

According to Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman, the Cumberland Gap mtDNA Project with overlapping territory with the Cherokee and Melungeon homelands in the Southern Appalachian Mountains also shows elevated frequencies of T. Project administrator Roberta Estes recently published the results of a large study of Native American Eastern Seaboard mixed populations “in relation to Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony of Roanoke” in the online Journal of Genetic Genealogy, 5(2):96-130, 2009. Estes is a board member of the Melungeon Historical Society and has an introduction with links to the study and its data on the society’s blog, titled “Where Have All the Indians Gone?”

Harvard University professor Barry Fell in his book Saga America first published in 1980 presented historical, epigraphic, archeological and linguistic evidence suggesting links between Greeks and Egyptians and the Algonquian Indians of Nova Scotia, Acadia and surrounding regions around the mouth of the St. Lawrence Seaway, particularly the Abnaki ("White") and Micmac Indians. He noted as early as 1976 in his previous study America B.C. that the second century CE Greek historian Plutarch recorded “Greeks had settled among the barbarian peoples of the Western Epeiros (continent).” Fell inferred from Plutarch’s passage “these Greeks had intermarried with the barbarians, had adopted thier language, but had blended their own Greek language with it.” In an appendix, he assembled extensive word-lists comparing Abenaki and Micmac vocabulary in the areas of navigation, fishing, astronomy, meteorology, justice and administration, medicine, anatomy, and economy with virtually identical terms in Ptolemaic Greek. One example is Greek ap’aktes Abenaki/Micmac ab’akt English “a distant shore.”

Fell’s work was continued by John H. Cooper, “Ancient Greek Cultural and Linguistic Influences in Atlantic North America,” NEARA JOURNAL 35/2.

Acadia project’s website is: http://www.familytreedna.com/public/AcadianAmerIndian/default.aspx.

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commented on 18-Jun-2011 02:08 PM

My mother's family has roots from one of the very early Grandmother's of Acadia (Nova Scotia) and my father's parents were born in Sweden. I had my DNA done and my autosomal DNA gives me a 98.6 % with 1.86 error ratio of being from the Orkney Islands..
I am blown away by this finding as I never heard of Orkney Islands until this week and my mother's family is theoretically French.. I can see my father's family originating from the islands as he is a Swede.. I am very interested in any discussion on this
finding.. Thank you

Frazer Campbell commented on 09-Aug-2011 08:05 AM

Hi re the entry above about Nova Scotia and Orkney. It might be that your Orcadian roots are a result of contact with the Hudson Bay Company. Around 75% of Hudson Bay employees were from Orkney, quite a few married Cree women . I am busy with a project
until October 2011 but if you want help to explore this further let me know and I'll try my best. Kind regards Frazer Campbell

Keith Gilbert commented on 24-Mar-2012 04:55 PM

I am 72 years old, my mother was a Mouton. At age 8 my maternal grandmother told me we were Jews...ours was the most un religious family you can imatine.

Keith Gilbert commented on 28-Apr-2012 06:44 PM

I am a descendant of the Mouton line...am very interested in how the Jewish migration to Nova Scotia (Acadia) happened.

Iceland's deCODE Defunct

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Icelandic genomics firm goes bankrupt

Nature 462/401

23 November 2009

In a report by Erika Check Hayden, the journal Nature gloated that the innovative personal genomics company deCODE Genetics went out of business, leaving the disposition of valuable genetic data unclear. "After struggling financially for years, the genomics company deCODE, based in Reykjavik, Iceland, filed for bankruptcy on 16 November," wrote Hayden, who follows the genealogy-and-genetics business beat for Nature. "The question now is whether other companies looking to commercialize genomics will follow the same path."

DNAPrint of Sarasota, Fla., went down that path last February without even an obit in scientific journals.

But according to Kari Stefansson, deCODE's CEO, the fate of the data never was in play since it belonged to individuals who had their DNA tested at their own expense with the service lab of deCODE. The lab, Islensk Erfdagreining, continues to operate today "under the same data and privacy protections as ever, rooted in the Icelandic community and within a tried and tested regulatory environment," wrote Stefansson in a comment on the online report by Nature.

Such an accidentally-on-purpose misunderstanding is more than sloppy science journalism or bad science. It reveals the fundamental hostility of academic geneticists and related disciplines to commercializing or even popularizing DNA. Geneticists should stop thinking they are doing God's work. They should give up the illusion that the great generality of humankind can only understand, profit from and benefit from their work if they, the scientific intelligentsia, condescend to allow it and specify the conditions and goals of its use.

Those on the payrolls of governments and public institutions have received so much money they think now they can be governors -- governors of the applications of their research.

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Interview with Donald Yates on Blog Talk Radio

Saturday, November 07, 2009

Listen to a broadcast about "anomalous DNA" in the Cherokee by principal investigator Donald N. Yates on Blog Talk Radio from October 29. Host, Rick Ozman of the Oopa Loopa Cafe. Length: 2 hours.

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Etruscans Again

Monday, November 02, 2009

When DNA Second-Guesses History . . . and Is Wrong

In a new article in the European Journal of Human Genetics (17/5:693), the enigmatic Etruscans of antiquity are again the subject of a DNA investigation. This time, the study, called "The Etruscan timeline: A Recent Anatolian Connection," uses mitochondrial DNA to probe the ultimate origins of the people, who appeared on the stage of history in about the eighth century BCE. We know this time frame is fairly accurate because the Romans started their calendar in 753 BCE with the founding of Rome and dated all records A.U.C. (Ab Urbe Condita, "From the Founding of Rome"). Roman historians beginning with Ennius and Livy also recount how early Rome was conquered by the Etruscans and made subject to Etruscan kings for the first few centuries of its existence.

That is why it is strange that the present article estimates "an [sic] historical time frame for the for the arrival of Anatolian lineages to Tuscany ranging from 1.1=/-0.1 to 2.3+/-0.4 kya B.P." Based, then, on the retrospective coalescence of DNA, this calculates the Etruscans' migration from an original homeland in Anatolia (modern Turkey) to as late as 1200 CE and as early as 390 BCE. What is going on? The Etruscans were clearly seated in Italy 450 years before 390 BCE, and by 1200 CE, they were long since gone as an entity. In fact, by the time of the emperor Claudius, who wrote a lost history of them around 1 CE, the Etruscans were already considered historical oddities and their language dead.

So are geneticists trying to rewrite history? I think it is a case of a fundamental fallacy in their work. Calculation of a time to coalescence is obviously limited by the validity and reliability of the sample, but it is also very often illusory. To take the example of Native Americans, just because geneticists arrive at a time to coalescence of 10,000 years before present, doesn't mean the place of coalescence has to be in Mongolia/Siberia, where they derive all Native Americans. It could just as well be in the Americas. DNA doesn't necessarily tell us anything about geography. But it is often pressed into service to prop up a theory about human migrations. Let us remember, though, that such constructs are just constructs, so DNA cannot be evidence, only confirmation of someone's historical or racial construct.

If one wishes to speak about evidence in a strict sense, however, it is interesting that the researchers (Francesca Brisighelli et al.) found, by mtDNA sequencing, a "novel autochthomous Tuscan brand of haplogroup U7." This can mean that the same U7 turning up elsewhere may be a sign of Etruscan movements.

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CINDY R commented on 14-Sep-2010 09:15 PM

I'm a U7a.

jojo commented on 01-Dec-2010 07:22 AM

can u shed some light for me? I did my dna and came out halogroup M from my mother. I thought this a mix up because she is 100% Tuscan Italian and we can trace her family on both sides to a single valley in Norther Tuscany. I sent in her dna for a double check and it came up the same again. Note: My mothers family (lineage) as well as a high proportion of inhabitants of this valley have fair skin and distinctive blue eyes. I read up on the history of one of the villages we come from and it was builta and inhabited as a 'buffer/lookout' outpost by the Romans. Maybe they filed it with slaves or ex-slaves but where does the figgin' New Guinea link of Halo-M come in and the blue eyes??? Jojo

Halloween Story: Shades of Peking Man

Friday, October 30, 2009

Scary Findings in Guangxi Region

In a report published in the October 30 number of Science, Chinese paleoanthropologists claimed that the jawbone and teeth unearthed by them recently in the southern province of Guangxi represent a form of man 100,000 years old. Their interpretation of the fossil challenges the Western theory that claims our ancestors peopled the world in a migration out of Africa late in the last Ice Age, about 50,000 years ago. But there is more. American and European scientists stand to lose even more face if China's insistence is true that this early human is a hybrid with H. erectus, a more primitive species also known as Peking Man.

Discoverer Jin Changzhu pointed out that the jawbone curved outward, whereas that of the older species of H. erectus had an inward-sloping chin, and modern human chins generally fut out father than the Guangxi specimen's. Such an intermediate chin, he said, suggested interbreeding with H. erectus.

In the West, paleoanthropologists and geneticists for the most part vehemently deny that any interbreeding between species of man could have taken place before our type emerged as the sole and supreme species favored by evolution. Neandertals, they claim, were replaced by modern humans in Europe and died out without a trace in the genetic record about 30-40,000 years ago.

"The initial publication makes shaky claims based on preconceptions," scoffed Tim White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

The title of the report is "Signs of Early Homo sapiens in China?" It was written by Richard Stone and published on page 655 of Vol. 326, no. 5953, of Science.

The confrontation reminds many of the battle over Peking Man dated to about 500,000 years old. At first, the Chinese maintained that East Asian people were descendants of Peking Man (and not of Africans or out-of-African humans). Later, they modified their view and held that modern Asians represent a hybridization with Peking Man. Possibly all the "races" or continent-specific forms of modern man are the result of anatomically modern humans interbreeding with more primitive hominids in their part of the world.

We wonder why Western scientists are in such a huff about the conclusions of Chinese paleontologists since there is solid proof of admixture between modern humans and archaic human groups like Neandertals, Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis (the fossils of "hobbits" discovered in Indonesia in 2004). One instance among many of publications demonstrating this possibility is: Jeffrey D Wall, "Detecting Ancient Admixture and Estimating Demongraphic Parameters in Multiple Human Populations," Molecular Biology and Evolution, vol. 26, no. 8 (August 2009), pp. 1823-27.

Perhaps the right hand of genetics doesn't know what the left hand of anthropology is doing or saying in this country.

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Officious or Official Regulation?

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Council of Europe adopts protocol on genetic testing for health purposes

In a report so-titled by Laurence Lwoff in the European Journal of Human Genetics (2009) 17, 1374–1377, first published online in July, it was noted that the Council of Europe has weighed in on one of the most controversial areas of DNA testing, whole-genome sequencing and SNP testing to find genetic predisposition to disease for individual customers. Recent editorials in Nature have called for similar measures in the United States, which is home to 23&me and other companies offering such services.

So far, no regulatory proposals have been aimed at genetic ancestry testing, only medical and health-related screening. One of the warnings often raised in the public discussion on genetic testing for health purposes, however, is that results may confuse and unnecessarily alarm consumers--a criticism that could apply equally to ancestry services. Another is that commercial research scientists and business operators may jump the gun with findings and peddle bad science, although critics admit that the state of knowledge on nearly every topic of interest to geneticists and medical researchers is in a constant state of flux. A finding about a gene for Alzheimer's will be trumpeted in the pages of a major journal one week only to be updated or withdrawn in the next.

This being the case, one wonders when discoveries will ever be fit to be commercialized or made available to the public. Should science only serve scientists?

We have always maintained that the would-be regulators underestimate moderately educated people's ability to understand emerging science. They overestimate commercial companies' disregard for professional practices and responsible communications. Most of the measures under discussion will have the effect of denying people access to valuable information. Regulation will also hamper growth in a direct-to-the-consumer business with unimaginable promise for society at large. A home paternity test purchased at the corner drugstore may make all the difference in the life of a family. Discovery of varied ancestry through a DNA test can be an important factor in furthering a consumer's interest in other peoples and countries, in history, and ultimately in tolerance of others. DNA testing can help bring peace of mind but it can also help bring peace in the world.

Many, if not most, of the innovative contributions to society by science have come from non-specialists. The scientific establishment is not oriented toward practical applications of knowledge. The Croatian inventor and engineer Nikola Tesla dropped out of college and never received any formal training. Driven entirely by his natural aptitude for learning, he patented some of the most important contributions to the birth of commercial electricity, including alternating current (AC) electric power systems and the AC motor. His inventions helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. So far from being overpowered by the profit motive, he died penniless at the age of 86 in 1943. No government program or university gave him any support or assistance. Whatever else the Council of Europe deliberated about, we hope they were not cynical or self-important enough to discount the possibility there may be many more popular scientists like Tesla in Europe's future. Science and technology are increasingly becoming a way of life for millions of people around the world who do not happen to have an advanced degree. It is a positive sign that consumers are so eager to take responsibility for their own health they will use the latest innovations from genomics to gain knowledge and control. Scientists should be glad they have such an impact. They should not squander the respect they enjoy in our eyes with pedantic discussions about fixing something that is not broken.

Isolated populations as treasure troves in genetic epidemiology: the case of the Basques

Paolo Garagnani et al. (2009) in European Journal of Human Genetics 17: 1490-1494.

The Basques living on the western border between Spain and France are a unique population. "Basques" often comes up as a match in people's DNA Fingerprint results, often because (as is widely believed, at least) a people resembling Basques helped repopulate the British Isles after the last Ice Age. But Basques are not an isolate. This article proves they blend gradually into their closest neighboring populations in Spain and France so they are not a candidate population, as say the Finns are, for the study of disease associations. "Basques do not show the genetic properties expected in population isolates," according to the authors. On the contrary, as many previous studies suggest, the Basques have so much diversity among themselves they were probably the source of population diffusions in prehistory, not a backwater trap for inbreeding.

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Anonymous commented on 22-Oct-2009 11:28 PM

This is most perplexing and sounds medieval. Does the Council of Europe think we are all children? Are they truly concerned that their citizens may become confused and alarmed? What planet are they living on currently? I suppose they are unaware (or have forgotten) that Darwin had a background in religion (how alarming). This is 2009 and the world is an alarming place. One gets rather used to it though after a number of years. There must be some other reason than this for their suggested protocol. Something truly alarming.

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Bradshaw Foundation, Stephen Oppenheimer, INORA

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Newest Research Confirms Beachcomber Route to Asia out of Africa

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Does deCODE's Bankruptcy Signal False Promise of Genetic Medicine?

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FOX News Showcases DNA Consultants

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Acadian Anomalies

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Iceland's deCODE Defunct

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Interview with Donald Yates on Blog Talk Radio

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Etruscans Again

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Halloween Story: Shades of Peking Man

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Officious or Official Regulation?

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