The Justice

Media Credit: Keith Cheveralls Spencer Wells gave a presentation on the Brandeis Explores the Journey of Humankind program, an initiative in which Brandeis students and faculty traced their genetic heritage.

Mankind has excavated almost every crevice of the earth; there is not one valley left unchartered, one land mass undiscovered or one mountain that has yet to be summited. For Dr. Spencer Wells, however, the question of how man came to inhabit the entire globe remains.

Motivated to find answers to this and other enigmatic questions, Wells has made it his mission to trace human ancestry using genetic sampling.

Last April, 100 Brandeis students and faculty members participated in Wells' Brandeis Explores the Journey of Humankind program, which afforded them the opportunity to trace their ancestry and contribute to the expanding database of the world's migration patterns.

Wells, 38, is the director of the the Genographic Project, a five-year research partnership between IBM and National Geographic. The project charts humans' historical migratory patterns by analyzing the DNA samples of people from all around the world.

Wells discussed the Brandeis Explores the Journey of Humankind program and his overall research on human genetics in an Oct. 14 public presentation entitled "Deep Ancestry: Inside The Genographic Project."

The process of DNA testing in Brandeis Explores the Journey of Humankind was relatively simple for the students and faculty involved. Participants used cheek swabs to take DNA samples that they then submitted to a Genographic Project lab for testing free of charge.

Jeremy Wells '09 was a student in Prof. Peter Conrad's (SOC) class "Nature, Nurture and Public Policy," last semester when he heard about the project at Brandeis.

He agreed to participate in the project because he was curious to see what the tests would uncover about his genetic background.

"When you get the results you get to see all the genetic results going back to Africa," he says.

Prof. Sarita Bhalotra (HELLER) said she participated primarily to help expand the DNA pool available to the overall Genographic Project.

"My major interest was to be one more person to add to the database," she says. "Once more and more people do it, we can get to the point where we can look at more recent immigrations patterns."

Continued...

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