Presenter:
Troy Duster, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, CA

Question and Answer Period

Troy Duster:
Thank you for the invitation to join you in this conversation about authenticity, genealogies, and what I will call for myself, a cautionary tale. I am ambivalent about using certain scientific procedures to construct genealogies. I also, at some point in my own experience celebrate that idea. There is a tension; I think it's a useful one.

About five years ago, there was a series of PBS documentaries on slavery. I was invited to a panel of "local experts" for the Bay area discussions on the topic. The panel included the distinguished historian Leon Litvak, an economist of slavery, a sociologist, several others and me. The moderator was a tall, distinguished, and somewhat arrogant in posture and demeanor Englishman. He opened the panel by asking Leon Litvak whether the presentation of slavery was authentic. Leon spoke for four or five minutes saying how he thought they had gotten certain things right while exaggerating certain things. The moderator turned to the economist and said, "What about the economics of slavery?" He got another five minutes of expertise. Then, he threw me a curve-ball: "Professor Duster, what's your personal relationship to slavery?" I had been expecting something about my expertise in sociology, so I was taken aback and decided to retaliate. So I said, "I come from a long line of slave owners."

The audience did what you did. Some of them thought that was somewhat amusing. Some thought that this was not a joke. What was I possibly suggesting? After about a moment of silence, I said, "Let me explain. My grandmother was a slave, but she wrote down much of her autobiography in her diary, which was later on authenticated, and she described that her father was the son of the plantation owner. That is, her grandfather was the slave owner." That story shocks no one in this room. We all know that slavery was about the ways in which slave owners routinely fathered slaves. There was a bit of relaxation but, the tension remains. What was I doing saying that I was from a long line of slave owners - a genealogy?

Put that story aside for a moment while I tell you a second story, this one about Muhammad Ali. This is from the New York Times last February. "Ali Said to Have Irish Roots." Researchers at the Clare Heritage Center claim that Abe Grady came to the US in the 1860's, went to Kentucky and married a black woman. Their son married a black woman and one of that couple's daughters, Odessa Grady, married Cascius Clay who then had a son called Cascius Clay who changed his name in '64. The story runs on to suggest that there is strong anthropological, cultural and genetic evidence in support of this assertion.

As in my story about my grandmother, there's something deeply counter-intuitive going on here. It grabs you that the Irish would claim that Ali was Irish. It has to do with identity and it's embeddedness in our routine assumptions about who we think we are. It is the flip side of my story.

I now want to focus on the matter of authenticity, genetics and genealogy. It's the social claim that interests me. In the last two decades we have witnessed a development that is stunning in using genetics to get at what we have become to believe are definitive truths about claims-making.

Almost all of you know the story of how historians for 150 years had been saying that Thomas Jefferson could not have been the father of the children of Sally Hemings. It was a debate in the literature but historians said it was impossible. Evidence had been on the cultural side, evidence about the way Jefferson spent time up there on that hill, and the way he cared for Hemings children, much of the information was cultural and anthropological. But, historians kept saying, oh no, it could not be. In November 1998, Nature, the esteemed magazine of the biological sciences, published a story that said that, "all paternally-related males have the same Y-chromosome." It showed that while Thomas Jefferson did not have any sons who survived to produce children, his father's brother did have sons and thus the Y-chromosome was available for analysis. They concluded that it was possible to locate five descendants of Field Jefferson, that is, the direct male line of descent with Thomas Jefferson. These individuals would have the same Y-chromosome DNA as Thomas Jefferson and any male descendants of this line. The male line descendants of two of Sally Hemming's sons were located on their Y-chromosomes DNA was examined for comparison to the Y-chromosome DNA of the Field Jefferson descendants. The DNA from the five male line descendants of the oldest son of Sally Hemings did not match the Jefferson DNA. However the DNA from one of the sons, Eston Hemings, matched perfectly the Jefferson DNA. Suddenly, historians, who had been saying for 150 years that it was inconceivable that Jefferson could have fathered Hemings' children, caved in. Within six months, most historians of Jefferson had said, we are wrong. Now that's the story that I want to highlight as I make my remarks, that the DNA had become a kind of definitive statement about truth, reality and lineage.

Think of your former president, who denied for a long time a certain thing and then a blue dress appeared and then he recanted. Why? The blue dress contained the definitive, in terms of the social reality and he said, 'We never really had relations; it was something else.' DNA - definitive social realty.
Another example is DNA in exculpation in forensic cases. A near-by state, Illinois, has suspended the death penalty because DNA has freed about 12 to 13 people across the country who were on death row and in another 85 around the country, the DNA did not match for people who were accused of other crimes. Think of the social power of the DNA, when to get a person off of death row, to suspend the very practice of the death penalty. It is happening now in four states, why, because the DNA tells us so.

But what is definitive? Here we move to the cautionary part of the tale. Is it so definitive that Jefferson's white relatives have now agreed on the familial kinship extension and embraced their DNA-related family members? The New York Times published a story a few months ago saying that in spite of the DNA evidence, the white Jeffersons said, "No, you still cannot be part of this family, this club, this thing called the Jeffersons." Whatever they were doing together socially, politically and morally, you are distinct. So it is definitive at one level, but the white Jeffersons are the other social reality. No matter what the DNA says, the Hemings descendents are not in the club.

About a year-and-a-half ago, an article appeared first in the Jerusalem Post, comparing the DNA of Arab and Israeli men. Let me give you a quick report of what the research said. DNA research carried out at the Hebrew University medical school and at the University College of London showed that Jews and Arabs are closely related at the level of DNA. Over 7 out of 10 Jewish men and half of the Arab men whose DNA was studied, had Y-chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors, who lived in the Middle East in Neolithic to prehistoric times.

The story goes on to detail the nature and character of the connection between Arabs and Jews. Consider this little segment. "Oppenheimer and her colleagues tested blood from 143 Israeli and Palestinian Moslem Arabs whose great-grandmothers and fathers were related. Chromosome sets of data were compared with that of 119 Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, and the conclusion was that comparing these data sets, the Arabs and Jews were much more connected to each other, in terms of their DNA, than was a sample of persons from the western part of Wales."

If Sharon and Arafat read this story, do we think there would be an embrace across that great divide? Again, what's at issue here is not what's definitive in terms of the DNA, but the social and political realities that face us. It's an aspiration, it's a hope, and I want to applaud at one level, that we find our common experience as humans in the DNA, but there is a kind of mystic or cosmic unreality, this hope that somehow, having shown the DNA to be connected, that we will find what, political solutions? Obviously the rhetoric here is exaggerated, and I'm making a point about what is and what is not definitive. It doesn't matter in some settings.

One variation of this is to "trace" ones lineage. The problem is the technology that permits us to trace our lineage is relatively limited. Here's where I need to talk a little bit about a technical problem, but I will try to make it as straightforward as I can.

Currently, what we can do with the technology is to take the Y-chromosome - males are X and Y; females are X and X. We can trace the Y-chromosome back, so to a father's father or a father's, father's father, great-grandfathers, all the way down the line, can be traced on the Y-chromosome.

On the female side, we can trace the mother's mother, or the mother's mother's mother across what is called the mitochondria line. What this looks like is something like this [projection].

So we have the first generation, X and Y, and is a male, and X and X is female. In the second generation, we can trace that with the Y-chromosome from the father. In the third generation, you go back to the grandfather. What we are finding with Y-chromosome analysis is you have to go back through history to the father's, father's, father's, father.

At the first generation, we have 2 persons; then we have got 2 sets of parents, so we have got 4. The next generation we have 8 people, great-grandparents. But notice we are no longer able, with this technology, to move into this zone. What's happening is this, when I said that my grandmother's grandfather, that's the social history. Why, because we know that this was my mother and now it's back to her father and then father's father. We cannot get there from the technology available to us, except through the mitochondria line, X, X, X, or through this line. So all this lineage, and by the time we get back to, say, the fourth generation, we are up to 16 people. If we can just get one of those 16 from this side and one from this side, that's 14 that are going to be missing. Pull this chart all the way back to about 5 generations, and what you're going to find out is that the technology is going to give us, definitively, on the Y-chromosome, let's say we are up to 65, 128, 256, then only the Y on this axis out here, only the mitochondria way over here. All this is lost. That's an important thing to understand on the notion of authenticity and using the DNA.

When they say that Ali's paternal grandfather [was Irish,] what they were probably doing was tracing this line, if they can get it: father's, father's, father's father. In my case what was happening in here is the missing social relationship, and yet it is the social relationship, which is imperative. Some of you know the story that my grandmother was Ida B. Wells. Now that lineage is what's important to me, not the fact that her grandfather was a slave owner. People who think of me in terms of who I am genealogically don't think across the mitochondria DNA line or the Y-chromosome; it's in that middle section that I would be. Wells becomes the important figure in my life - identity. There's the cautionary tale. More on that in a second.

On the matter of authenticity, let me say a few things now about prospects and horror stories of the DNA. These new technologies have some not so hidden potential to be used for authentication of persons from both "ethnic and racial" groups. For example, we go back to 1887, and we have the Indian Allotment Act. In that act, Native Americans are given certain rights, rights to property, rights to fishing, in exchange for being pushed over onto reservations. 115 years later, we are still concerned about who is a Native American. The 1887 act says that a half-blood - that's the language - that a half-blood Indian, and then decided by the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the tribal council. But along comes the DNA, and now the question is, can we use the DNA to decide who is authentically Native American? A few years ago, in the Vermont Legislature a member of the legislature introduced a bill to use DNA as an authentication device for determining who is and who is not really a member of a tribe.

How is this possible? We have something called the super computer, and given the fact that the revolution in molecular biology has produced the Human Genome Project, that revolution converges with computer technology, so we now have the super computer to solve the mysteries of the human genome. IBM said the machine would have the capacity of 7.3 trillion calculations per second on the DNA. The Blue Gene - it's called that; I didn't make it up; it's called the Blue Gene - will take these different nodes, open up the DNA and do what's called a pedaflop, a quadrillion operations per second.

So what? Well, you know that double helix, the famous double helix circling around like this, all the DNA. We can now use the technology to cut it in half, snip it in half, put it on a computer chip and look at certain patterns. They're called single nucleotide polymorphisms, and with the help of the computer technology, we can show patterns. This is an actual pattern of a polymorphism.

Up until now, this was only a theoretical possibility because there are 3 billion of these base pairs. But with the computer technology, with all these quadraflop calculations, we can now put on computer chips and do analyses…

…by trying to find patterns in the DNA, which would let them say who is authentically a Korean or not. Of course, waiting in the wings, are the Japanese, who've always been sure that they had a distinctive biological makeup. Following will be a number of persons or nations trying to use this technology for their purposes. The question of authenticity, who is and who is not part of the group, is a basic issue here in this technology, and we are going to see it more and more.

The basis for talking about this technology is that we are going to use it for gene discoveries, gene sequencing. Let me back up for a moment and tell you what it is that's at issue with these technologies. Why would one want to head down this path? Let's take the case of prostate cancer among black males. Black males have over twice the rate of prostate cancer as do white males. One technology would be to clinically take a population of black males and look at their DNA, put it on computer chips and see if you could find patterns in the DNA that would permit you to talk about specific markings for those black males that indicated they had a higher risk for prostate cancer. That's a very useful device, if it's stage 1 of a 4 or 5 stage process.

However, and here's the main claim I'm making, if there's a tendency to leave it there, to leave it at the level of patterns in the DNA, one is always in danger of embedding in ones analysis a racist formulation. So here's the problem as I see it. It's all right to use this technology on behalf of, say, gene hunting, but as you saw in the Macrogen Biotechnology case, there are other agendas here, looking for authenticity about who belongs to a group.

Moreover, the technologies head us down another path in forensics, namely, we are going to now claim that by using not just 1 or 2 points but 15 points in the DNA, we can get patterns by which we can "infer the ethnic origin of a person." This paper was published just a year ago, and you can see what it claims. It's claiming that by using this DNA sample, using 6 different loci, that one can conclude the ethnicity of an unknown offender in an investigation for a crime. Most extraordinary, here's the report. Using 6 loci, we infer the ethnic origin of a crime stain. Wrap your mind around that, the ethnic origin of a crime stain, "and discuss how such evidence may be used as intelligence information to reduce the expected number of interviewees to resolve a case."

These technologies, in short, which on the one hand claim to be transcendent of race, that race is no longer part of the phenomenon, upon closer inspection you can see that the science being deployed to recreate the very racial categories that we have said no longer exist. This is not 1920; this is 2001, and a forensic science journal claiming that by using different portions of the DNA analysis with this kind of technology, one can "infer" the ethnic origin. Using the databases of 5 ethnic groups - you see race has now dropped out, ethnicity. "There are more loci to be analyzed and the system will become a more powerful tool for inferring ethnicity." Substitute the term race because the categories that were being deployed in this analysis were about the early Lenia system of races.

Notice the double edge. On the one hand, we could applaud the DNA technology, as people are put into situations where the conclusion is that they are innocent of committing a crime. In Illinois, the death penalty is now on the ropes. Let's applaud that. On the other hand, the same technology that's deployed there can be used in ways that we need to be very alert to "using the DNA to infer ethnicity."

This is only stage one, because as we move into the next decade, these technologies are going to get much, much more complicated, and much more able to let us decode. This is 6 STR's; it'll be up to 30 or 50 STR, points along the DNA. Not just 6 points, but 50 points and "more and more definitive."

Let me draw the relevance back to my chart. Remember I said that using the Y-chromosome analysis and the mitochondria, it looks like this. There are limits to the technology, and all that in the middle is a little bit difficult, indeed impossible. But suppose you have technologies, what are called computer assisted analysis of the DNA, which permit this kind of thing for the purposes, on the one hand, of [detecting] prostate cancer. Applaud that; that's good. On the other hand, inferring the ethnic origin of a crime stain, be alert because behind that is two hundred years of oppression.

Here is our task, how to pull apart, how to tease apart, analytically, politically, socially, these different uses. It would be dumb to simply say, let's get rid of the technology. It would be equally dumb to say, let's march forward. I'm suggesting that our task should be to try to dissect the different uses of the technologies, to applaud those in which we get people off of death row, and to be quite alert to and mindful of, those that reinforce old imageries about the nature and character of our "ethnic origins."

In Tuesday's New York Times there was a full section in Science Times on Decode. Decode is the Icelandic database. Again, many know these materials, but let me just say for those of you who don't, Iceland is a country of about 250,000 people, at most 275,000 people, so it's a relatively small country. Because of that, and because of the fact that it has been isolated for about a thousand years, the idea was that one could go to Iceland and find, in this relatively homogeneous population, technologies that would permit you to find genes for disorders. Decode is the name of this strategy. This company went up to do this, and they were able to persuade the Icelandic legislature to permit access to the health records of almost all Icelanders.

The vote was 42 to 1. There was only one dissenter in the Icelandic legislature. Here we have a private company with access to all this information about the Icelandic people. The first idea was, let's use these technologies, these computer-based analyses of the DNA. People's stuff would be there; we could now put it on the computer and find patterns and markers. But something happened, and the New York Times article on Tuesday displayed this shift in orientation.

What happened is that they found that technology not nearly as successful as using genealogies. It turns out that the Icelandic people are very good record keepers, and going back maybe 17 generations, they've got data. Back in about the 14th century, there was a plague. The plague hit Europe; it also hit Iceland. In Iceland, at least, a quarter of the population died, due to the plague. Then in the 18th century, there was a small pox epidemic, which wiped out another about 20% of the population. So the population has experienced several traumatic jolts, while it's been relatively "inbreed." But that's not what's going to produce the new science; it is the capacity to use genealogies. Here's what the story reported.

They received information about, let's take the case of asthma, 400 asthmatic patients. They then went back into the genealogies and found that there was a connection between people with these genealogies, which they didn't know existed. From there they moved back to the computer assisted technology with DNA, and have now begun to locate, in these populations, the genetic basis for asthma.

I tell this story in part because I want to provide another handle on these materials. Either that the uncritical acceptance of these technologies on the part of scientists is mindless. They thought they could go up to Iceland and just do the DNA analysis. No, it turns out that within two years, Decode had to retrace its steps and use what, Icelandic genealogies. The same will be true in Africa.

As we move into this next period, what we are going to find out, as we found in Iceland, is that genealogies are going to play a much more important role than we thought in understanding the nature of disease phenomena. Already we have the notion there will be haplotypes. Hapolatypes are simply patterns of the DNA, like I was showing you with that slide, patterns of markers around some phenomenon. Let's take sickle-cell anemia, or a marker around cystic fibrosis, or a marker around an ethnic group. Yes, the double-edge again. On the one hand, haplotypes, collections of markers in the DNA, can be used strategically to help us understand sickle cell. That would be a very good thing to applaud, but the same technology can be deployed to haplatite around a group, as the macragen Korean ethnicity example. Once again, the broken record. The flip side of the use that's positive is the side that we need to be alert to with these technologies.

What I've come to understand in my time with this topic and with these projects, is that the uncritical acceptance on the part of many in science, is as much of a problem as the uncritical attitude of 'let's just bury it' on the part of those who are critics. We want to have the use of the DNA, to exculpate the innocent. We don't want the use of the DNA to re-inscribe, to re-enforce old ideas about race, but that requires vigilance, attention to detail, emersion in the topic, the capacity to see that these topics, as john powell said, are "at the edge of taking off."

Ten years from now, here's my prediction. The technologies will have produced some good results with health and medicine. I'm not simply a naysayer here. I'm suggesting that we will find some good benefits from the determined use of pharmaceuticals to deliver certain populations, based upon the DNA analysis. That is likely to happen.

But I also believe that given the way our society is structured, these technologies will also be used, even more than the medical uses, for forensic purposes. They'll be used more and more, not to get the innocent off of death row, but as strategies to have more and more people in a base of data that one can use for analysis of a crime. And here's the way the future looks.

Every year, more and more people are included in the FBI national database for DNA. 20 years ago, people got into the DNA database only if they were sex offenders. That's always the first foot in the door. Then they moved to violent criminals, homicides, put them in the DNA database, and then they moved to burglars and robbers. Currently there are misdemeanors, and in several states, Louisiana, Virginia, and others, you go in "only" if you're been arrested. So that database is increasing every year. It is stored samples, which are sitting there waiting for analysis.

Suppose someone comes along, a serial murderer or serial rapist, and we want to find out whether this person is possibly in the database. Well, if we don't have everybody in, we have got a problem, so in a conference panel I was on in New York about a year ago with then police chief Howard Safer, he said, let's have everybody in the database, everybody's DNA, and who could be opposed to that?

That's the future. There was an article in the New York Times about two months ago, a professor of law at Yale, saying, in effect, Howard Safer is correct. At birth, everybody enters the DNA database.

What will happen, it seems to me, is that as we have cases where serial murderers or rapists appear, there will be more and more urgency to find a way to get everybody in. Post September 11, we should not be surprised by this kind of gloomy prediction, given the assault on civil liberties of the last eight months.

We should both look back and look forward. Looking back to the genealogical issues is useful and important, but they're always going to be shaped by the social project of who we think we are and where we think we are going. To look back to the past in genealogical research is useful, important, and fraught with certain problems. The problem I gave you was a technical one. You can only go down the X line through the mitochondria and the Y line on the very edge. However, waiting in the wings is DNA analysis, that whole middle group, and that's where I think the technology is heading us. So to look to the past along lines of descent has particular limitations. To look to the future and the DNA technologies is fraught with the problem of forensic science, the notion that we want to be able to determine, with different loci, who is and who is not likely to be African-American. They don't tell us that. What they tell is population, Alio frequency associations at different loci. African-Americans are gone from the equation.

But here's a story to end my presentation. Ian Eddit of the Home Office in Birmingham, England published an article about seven years ago, in which he made a claim that was extraordinary. He claimed that using the DNA analysis, he could predict with 85% accuracy whether or not the sample he was looking at was either from a UK background or from Caribbean background. In England, Manchester, Liverpool, London, that's a proxy for race. Never the term race was used, but using DNA analysis, you could predict with 8 in 10 accuracy. Now if you're Scotland Yard, that's effective; that'll work. You don't need the discrete taxonomy of race. You don't have to say that race is or is not real. You can say that you've got probability theory on your side. That's the shape of the future, unless, again, we are alert to this problem, that the use of these technologies to "get at authenticity" has a double edge. We may always slip into this slope of saying either yea, let's go back into history with this technology uncritically, or let's stop this train before it starts. I think both strategies are doomed. We need to sit and do what you're doing here today, to take a closer look at the analysis of what's happening and to be mindful and vigilant. It's a social project we have here and we need to be careful of the genetic stamp of approval. Thank you.

Question and Answer Period
Speaker: I agree with the essential elements of everything you just said. However, I do have to take issue with some of the tone of your presentation. It has to do with the degree to which the statements of some scientists are representative of all scientists or even the majority of scientists working on a particular problem. You know full well that there are people in this room who are molecular geneticists and evolutionary geneticists who disagree with the kinds of statements that you were showing, and have reasonable knowledge of what the sentiment is in the field. Some of the statements, particularly the Macrogen statement, don't reflect my colleagues in genetics and their thinking about what one can do with genetic data sets.

We know that there are people who own companies, who make all sort of irrational and irresponsible statements because they're trying to drive up their stock prices. But that has little to do with the consensus views on the science of the question. I am concerned that some of the things you said give an impression that there is a majority of geneticists who believe that kind of nonsense. I disagree. I know that there are people, there are important people who believe that, but I certainly would not characterize the state of knowledge in the field as agreeing with some of the statements that you represent.

Troy Duster: I thought I was careful, but in my remarks, I will be even more careful. What I thought I said was that Macrogen Technology, this company, had used this strategy of using these 96,000 bacteria to compare with cellular genomics, on behalf of getting at the authentic ethnicity of a Korean. I didn't suggest that these were molecular biologists in a world independent of biotechnology.

The first thing I would say is, yes, molecular genetics as a field, independent of biotechnology would not suggest that this is a good strategy. However, it is the interface between science and society that interests me, not that over here are the molecular geneticists who are, let's say for the purposes of argument, pure, who don't have these views. The interface is impure. The interface with biotechnology is all about markets and it's the interface that interests me and, I think, what interests this audience. Not that microbiologists don't have, sometimes, the purest of motives and the purist of views, but that when they interface with biotechnology, they find themselves often doing things that are on behalf of the market. I've seen in the last 25 years, at Berkeley, in particular, but in other places, that the field, even on campus, has been corrupted by biotechnology. I think here, Joe, you'd agree with me.

Speaker:
Yeah, I certainly agree with that.

Troy Duster:
It's the interface that interests me here. The purity of the field of the molecular geneticists having their own views about this as being an extension beyond reality, you're probably right. Most would say that's going way too far. However-I have to dig up old issues here-but I remember back when The Bell Curve was published, and I was on the Ethical, Legal, Social Issues Commission of the Human Genome Project. I was struck by the fact that my colleagues in the field would not come out and say that this was nonsense, and I asked them why. I was in a good position to; I was chair of the ELC group at the time. What they said was this: 'well, this methodology is so far afield from ours; we are not even going to comment." But I said that Murray and Herrnstein were claiming that IQ was 60% genetic. Surely, you geneticists will come forward and say that this is nonsense, and they refused. Now, it's that interface that interests me, Joe, that people would not come forward to tell the public that the bell curve was nonsense.

john powell:
Let me invite one more question, and consistent with that theme, I'm going to suggest, at least initially, that it be from a non-scientist. Let me make one other comment. Thinking about this conference, I went back and read some of the scientific literature on race, and I was reading about Bennett, who is considered the father of the IQ test, and how he consistently argued that IQ should not be used to type someone in terms of heredity, but talk about it as learning, and I would say he largely failed. I say that to say that even though, at least in my reading of him, he tried to be careful. He tried to say, don't misuse this. Despite his best efforts, it was misused. It's till being misused. Troy's point, that even if you have scientists who are careful, the social interface with how society, and I would even say politics, will use this information, is much more complicated than saying that the people producing it are careful. But let me have a comment or a question from a non-scientist.

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall: I'm Gwendolyn Midlow Hall and I will be speaking this afternoon. I think I'm the only historian speaking here. I would like to comment on the way you opened your talk, about how you were descended from slaveholders. There's another aspect to this that is not talked about at all and which you have a lot of implications for this idea of translating race into ethnicity, as if we are some kind of separate peoples in the United States, in particular.

In 1999, I gave a keynote address at the University of Southern Mississippi, of all places, and after hearing some eulogies to the Confederacy, I gave my talk in which, using historical data from the 18th century, I established that when Spanish took over Louisiana in the 1760s, at least 20% of the people listed as whites were descended partially from Africans, and that later, of course, they intermarried. I concluded the main part of my talk saying, we all have to learn more about, and learn to be proud of, our African ancestors. And would you believe that the audience stood up and applauded. I know it's hard to believe.

But this is one aspects and I do think that geneticists could help some people who believe they are whites or pure white, whatever that means, to realize that we really are one people. We should look, in particular, at the female line, because most of the women, the maternal line, was African or Native American. I think it could be quite enlightening. You may be surprised to learn that people who are doing genetics in Louisiana-and every now and then I will run into somebody in an archive who will ask me, 'what does FMC mean?" This was one of their ancestors. And I say, 'free man of color,' and some people are shocked and some people are in denial. But at the same time, there's a movement among people who thought they were white, when they find out they have African ancestors, they're very interested and thrilled and they seek out their relatives. I just had a visit from somebody living in California who had done that. She came to tell me how happy she is to know the other side of her family. So this is a move underway.

For example, when they're going to go out and test crime stains and decide, OK, this person is descended from Africans, may not mean they're black at all. They should keep this in mind.

john powell:
I'm going to have Dr. Duster respond if he'd like, but I'd like to at least get one more comment and then we'll close the session. Atum, I wanted to recognize you.

Atum Azzahir: I wanted to ask the people in the audience who are community to really ask questions. I think your presentation was very good for me, and I wanted to ask if you could tell us how those of us who are on the ground can learn more about how to place limits on what you said about the duality of this, and to keep our arms around the fact that it will probably end up with the negative side for those of us who are African people. Please, can you speak a little about that, and I encourage people who are in the room, who are the people, to ask questions.

Troy Duster:
I'm here as a testimonial to the fact that one need not be immersed in the microgenetics of the topic to be aware of the social issues around it, and I want to emphasize that. Get over any myths that you may have that this topic is so technical that it cannot be understood. I would say within an hour or two, you can understand the basic structure of the problem of the DNA. What people are talking about, at some level is, of course, intricate and complicated, but the basic issue, that there are only these four elements that code for certain proteins, you can get that. Once you understand that, and you understand the use of the computer to do technologies, you understand a lot. I want to demystify the Human Genome Project and demystify the notion that people with a very modest understanding of biology, or even without any biology, can, within a very short time, understand the issues. Once you understand the issues, then we go back to john's remarks at the beginning: the topic is too important to be left only to the scientists. It is the interface that is of interest here, and it's that interface that we are all involved in.

On the question of ancestry, I do not want to steal Rick Kittles' thunder; he'll have thunder of his own, but it is the case that this Y-chromosome analysis will lead, among us black people, back to a point where on the Y-chromosome side, there will be a white person. What do you want to do with that? Well, it depends on what you want to do with it. It's the social project there; it's not the DNA. I think you're right. Mitochondria analysis is the same thing. You go back on the X-chromosomes all the way back, and you'll find if you're white or black, there will be somebody in the "other category." Here's where the work of Joe Graves is correct. It is all mixed up, and the more you unfold and open up that box, you're going to find more and more of that complexity. It however will not be definitive, unless as a social actor, you make it so. Thank you.

john powell:
We need to transition to the next speaker. I know a number of you have questions.