going. sam will be signing books immediately after this presentation and copies of his books are on sale at the politics and prose tent. sam kean is author of two books about science, the disappearing spoon and the violent, his books are not only about the technicalities of science but

also the people and culture of the science of the world. in his latest book the violence -- "the violinist's thumb: and other lost tales of love, war, and genius, as written by our genetic code" he has a cast of eccentric characters who lead deron detailed biographies. from the beginning of genetic discovery in the university labs to a broom closet with microscopes and beakers to today's scientists who are moving science-fiction toward reality sam draws you into stores of personal struggle and triumph and on your journey he teaches you something you didn't even realize you were learning. he has worked in the radio lab, all things considered, he will actually be doing a live webinar for one of my clients, the american chemical society in june. his latest book is "the violinist's thumb: and other lost tales of love, war, and genius, as written by our genetic code" and it is a new york times best seller and amazon top five science book of the year and here to tell us about our own dna and how we know what we know about it,

please welcome mr. sam kean. [applause] >> hello, everyone. thank you all for coming out this afternoon and joining me. i appreciate it. i will be talking "the violinist's thumb: and other lost tales of love, war, and genius, as written by our genetic code". it is a book about genetics on the surface of it but deep down it is a story book, storybook about all aspects of human life. there are a number of specific historical stories about people trying to prove or disprove ancient legends or stories of personal triumph for personal tragedy, but overall it is kind of a storybook about human beings, about our big kind of overarching history and as an species. kind of epic stories about who we are, where we came from, why

we almost went extinct at various points, kind of big questions about humanity and i thought i would jump right in with a few of my favorite stories from the book from a chapter the my mic to call retro diagnoses. the basic idea of retro diagnoses is you want to figure out how your favorite historical celebrities died. what you do is look at when they lived, look at where they lived, look at their social circumstances, what they complained about on their deathbed, look at other symptoms and through all of these things you try to piece together how they might have died. so you retro diagnose them. doctors are really kind of incorrigible about doing this type of work. if you get a hold of a medical journal and start flipping through it you will see just

paper after you will see paper after paper saying that you know this emperor died that this and this artist died of this and everyone is an idiot or not realizing that this president had this disease. they really, really get into this. or chandley, the field is trickier than you might imagine that ers. be quite didn't know what they were talking about, didn't have a lot of medical knowledge of few hundred years ago so they might not exactly get things right. or you might be relying on sources that were compiled hundreds of years after people died so there is much legend as they are fact and if you are not careful you can get one more from reality pretty quickly. i have seen papers, serious papers suggesting for instance that beethoven died of syphilis of all things, that edgar allan

poe died of rabies which would be fitting lee learned for him. that alexander the great died of ebola. just a partial list of all the things that charles darwin supposedly suffered from, just a partial list include middle you damage, pigeon allergies, arsenic poisoning, lactose intolerance, lupus, narcolepsy, of course or a bear, cyclical vomiting syndrome and something called smoldering hepatitis. i have even seen serious suggestions diagnosing fictional characters with various diseases, suggestions that sherlock holmes had autism, ebenezer scrooge had obsessive compulsive disorder, darth vader had borderline personality disorder.

not bad. you might think with this type of work that dna may be is a little more objective, you get somebody's bones from the ground, do a test on it, get a nice easy edge, they added disease or they didn't but as i explained in the book, is not quite that simple when it comes to genetics. barista lot of interpretation, still a bit of an arch to figuring out whether someone had a disease or not and there are certain cases where they started to look into doing a genetic test and cited to stop because they realized they wouldn't get a nice clean answer. the best example in the book is abraham lincoln, two decades or so ago they were going to do some genetic testing on him and realized they would have to destroy a little bit of a small artifacts and they might not get a clear answer one way or the other so they decided to hold off, not do anything and still really haven't gone back and

looked at it today so the question of whether he had a certain disease is still hanging. but the story i'm going to talk about now actually explains one of the success stories of doing this type of genetic testing, retro diagnoses and that story gets started in 1300 b.c. with an egyptian pharaoh by the name of a man those have iv. a few years into his reign he decided enough with this, we already had four, i am going to change my name to i cannot and and that is what he is known and is history today, the very famous ferro i cannot and as more than anything else he was a reformer. he wanted to reform egyptian society top to bottom and the thing he was really excited about reforming was egyptian

religious services. traditionally add chicken people worship the lot of different gods and worse of them at night. but i cannot and was one of the first monod's diaz, he believed in only one god, the sun god and he also wanted people to worship during the day, the son's prime afternoon hours. does not allow people upset. they didn't like the idea of changing their religious services put akhenaten and forced that and a lot harsher statutes on the too. for instance he became something of a grammar not see in that he wouldn't let people use the plural hieroglyphic god's on public monuments. they would go and smash it if they saw the plural hieroglyphic. he also sent his fed doing to people's homes and if they saw a mug with a local guide on it they would take and smashed on the ground because he couldn't

stand the depiction of any other gods. as heretical as he was with religion, he was equally heretical when it came to art because for the first time during his reign he starts to see a lot of realism, ala realistic depictions of things like birds or crocodiles or plants, things like that. you also start to see realistic depictions of themes from his life. it might be akhenaten kissing his wife, the famous queen nefertiti or he might just be sitting down and having a meal with his son, the future king taught and the lot of people were surprised by this that the feral would have himself depicted doing normal mundane everyday things. kind of a departure from normal egyptian art. but for all of the realism and all of the art throughout all of his reign, there was one thing

that was decidedly unrealistic and that was akhenaten himself. whenever a he was depicted he always looked a little funny. he always looked a little off for some reason. there is another picture of him here, he is on the left. if you listen to archaeologists describing what akhenaten looks like a sound like carnival barkers sometimes lose one promises you will recoil from this the epitome of physical repulsive this. another call him a humanoid praying mantis. if you look at the symptom is they just go on and on, the archaeologists have seen, and all and shaped head, con cave chest, spidery arms, chicken legs with a backward bending these, big botox lips, potbellies, on and on.

these are the anti david, the anti venus they milo of our history and the lot of archaeologists always wanted to know, what is going on here. he is the pharaoh. he can have himself depicted however you wants and this is what he chooses to look like. why would you do that to yourself? there has always been one school of thought that said maybe this is just more realism, maybe his body did look a little funny. maybe he had a genetic disorder of some sort and it is not at all implausible because frankly there was a lot of incest in the pharaoh lines it is not implausible he would have gotten a bum copy of the gene from his mother and his father and had a disease that gave his body strange shape. but of course no one had any sort of hard evidence pretty

conjectures beyond the carvings they would see everyone's a while so they would argue and argue and bicker back and forth and no one really got anywhere until genetics entered the scene. i am going to be reading a little bit from the book about what happened when they did start to do genetic testing on a few mummies for the very first time around two thousand seven. so the egyptian government long hesitated to let geneticists' just have at their most precious mummies. boring into the tissue or bones inevitably destroy is small bits of the manned paley a genetics is actually pretty iffy at first. only in 2007 did the government relent and allow scientists to withdraw dna and also do meticulous ct scans of five generations of mummies including cuts and akhenaten. the study turned up no major

defects in akhenaten or his family. this hints that the egyptian royals did look like normal people, that means that the portraits of akhenaten with shore don't look normal probably were not striving for verisimilitude. they were probably propaganda. apparently decided his status as the pharaoh, lifted him so far above the normal human rabble that he had to inhabit a new type of body in public portraits. some of his strange features in the picture is like a distended belly or big paunch call to mind fertility deity so perhaps he wanted to portray himself as the womb of egypt's well-being as well. all that said the mummies did show some subtle deformities, things like club feet or cleft palate and each succeeding generation of mummies had more of these deformities to indoor. can touch of the fourth

generation had both a clubfoot and cleft palate. scientists realized why he suffered so much when they looked at his jeans. certain dna stutters, repetitive sections, little bits repeated over and over, dna stutters get passed intact from parent to child so they offer a way to trace lineages. unfortunately for king tet, both his parents had the same stutters because his mom and dad had the same parents. nefertiti may have been akhenaten's most celebrated wife but for the crucial business of producing an air he turned to an unknown sister. this incest likely compromise king tusk and simian system and did the dynasty in. because a few years after the 9-year-old king tusk assumed the throne of egypt the bullet renounced his father's heresies

and was hoping for better fortune from the gods. unfortunately it didn't happen. while working on king tax's money scientists also found scads of malarial dna deep inside his bones. malaria wasn't uncommon. similar tests reveal both of king touch's grandparents, he only had two, both of king touch's grandparents also both had malaria and they lived until they're 50s. however king taught's malarial infection added one strain too many to a body that because of the incestuous genes could no longer carry the load. king tug succumbed to malaria, probably at age 19. indeed there are some strange brown splotches as you can see here on the walls inside king touch's tomb and they provide clues hal sutton his decline

was. dna and chemical analysis has revealed this as biological in oregon. they were basically mold. what happened was his death same co quickly and was so unexpected that the tomb's in walls didn't have time to dry. they had to steal him up before the paint was dry and it attracted mold. powerful forces in egypt never forgot the family since and when tut died without an heir and army general seize the throne. he in turn died airless but another commander, the famous ramsey's took over please ramsey's and his successors tried to erase all traces of akhenaten, tut and nefertiti from the annals of the pharaohs and as a final insult ramsey's and his heirs erected buildings over tut's tomb in order to conceal and in fact they concealed the tomb so well that

even looters struggled to find it. as a result the treasures survived mostly intact over the generations. treasures that in time would grant him and his family something like immortality. so the entire thing about covering the tombs ended up backfiring for ramseys because he is trying to hide tut but ended at preserving his treasures and making him the very famous ferro the we know today and i like that story because it shows how you can start with something like dna but if you know what you are doing you can really parlay that into a lot more information. you can find information about the history, the funeral practices, archaeology, politics, so many different areas just starting with dna and that is what is really exciting

about genetics these days. genetics is not just medicine any more. is spilling over into so many different areas. it is really a field that is expanding into all parts of science. is really an exciting time to be studying and looking at the field of genetics. for the next part of the talk, i would take a little closer look at jeans and dna themselves. what do genes do? the basic idea is that genes control body traits so you have a gene that controls the body train and if you change the genius end of changing that body trade. that is the general idea. and jeans change when they get damaged or suffer mutation or something like that. that is basically what happens, why you get changes to body trades. why we are not all the same and the really exciting thing to me

about dna and jeans is that they work the same basic way in all those forms of life, in all creatures dna and genes work the same basic way. with you are talking about tulips, and guinea pigs, bacteria, toads, toadstools, slime molds, members of congress, what ever, they work the same way, all of these strange creatures, it is the unifying idea of biology and i find that absolutely fascinating. and because they work the same basic way in all creatures we often study them in animals first, to get a general idea of what they do in animals and then we can apply it to human beings. is often easier to study them in animals. at least personally i find it a little bit more fun sometimes to study genes in animals rather

than human beings for a specific reason. the names of the jeans. i am sure a lot of us have had the experience looking at a medical paper may be or even reading a newspaper story about a certain gene coming across the name of it and having no idea what the word meant. they are usually very long, very technical words, very hard to decipher, usually the case with human genes. when it comes to animal genes scientists have a little bit more leeway. they can be a little more creative with animal gene names. in particular i am thinking about the gene names of this animal right here, the fruit fly. they don't look particularly witty, but the fruit fly has probably inspired more funny and unusual team names and every other animal out there. there are different food fly

jeans named groucho, there's one called smurf, lost in space, fear of intimacy, speed faint sausage, have no idea what it does that is a lovely name. there is the tin man gene. if the team man gene gets mutated fruit flies cannot develop a heart. there is a gene -- yes. there is a gene from flies exceptionally tipsy after a tiny step of alcohol called the cheap date jean. there is the ken and barbie gene and if it didn't mutate, fruit flies cannot develop any jenna tally of. but it is not just in fruit flies, there's an occasional zinger out there in other animals too. my favorite been named story has to do with this gene right here, it is a gene in mice called vp

okay jean. at first glance that is a perfect example of one of those horrendous team names, no idea what those words mean but if you look at it a little more closely for the first three letters are p o k e and there's been at the beginning of the next word, kind of spells out polk --pokemon. it appeared in a scientific paper and became the official name of the gene and everyone had a good laugh about this. except, notice right after the word pokemon along all are with a circle around it and lawyers were not very amused by this because it turns out that the gene contributes to the spread of cancer and they didn't want

their cue little pocket monsters confused with tumors and so they actually threatened to sue these scientists. they were really going to take him to the cleaners over this the scientists backed down and gave it some other horrible jean name but the one shining moment, there was actually pokemon gene. one thing scientists are starting to get into, for a few minutes i was talking about individual genes, groucho, the tin man machine, things like that but nowadays something scientists are really interested in is systems of genes, talking about how lot of jean's work together to give us a certain body traits. the next story i am going to talk about is a good example of how lots of jean's work together to give us a certain body trade that is very dear to human beings, specifically our very large brains. the idea of where we get our

large brains has fascinated scientists for a very long time. they have been looking into this for centuries and there have always been a couple schools of thought on how to study this. one school of thought has been you want to study how human beings got very smart, you got to look at the smartest human beings out there, just like if you want to figure out why some people are very tall you go to giants, look at the biggest, the best examples and if you want to study why human beings are smart, people have always wanted to look at the very smartest people, they want to look at the brains of people like albert einstein and believe it or not, we do actually have einstein's brain preserved to this day. unfortunately the way we got einstein's brain is of bit of a gruesome story. the story got started in 1955,

princeton, new jersey where einstein was living and he had and a your neck aneurysm, held on for a few days but finally died at 1:15 in the morning one night. they called in a local doctor to do the autopsy and it should have been a pretty straight forward autopsy, just had to go in, confirm the cause of death, so the body up and give it back to the family. but the doctor who was called in, a man named thomas harvey was payable ambitious, dr. harvey got to thinking, dr. harvey said this is the gray matter of the greatest scientific thinker since isaac newton and we have one chance, just one chance to preserve his brain. not like we can go back a month from now and decide we want to do this. we have to do it tonight or never and i think a lot of us

might have been kind of tempted in the same way harvey was but i am not sure we all would have done what harvey did which was to extract einstein's brain without permission, to sell einstein backup, the body to the family without telling them he was doing this. unfortunately for him, harvey was very excited about this kind of war, told a few friends, also told his family including his small son who went to school the next day, they were talking about einstein, son's hand goes in the air and you can't blame the kid, hand goes in the air and he blurts out my dad has einstein's brain. people start talking, thomas hardy's friends started talking, newspapers got a hold of the story and if you can imagine einstein's family was not very happy to find out what happened

to his brain this way. this isn't the first celebrity autopsy to take a laird turn like this. beethoven for instance, doctors wanted to study his year bones so they set them aside but when an orderly came, put them in his pocket, no one ever saw them again. the composer-had his head sold by for enologist who wanted to study is head bumps and figure out what made him a great composer. one of the odder stories out there involves thomas edison to on his deathbed someone shoved a jar in front of his face to capture his last breath and then put the lid on the jar. the breadth ended up in a museum and people came from miles around to look at this jar with the breath inside of it supposedly. probably the most lurid story,

though, involves feinstein again because after his body got out of thomas hardy's office bottle went to another doctor who decided to pluck out his eyeballs and kept them in a jar in a safety deposit box decades and decades. word got out about this in the 1980s that which point michael jackson, who else, michael jackson reportedly offered $3 million to get einstein's eyeballs but the doctors said no, he was not going to part with them because he had grown fond of taking them out and gazing into them every now and then. i don't mean to lump thomas hardy in with these other people. he didn't have some sort of weird fetish about a celebrity body part. he actually had a serious scientific purpose, to figure out what made einstein very smart. first thing he did, he took out of the brain and he waited and

that is where the first disappointment started because the average human brain waves are around 49, 50 ounces, something like that. einstein's a great weight in at 43 ounces so he was actually about two standard deviations below normal for of human brain size, had a very small brain. thomas hardy kept going, took a lot of black and white pictures of it and talked of rain up into little pieces. you can see some examples right there and put them in kind of this hard plastic coating, basically shellacked them to preserve them for future generations and when he have all the pieces, he started putting them in mayonnaise jars and mailed them out to neurologists around the country and asked them to examine them and so he wanted to know what made einstein special, what set him

apart? the neurologists got back to him and they said funny thing, there is not that much unusual about the brain. it just looks kind of normal to us. he got all the pieces back and sent out the pieces again to another wave of neurologists and he said what have you got? what made einstein einstein? and they said you know, it just looks like an old man's brain, there is nothing unusual, just a normal brain. this kept happening over and over. no one could really find anything strange or unusual about einstein's brain. there was a paper a few months ago where they find something a little bit different about einstein's brain, but neurosciences often don't put a lot of stock in these studies for various reasons, the idea he

might have had a few more cells in one part or may be missing a fold. in some cases s they noticed also come about when people play musical instruments from a very young age. feinstein started playing the violin when he was 6 or 7. you don't know if the folds change in his brain because he was a genius or because he was playing violin. and overall is very hard to tell with the sample size of one if something was just idiosyncratic to einstein war if it was really something that made him a genius. brains very as much as faces do so with is really hard to tell from just looking at einstein's brain. so harvey eventually got all the pieces back, put them in a cookie jar in his office, put them in a cardboard box beneath the beer cooler and that is where they sat in his office, einstein's brain. as all this work was going on

with harvey other scientists were looking at human genius in general and it turns out that a much better way to try to figure out where human genius came from is through genetics and the last part i am going to read here explains a little bit about some of the things we know about that helped give rise to the big brains that we have. some of these findings are a little preliminary so you have to be careful but we are starting to get a glimpse of what made our brain special in genetic terms for the first time. some of the dna that enhances human intelligence does so in roundabout ways. a sayre mutation in humans a few million years ago deactivated a gene that bulked up our jaw muscles, this probably allow us to get by with their skulls which in turn freed up precious cubic centimeters of skull for the brain to expand forward

into. another surprise was that a gene that originally allowed us to eat more red meat helps out our brains a lot by helping the brain manage its cholesterol. to function properly brain cells need to see if there axons in a substance which is like insulation on lighters and prevent signals from shore seconding or misfiring. cholesterol is a major component and certain forms do a better job distributing the cholesterol in the brain where it is needed most. some genes lead to direct structural changes inside the brain. the l r r t m 1 jean helps distribute -- helps keep term in which exact patches of neurons control speech, the motion and other mental qualities which

helped the human brain establish its unusual asymmetry and left/right specialization. some versions of the gene reverse parts of the left and right brain and also increase your chances of being left-handed to do, the only no genetic association for that for eighth. scientists of also recently detected 3100 base pairs of so-called junk dna in chimpanzees that got deleted in human beings. this helps stop out of control neuron growth which the lead to big brains obviously but could also lead to brain tumors because tumors are basically out of control cell growth. human really gambled in deleting this dna but risk apparently paid off and our brains. . discovery showed that it is not always what we gained with dna but sometimes what we lost that helps make us human.

i am not going to go into a lot of the other genetic changes but i think you can see again it is not just one gene that gave us our big brains. it is really a suite of a lot of different changes that all came together to help us get our very large mental endowment. lot of factors working together. but still there's that big question, we might know how human beings in general got smart but it is fascinating to think about why some people are even smarter than the normal person. why does someone like einstein stand a couple standard deviations even beyond regular old human genius. you might be thinking we have einstein's to brain and we know a little bit about the genetics of what makes human beings smart. maybe we could look at einstein's dna and figure

something out. unfortunately this turned out to not work and the story, i am going to finish up the story right now explains why it ended up not working. thomas harvey, the local doctor, lost his job in new jersey and tiring of life there took off for greener pastures in kansas where he moved next door to the author and junky william burroughs of all people. the brain rode shotgun in his car. einstein's brain got back on the road in 1998 when harvey, his jaws and a writer took a road trip in a written buick to visit einstein's granddaughter in california. although weirded out by grandpa's's brain evelyn einstein accepted the visitors for one reason, she was poor, reputedly not very smart and had trouble holding down a job.

not exactly an einstein. in fact evelyn was always told that she had been adopted by einstein's son haunts, but evelyn could do a little math and when she started hearing rumors that einstein had been with various lady friends after his wife had died of unrealized she might be einstein's illegitimate child. the adoption might have been a ruse. evelyn wanted to do with genetic paternity test to settle things but it turned out that the embalming process denatured the brain's dna and made it useless. other sources of feinstein's dna might be floating around, stranding mustache brushes, sweated on violins, but for now we know more about the jeans of neanderthal sites who died 50,000 years ago than the genes of a man who died in 1955.

i would like to end with that story for a reason. it goes to show it is a good reminder that we don't know everything about genes and dna. there are a lot of surprises allowed they're waiting for us so in some sense the stories in this book are still waiting to be written. in the interests of time i won't go into any more stories. i will mention a few of them from the book, stories that are still going on today, stories about other man who survived the hiroshima and nagasaki nuclear bomb attacks, but the kicker on the story is even though he was probably the most unlucky man of the 20th centuries ended up living until 2010, and probably because he had very good dna repair mechanisms that extended his life. there are stories in a book about people who have a certain genetic mutation that leaves

them without fingerprints, their fingerprints are completely false and scientists have named this immigration delay disease because as you can imagine if you get to the border you don't have fingerprints people don't really want to hear that. they want to know what is going on, not about your jeans. there are also stories about our connection to our animal past, connection, these traits that pop up in us, atavisms where people might have an entire body coat of hair. there are even stories of babies and other people born with kales, things like that. it goes to show we have a lot of these traits buried inside of us just waiting to come out with genetic mutations. and right now is really a special time with regard to a lot of these stories. the overarching theme of the book is about human beings, all

of human history, and scientists thought a lot of these stories were probably lost forever. they just happened too long ago for us to really have any information about them. but it turns out that our cells have been copying these stories inside us for millions, sometimes billions of years and we can finally read these stories inside us for the very first time. i hope the talk this afternoon and especially hope the book has been able to capture the fun, the excitement and all the great science of being able to read these stories for the very first time. so again, thank you for coming out of this afternoon. [applause] >> i am happy to take questions. >> if you have questions of you

could go to the mic in the back of the tent please so we can all hear and -- >> thank you. i think so. >> i enjoyed your talk. i was wondering what did you do before you wrote these books? what was your day job? what was your study in college? >> i studied physics in college and english in college so i had degrees in both of those things and i really loved science, i love studying it, doing the classes and things but i was kind of abominable in labs shall i realized i probably wasn't cut out for it and temperamentally i just wasn't able to do the science. i knew i wouldn't be happy doing it. but writing gave me a chance to really keep up with the field and to study science but without having to specialize, without

being a disaster day to day. before this i worked at various publications in washington d.c. writing for the man doing free-lance work writing about science on my own. since i have been out of college i have been riding, picking up pieces here and there and eventually hits on the idea for my first book, the disappearing spoon about the periodic table and i have been riding full-time since then. >> thank you. >> my question is along those lines. i went to a conference that the dna learning center one time. have you been there? have you worked with anybody ask and i h? are you involved in any other way? what kind of job do you have other than your writing? >> i do not have another job. have been fellowshiped at various places, given talks, gone and met with people, i

interview a lot of scientists at various places but i am not officially affiliated with anyone and vital full-time writer right now. >> thank you very much for your presentation, very interesting. >> i really love your book. i am not quite done with it but i think it is fabulous. >> i won't spoiled an end. >> i was curious how you decide on an example of how to develop an example like when you didn't mention here is a fascinating one on the philadelphia chromosome. i know there are so many examples of that and i was curious how you come of with the one you want to develop. >> what i focus on in both books was the better stories. i figured the science would take care of itself once i had a story that would really hook people and what it is is reading very widely and trying to find these great stories, digging them up and have a file at home

where people filed a things i might want to write about. and figure out how i can write about some. the periodic table book i wanted to write about art and military and things like that so i was finding connections so it is partly knowing those stories are out there but also some serendipity too. ..

>> thank you. >> i loved your talk and i'm planning on getting the book and i was wondering if this videotaping is going to be available for us afterwards, because i would -- it would be great if my students could see what you teach in a enough would be a really interesting talk for them to access. is this going to be on c-span? >> i'm not the best person to ask that. >> we are live on c-span now. i am glad -- gaithersburg local tv have it on afterwards. >> it will be on line too. >> it will be on line for sure. he said in the library.

>> with the study of dna, i hear sometimes on the radio these commercials about these commercial services of being able to send and a swab of your dna and they will be able to tell you your lineage and all these interesting things about you and your ancestry and things like that. what kind of science is there in your experience in studying dna with those kinds of claims? >> i actually, i explained in the introduction i submitted my dna for one of those tests and i ended up enjoying the process. i thought it was kind of fun to do. there were a few scary moments in it. there were certain diseases and my family history that i didn't want to look at and did not want to think about but overall i think those services are a lot of fun if you realize that there

are limitations to them, especially if you say you know they find you have a certain genetic propensity for disease, you just have to keep in mind that those are probabilities, those aren't aren't certainties. you are not condemned or sentenced to come down with that disease. and with ancestry as well, if they look back they can tell a lot of things about you but there are certain things that will kind of always remain hidden and that you might never able -- be able to find out. so as long as you do know some indications on those, i think it can be fun and a lot of people have found long-lost relatives and fifth cousins that have helped them out with genealogy and things like that so people do enjoy doing those things. as far as the actual science, the really important thing about those kinds of enterprises is that you are getting lots and lots of people submitting their

dna and so for a disease that only has a few people or a treat where you know one might contribute just a little bits to the disease or the trade, the more people you have the more you are going to be able to key out the exact genetic contribution so it is important to have lots and lots and lots of people. they are starting right now finally getting the numbers where they can look at lots of people and figure some of these ideas out. there is a real science coming out of that type of work even though they are not going as in depth into your genome and some of the really fancy university or governments can. anyone else? >> in the course of your

research, did you find anything relative to the use of dna in i'm going to call it managed medical care, where my understanding is that at some point in time it may be possible to for insurance companies, and i'm stuttering for words here, physically use it against you if you have a propensity for a cancer or another type of disease. did you find anything along those lines? >> yes you can find a lot of information about that. i didn't go into it in a lot of detail in the book but that is one of the scary things about genetic information, that you not only find things out about yourself that you might learn that you might not want to know about that other people might find them out as well. and i'm not sure about this but i don't think it's legal

actually for insurance companies to discriminate against you based on that. but you know there still is that fear because you do feel that it's out there and that we don't want other people knowing those kinds of things. there are a lot of people that are very very worried about that type of thing and i do talk about it a little bit in the book but it's kind of focus more on historical stories -- historical stories and things like that. all right. [inaudible] >> she's said they passed legislation in maryland seven or eight years ago to make sure that kind of discrimination doesn't happen so you are safe on the ground right here. [laughter] >> is there anything you're working on now? what is the next very we have to look forward to and is there anything you are going to write about the human microbioproject? >> i'm working on a book now actually about neuroscience so

it has the same diversity, a funny unusual weird story but this time about the human brain and how it works. all parts of your brain that explores what happens in each part and things like that, so i'm working on that. i don't have any plans to write a book or anything about the microbio, but i do talk about it in the violinist him, the interplay between microand human needs and some of the really fascinating interactions there, the human placenta, the mammal placenta for instance, the gene that helps its views to the inside of the. we probably basically stole from a virus. it's at virus gene that allows us to do this so without those viruses we wouldn't have this characteristic of mammals. we don't want to think about that of virus gave us this ability but that seems to be the

case. it's kind of mind-blowing connection and the microbiois another good example of these connections that scientists really weren't thinking about until maybe a decade or so ago. so that is probably we are close to the end of time anyway