Ridiculous History: A Humorous History of Genetics

History is beautiful, brutal, and often ridiculous. You don't think so, talk to the host of our next episode, Ben Bowling and Noel Brown. Ben and Noel are the hosts of the crazy, fun and informative podcast Ridiculous History, where each week they dive into some of the weirdest stories from across the span of human civilization. That's a lot of

raw material. In this episode, Ben and Nol set out to unravel the history of genetic research, which surprisingly traces all the way back to the year five thousand BC. Back then, back in the day, humans were practicing something called selective breeding and early acknowledgment of genetic traits and a willingness to isolate and express them, whether it was growing crops, breeding livestock, or breeding humans. Now, what started as more of a philosophical question what makes you you?

What makes me me? Led to a fascinating and yes, sometimes ridiculous history of an incredible scientific achievement. So when the guys took a twenty three in me test, they got them thinking. Nowadays, it's easier than ever to learn more about your past and possible future. Through the power of genetic testing, we have the power to unlock information on our ancestry, traits, and health, just to name a few.

But how did this world changing science evolved from the work of ancient philosophers and Augustinian friars all the way to the cutting edge innovations of the modern day. Let's listen in as the guys present their research, along with their own personal experiences with twenty three and me, what they learned about their health, and what the report tells them about their own Ridiculous history. Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome back to the show,

Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for tuning in. Uh Let's give a shout out to our one and only demand the myth jen super producer Mr Max Williams, and they called me Ben Uh joined as always with Mr Noel Brown. Uh Noel. We like like most people, we like to think of ourselves as fairly distinct here in the in the mass of humanity, right. Oh yeah,

we're special boys. There we go, there we go. We uh. We, like many other people throughout ancient history to the modern day, have spent a lot of time wondering where we came from, wondering about our origins as individuals. And like many people, you know, we we know a little bit about our ancestry. We don't know everything, however, and that's why we were

interested to team up with twenty three and Me. Nowadays, you know, it's easier than ever to learn about your past through the power of genetic testing, and no I have to ask and Max you as well. Growing up, did you, guys ever have a member of your family who was like obsessed with their genealogy? I didn't really personally, and in fact, it wasn't until uh no spoilers yet, but that I took the twenty three and Me a test that I really had much sense of my heritage

at all. So this was super eye opening and fascinating process for me. Um. But no, I definitely am aware of folks that take that very seriously and kind of consider themselves like armchair you know, genealogists or anthropologists or what have you. But there was really nobody in my family that that much mentioned it when I was growing up. How about you, guys. Yeah, I actually have a pretty

extensive story about this one. It's uh so, my paternal grandfather, to my great grandfather and my dad's side of the family, he was adopted in the early nineteen hundreds and they lost all of his adoption papers, so there was really like no idea where that'side of my family came from. It's just been kind of things. So my aunt has been spending with the last no joke, like thirty plus years just trying to dig up some and like she recently did a test like this and it's got like

some more answers, but it's been up. It's been like a kind of like a lifelong pursuit of hers right there. Wow, Yeah, I had I had something similar because of the controversy surrounding my paternal line, the Malungeon side of my family. Uh So, there were times where people were actively hiding there. Um, I guess they're perceived membership of that group and as a result, they're hiding some of their genealogy. But of course as time went on, people became less hesitant, you

know about acknowledging the past and the truth. And now here in two it is easier than ever for people to, as we said, learn more about what led to you being here a fellow ridiculous historian listening to this show today. But today's question, how did the world changing science of genetic testing and our concepts of DNA? How did they evolve from the word of ancient philosophers and Augustinian friars

all the way to these cutting edge innovations. In today's show, we're going to unravel some of the history of genetic research, and along the way we might share some of our own personal experiences. Because spoiler folks, uh Noel and I each took some test with twenty three and me, Uh Noel, I believe this was your second test with the group. Yeah, it was, uh And let me tell you a lot

of things have changed for the better. It was probably a couple of years ago that I took the test previously and the one that we took for this episode. This partnership just had way more granular information, including stuff about potential health risks, markers that are contained you know, within my genetic code, our genetic code, your genetic code, um, that can give you indications as to whether you're predisposed to certain medical conditions. So it was very very illuminating me.

The last one was great too, but it really feels like they've added a lot more bang for the buck and a lot more features, a lot more results that are very meaningful. Not to mention, um, I believe Ben, you and I have some interesting kind of shared results that we will also say for the end. Yes, yes, you might be surprised by how this sort of technology can connect you with people you never imagine yourself connected with. But let's let's start there, right, What makes you you? Okay,

So here's the lay of the last. People are asking what makes me me? What makes you you? Well before the concept of microscopes, well before DNA was even a thing. The history of this, like the the ancestry of ancestry research and d NA starts all the way back in like five thousand b C, which I think might surprise a lot of people, Oh for sure. And I mean, you know, it was really more of a philosophical question

for a long long time. I mean, there was certainly observations made towards various traits and things that family members possessed, but the whole idea of like who who am I, where do I connect in the universe and you know, life and all of that was much more of a of a philosophical question. But you're right then as early as five thousand b c. E UM humans were practicing

something called selective breeding. So there was an acknowledgment of like, okay, how do we isolate these traits and figure out how to express them, whether it be livestock or or crops or what have you, or even you know, humans, There was a certain amount of selective breeding that came with like in breeding, uh, and you know, the idea of maintaining a bloodline. And as we know that, there were some pretty catastrophic consequences to those um activities. But you know,

their head was kind of in the right place. They just really didn't quite know what they were doing, but they definitely did when it came to the livestock and the crops to make more robust crops and more hearty livestock. Yeah, yeah, a k A. The reason you have things like corn, you know what I mean, the reason you have domesticated crops as they're called. And there's something really interesting about that.

I can't remember who I was speaking to, but we were talking about the old question what is the most successful form of life on the planet. And you know, a lot of people would just say humans. But if you think about it, the idea of wheat being domesticated or corn being domesticated, it sounds like humans won that game. But if you look at it from the perspective of the plant, they kind of one because now they're spread across the planet. I thought that was kind of trippy. Yeah, totally.

I actually heard an interview with an entomologist who specifically um focuses on flies. UM and flies. He believes we're one of the most successful species in the history of the world because of their ability to kind of bob and weave and and and dodge things and just you know, they're one of the most successful aerialists on the planet. And also they essentially feed on dead stuff, which there's always gonna be plenty of. Also, I believe they've been around,

uh much longer than humans. So while we may be successful and good at, like, you know, making stuff and figuring things out, it's all kind of self serving and in the end of the day, we're only really a blip in the historical record. Oh yeah, we're like a fad to crocodiles, you know what I mean, We're like POGs to crocodiles and alligators. But but you were you a pog guy? Were you a pargman? No? I had some POGs, but I wouldn't say I was a parkman. I just I had enough to play the game, and

then I didn't get super into the game. I actually like the art more. That's right. I barely understood how the game was play. I just know there were slammers and they were the POGs, and I mean it was kind of like Tiddley winks you want other people's POGs by slam in them in a stack. I don't know. It doesn't matter. We're not here to talk about pole. We are here to talk about is Pangenesis. Yes, let's talk about a little bit about the great philosophers you

mentioned earlier. So let's go to Aristotle Aristotle is one of the first people on record who said, you know what, I wonder if traits acquired throughout an organism's lifetime can

be transmitted to their offspring. Essentially, and not to be too to gruesome here, folks, but essentially, the question is if I took five people and I cut off a different finger on each one of their right hands, would their children also be missing the same finger when they were born because that trait was acquired during that person's

unfortunate lifetime. He's kind of added to this guessing game with this theory the way you just mentioned Pangenesis, which sort of just scribes how these traits could be passed on through particles called give us, which sort of encapsulated the traits and then allowed them to be transmitted to reproductive cells. And then he also thought about what he called the form giving principle, and a lot of the stuff you're gonna hear from these ancient thinkers, by the way,

is in principle not super duper far off. Yeah, he believed in something called the form giving principle that was a property of an organism that was able to be transmitted through bodily fluid specifically semen, which he believed was kind of like blood, but a more pure form of the stuff. And also we believed that the mother's minstreul blood was another one of these UH form giving fluids. He believed that this interacted in the womb to direct

uh the early development of an organism. M M. So again, you can you can see where UH, someone working with the technology at the time could have reasonably started making these suppositions. But Pythagoras, Aristotle, they weren't the only folks who were thinking through this. Hippocrates and Epicurus also had their own takes on the idea of heredity. Heredity is just the passing on of traits from parents to offspring, whether that's through sexual reproduction or through a sexual reproduction.

And it's weird because hippocrates theory is sort of is kind of similar to Darwin's later ideas that involved hereditary

material collecting from throughout the body. But again, one thing we wanna be careful of here is we want to avoid just focusing on the ancient Western philosophers, because people in India and China we're thinking about this too, that's right, And the Sharraka Samita that was written or at least a distributed around three Ancient Indian medical writers observed the characteristics of the child were determined by what they saw as four distinct factors, the first being those from the

mother's reproductive material, second from the father's sperm, and the third from the diet of the pregnant mother. Uh, and the fourth being those accompanying the soul. So, while there were some of these do feel pretty connected to modern scientific understanding of reproduction, that fourth one kind of imparts a more religious characteristic as well. Yeah, yeah, one through three you cannot along home going, okay, uh huh sure. And then number four is where we see just how

how inextricably intertwined. Uh, the ideas of religion were with the ideas of medicine. You know, it's funny, but the idea of things becoming attached to the soul as it enters the fetus, what does that remind you of? Uh? Oh, scientology. I was thinking cloud Atlas reincarnation, but yeah, well those

are all kind of in the same wheelhouse. But I mean it's the idea of like negative things becoming attached to the soul from birth to carry the follow you along for the rest of your life and cause you to you to develop all kinds of problems that that just reminds me of that that concept within scientology, not that l. Ron Hubbard was anything but original, you know. Anyhow, I walked around the corner for that for that slight this.

But let's jump around in time, Like when you hear this, when you thought about this episode right as you tuned in, you were probably thinking of Charles Darwin and his famous eighteen fifty nine banger on the Origin of Species full title on the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the preservation and favored races and the struggle for life. We'll get to that in a second. Darwin

is a recurring guests on our show. But if we're talking about genetic research and we're talking about the full scope of this, you can kind of divide it into two broad eras all the stuff before a guy named Gregor Johann Mendel, and all this stuff after this Friar. Yeah, that's right. Modern genetics really started with the work of this man who was an Augustinian Friar. He was really into the idea of propagating pea plants, like you know,

like English little green peas. When he published his work specifically on the reproductive qualities of these little fellas in eighteen sixty six, he established the theory of Mendelian inheritance UM. He became the first person to lay out a scientific and mathematically founded uh science of genetics, even before it was even called that. And this is legit. You can find it in his Encyclopedia Britannic Entry, which personally I thought did a good job of breaking it down in

an understandable way. So let's get in the nuts and bolts. Strap in for some math. Don't worry, we're gonna. We're gonna. We'll be right there with you. Try to make it easy. Okay, matth mass me up. Then let's math up. So the reason Mindel wants to study the p plant, the edible p or pisso sativum, is because it had a lot of distinct varieties. It was easy to control, you know, like easy to grow, but then also easy to control

how the plants pollinate. And there was a high proportion of successful seed germin nations, which means you know, it was uh. If you were making something new or trying to attract something, you had a higher than average likelihood of that plant actually growing to pass the seed stage. So he tested UH for for about two years, from eighteen fifty four to fifty six. He tested thirty four different varieties for what he called the constancy of their traits.

And when he wanted to see how these things transmitted, he chose seven traits that he thought were expressed in a distinctive manner. And it's stuff that's like a lot of it's stuff that's visually apparent to him. So stuff like tall plants and short plants. What colors are their seeds? Green or yellow? So he referred to these kind of alternate versions UM as contrasted characters. UH. He also referred

to them as character pairs UM. And you know, this is very similar to what we talked about in ancient times, the idea of kind of cross breeding different things to create a strengthened single traits. He would cross varieties that were the same except for one trait. So, for example, tall my be crossed with short UM and then there would become a generation of hybrids, which he referred to as f one. That generation would display the character of

one variety but not that of the other. UH. And he believed, or at least using terms that he developed, one of the characters was dominant and the other one was recessive. This this, this checks out with what we know today right in terms of like eye color and all of that stuff. We have more into that in a bit, but he was definitely barking up the right

genetic tree. So in the offspring that he raised from all of these crossed hybrids, which he referred to as second generation or F two, he would see the recessive trade appearing. And then he noted that entirely third of them had the original heritable traits while two thirds were of that hybrid arrangements you know, or rather you know,

presented the more of the hybrid kind of qualities. So he yeah, maybe, man, what don't you you you kind of did the research on the math here, So why don't you take us home here with like kind of the solution. Oh for sure. So this goes to uh Gregor's major discovery. He says, Look, after I've read these successive generations of plants, just as you describe, Noel, I'm seeing by the time I get to the descendants of the dominant group that I can rewrite that three to

one ratio. You know that kind of dominant to recessive appearance ratio. I can rewrite it to one to two to one, and by this we mean fifty percent of that second generation we're true breeding. Fifty percent we're still hybrid. In a in a way, he was. He finally he was arriving at an understanding of what we call dominant

and recessive genes today. This major discovery probably wouldn't have been made by his predecessors because they didn't grow statistically significant populations of testing material, which is a very cold way to say living things, and they didn't follow the individual characters or characteristics separately to establish their relationships to each other overall. So this is big, big stuff, right, this is world changing stuff. He publishes it, and everyone

ignores him. Everyone sort of ignores him. It comes out in like a not very well known scientific journal. Most of the scientific community at large isn't aware of it. And if you're talking about heredity at this time, you are much more likely to be in a slaughter or a cafe talking about Darwin's hot button theory of evolution

by natural selection. And uh he also Darwin, we should say, wasn't super perfect aside from his culinary taste, which we're ambitious check out weird historical flexes uh to learn more. He uh, he had a theory that not all his theories widely accepted. His own theory of heredity, which she had called pancha out assists as well, and just didn't really didn't really fly. Uh. So to find the next part of the story, we have to fast forward to

eighteen eighty three. Let's just remember that, I mean, reading through this now and talking about this now, we're so many echoes of what we know to have been determined to be true and accurate. So it's just like, well, why wouldn't people pay attention to this? But at the time it was like very out there right, like it would not have been connecting with like the sort of

traditional scientific thought of the time. And it's just one guy kind of like breeding pea plants and and espousing these kind of like whacka doo notions of traits and qualities in offspring, So would not have been like an

easy cell necessarily which you write them. If we pressed the fast forward button into eighteen eighty three, who got a man named August Weissman who was an evolutionary biologist from Germany who was making waves by breeding mice after are chopping off their tails like three blind mice style. But presumably you know, for science, for science little yeah, yeah, he uh. He did this for reasons, as he assured the mice police. Uh. Mainly, even though this sounds ghoulish,

there was something important to it. He wanted to disprove this popular idea of lamarchism, the concept, like we said, similar to the ancient philosophy concept that physical characteristics of apparent organism can be carried through to the offspring. So when mice with amputated tales gave birth to mice with absolutely normal tales, they proved a crucial point. So we don't the names of those mice are lost to history, but thank you, now we we do know a very

interesting field that's more in the realm of psychology today. Epogenetics, the idea that trauma can be um, you know, carried or passed down through generations. So in theory, the trauma of having their tails chopped off could have been you know, carried to their offspring. Yeah. That's a great point, man, because epigenetics is the study of the way gene expression has changed, like what is more active in your genetic

code instead of like your actual genes getting altered. There's a great study about starvation and World War two that goes to this. Epigenetics is like still very much the forefront of genetic science today. Yeah, that is a good point. Maybe the mice were traumatized, certainly possible. Um, but let's get into some more breakthroughs. Here are some names that might ring a bell, Watson and Cricky. There's like a biopic about these guys. I think Jeff Goldbloom played Watson

or Craig. I can't remember which Gary played both of them. Maybe certainly possible, yeah, or like, yeah, Daniel de Lewis played every character in the whole movie. Um, but yeah, they are you know those names like leave it if you don't know exactly what they did because they are, uh, the American biologists that are largely created Well, they are credited with discovering DNA in the nineteen fifties. But you know, as is off of the case with science though, timing

is everything. Who's first to market with something it is not necessarily the same as like who actually discovered the things. So DNA was in fact first identified in the late eighteen sixties, eighteen sixty nine to be precise, by a Swiss chemist named Friedrich U. Mascher. But again, Watson and Crick are the names that you probably think of when you think of of d N A and and DNA

sequencing and all of that. Also, to jump in here real quick, the name of it is the Race for the Double Helix who aired September fourteenth, seven aired, So it was a TV movie, Yeah, and it had Jeff Goldbloom as Jim Wasson, Tim Pigott Smith as Frances Crick, Alan Howard as Maurice Wilkins, and Julie Stevenson as Rosalind Franklin. Here in a little yes, hit the sound cue just right now. Awesome, Thanks Max, and thanks Matt Frederick. So

here's the thing. Those guys are super famous, and rightly so. But there's more to their story. A lot of people, probably ourselves included at some point, have made the mistake and thought those guys discovered DNA by themselves in the nineteen fifties. This is not the case in reality. Instead, DNA was first identified all the way back in the late eighteen sixties. In eighteen sixty nine by a Swiss chemist named Friedrich Myischer. He wanted to figure out what

made white blood cells. White blood cells, so you know those that are part of the body immune system, and his main source of those cells was kind of kind of growsy, kind of gnarly. He got most of these white blood cells for his research from pus coded bandages that from a clinic. So, um, you can't do that today. That is wild plus coded bandages. That's a metal band if I ever heard one, or at the very least

a song. Yeah, that's pretty pretty gross. Uh. So, he noticed that when you added acid to a solution of those cells, that a substance separated out from the solution, and that substance was able to be dissolved again in an alkali solution. So in investigating that solution, he discovered that it had some pretty unusual properties. It was different from other proteins that he'd looked into before that he was you know, much more familiar with through his past research.

And my Share called this substance nucleon because he believed that it had like you know, leached out from the nucleus of the cell um, which you know at this point, that was something that people understood the nucleus of the salad, just the makeup of the atom and the cell, et cetera. So Maisha had discovered essentially the basis for for all of life, the molecular basis DNA. And then he decided, how how am I going to figure out how to

pull this out in its purest form? Yeah? And he you know, he didn't know that exactly what he had discovered, but he discovered it. And then in the decades after his discovery, we see this cavalcade of breakthroughs by many other researchers, other scientists, people like Phoebus Levine and Irwin Chargeth carry out these research efforts to learn more about the DNA molecule, including its primary chemical components and the

ways those components work together. We actually get Philoettomalogy nerds the name DNA from a biochemist named Albrick Coastal in good old Albrick, who I'll call Al identified nucleon as

a nuclear Yeah, yeah, if he'll be my bodyguard. So he provided the present chemical name dexo ribon nucleic acid DNA, and then he also went on for extra credit to isolate the five nucleotide bases that are the building blocks of DNA and are in a First we have at anine, then we have a Sias scene, then we have guanine, thymine and Eura sill. Yeah, not to do much too much p humor, but eur a sill feels like you

get ripped off, like you know, diuretic of some kind. Yes, with a bunch of fine prints at the very end of the commercial. Right, So there's a little bit of a bitter sweet note to greg Or Mendel's story. It wasn't until nineteen sixteen, years after his death in eighty

four that he finally got his due. Three separate botanist Hugo de Vrais, Carl Corren's Eric van Scherbak, all of them independently rediscovered the work of this obscure Augustinian Friar, and with the new breakthroughs in the understanding of cells and chromosomes, they were able to kind of ground his weird p plant experiments, and so people were able to say, again, the guy never lived to see it, but people were

able to say, Wow, he was really onto something. And then in nineteen o two, just a few years later, things kick up another notch. A scientist in Walter Sutton says, Hey, the segregation of chromosomes during the process of neosis are pretty much exactly like the segregation pattern that this friar predicted. Oh and people weren't calling them jeans yet. That still hasn't happened. No, No, it definitely wasn't. That didn't happen until nineteen o nine, when a guy by the name

of Wilhelm Johansen came up with it. He coined it. He used it to describe the Mindelian unit of of of reproduction. He also used the terms genotype and phenotype to separate the genetic traits of an individual um and the way it ultimately came to look. So, as a matter of fact, here is a list, a kind of a quick hit list of other notable breakthroughs of the time.

Don only just round robin these ben yes. So. In nineteen eleven, a guy named Thomas Hunt Morgan, along with his students, used fruit flies to show the chromosomes carry jeans. They also discover what called genetic linkage. In George Beatle and Edward Tatum's experiments on the red bread mold um known as Neurospora crassa, also be a good name for a metal man um show that genes act by regulating distinct chemical events. They actually proposed the two fellows that

each gene directs the formation of a single enzyme. And then in ninety three, again just a few years later, William Askedbury, who is a scientist from Britain, gets the first X ray diffraction pattern of DNA and it shows that DNA must have a regular periodic structure. This leads him to say that, hey, maybe nucleotide bases are stacked on top of each other, but what's DNA actually made of?

H In nineteen fifty to Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase attempt to answer this question, showing that only the DNA of a virus needs to enter or a bacterium to infect it, which gave a strong bit of support for the idea that jeans are in fact made of the stuff, the stuff DNA. Yeah, and so those are just a few of the scientists and just a few examples of the research that all went into leading to Watson and

Crick Watson cricks discovery. Without the foundation provided by those folks, James D. Watson, Francis H. Crick may have never reached their groundbreaking conclusion ninety three that the DNA molecule exists in the form of a three dimensional double helix. But before we go there, let's hold up max record. Scratch the crick Watson stories told pretty often in schools, but there is another very important side to it. Enter raw Allan Franklin Raslan Franklin has entered the chat or the

ring or whatever. Franklin was born in July twenty in London, um. She was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family who valued education and public service. Yeah, she was a scientist when there was a lot of discrimination against women who wanted to enter stem science, technology, engineering math. When she was just eighteen, she matriculated in the Newnham Women's College

at Cambridge University, studying physics and chemistry. After Cambridge, she went to work for the British Coal Utilization Research Association and her work on the porosity of coal became her PhD thesis. As anybody who's working on a PhD or has obtained one knows, the thesis tends to be pretty specific once you get to that rarefied air. And this work allows her to travel the world as a guest speaker, she's an order a lecturer. In nine she moves to

Paris where she masters X ray crystallography. This becomes her life work, and this is what leads her to make a crucial contribution to the discovery of the double helix structure of d a day. So some people think she got a raw deal out of it, A woman getting a raw deal in favor of wo men history. I don't know about that. Man, that's that seems incredulous now, it happened all the time, and I would agree, I would I would argue she definitely got a raw deal.

Biographer Brenda Maddox called her the quote dark Lady of DNA, based on a pretty negative, uh sexist nickname given to her by one of her male co workers. But you know, her friends and and other colleagues believe considered her to be very kind, um and brilliant scientists. So this, this reputation, this idea, I don't know, this sort of like strikes me as sort of the character assassination. Character is that, yes,

character assassination? Almost Is this the idea that like women in business or somehow like mean or like you know, not the docile creatures that men would have them be you know what I mean, Like it's absurd and it's based in the generations of of patriarchal uh bulb dish if you will. Yeah. So a lot of scientists thought it was challenging to work with her because she wouldn't just roll over. She was thought to be short tempered

and stubborn by those dudes. So there was a lot of friction between her and a co worker named Maurice Wilkins, in particular, while she was working at King's College. They were supposed to work together to find the structure of d N A, but because they really really did not get along, they ended up working kind of in isolation. And was just fine with Franklin. She didn't need these

dudes to help her. Uh. Wilkins instead went looking for company at the Cavendish Library in Cambridge, and that's where his friend Francis Crick was working with James Watson on building a model of the DNA molecule. And that's where Wilkins showed Watson and Crick some of Rosalind's work. Yeah that waited, man, I've seen this before. Okay, Yeah, So, unknown to Franklin, Watson, Creek actually kind of potentially took

the stuff and ran with it. In particular, there was an artifact known as photo fifty one that was shown to Watson by Wilkins, an X ray diffraction image of a DNA molecule, and it was in fact Watson's inspiration, um, you know, to uh coin the idea of the double helix, you know, because the pattern was clearly a helix, and um using Franklin's photo along with you know, Admittedly, they did do some of their own work. Watson and Crick

created their now famous model. And when I say model, we literally mean like the you know, the way it looked like a thing you could do, you see hanging in like classrooms to this day. However, until more recent times, Franklin's contribution was not acknowledged. After her death, however, Crick did uh say that her contribution had indeed been critical. But it's sort of like after her death, too little, too late, buddy, you know, now that she's gone, let

me say, good job. But that's a you know, this is all a true story. Luckily, Rosalind Franklin has finally gotten her well deserved do, and the modern world has acknowledged just how much society owes her for her research. And that's a bit maybe of a diversion for some folks or a tangent, but we felt it was an incredibly crucial one, uh, And we wanted to thank the good folks over at Nature dot com for providing a lot of this information in the Rosalind Franklin biography. So

in any case, that story aside, which is important. What you need to know is that Watson Crick were not the quote unquote discoverers of DNA. They were the first scientists to make an accurate description of that complex double helix structure, and their work was directly dependent on the research of numerous scientists we've named who came before them.

Thanks to all this, humanity now is capable of making even greater strides and understanding the human genome and the many ways in which d n A affects you and your loved ones. This leads us to the modern age. How crazy is it? How astonishing is it that we can just spit into tube and learn so much about not just our past, but our present and our future. Like you said, no, it's come a long way since the last time you took it to To answer your question,

Ben how crazy, how amazing, how insane? I would say, quite, it's it's it's remarkable, and and we're gonna get into very shortly, just how remarkable it was for the two of us, you know, as as human beings, finding things out about ourselves that we never possibly could have without decades of detective work, you know, literally digging through family heirlooms and traveling is how far medical records and all

of that stuff. So in fact, this is pretty cool, Ben I believe as of today, we found out that the human genome has finally been fully sequenced. Yes, yeah, this news came out pretty recently. It was June seventeenth. You can find the full story on the cyberse dot com. The human genome is finally fully sequenced, it's been announced. Uh, we figured it out, folks, We got them. As John Oliver would say, the first human genome was mapped back two thousand one, is part of the Human Genome Project,

but researchers knew it wasn't fully accurate. What we've done now we not just being your host, but you know, we as society, the boffins went back through and filled in all those gaps and fixed all the errors that were in the first attempt at mapping the genome. Yeah, there are parts of it that had previously been kind of disregarded and referred to as junk DNA because they were seen as being comparable to copying errors repeating sequences in fact that ultimately have been discovered to play a

more important role in the development of some human disorders. Uh, there's a really great quote from one of the researchers. Uh, just because something is repetitive doesn't imply its garbage. Evan Eichler. Yeah, he was a senior author of of one of the publications there, and this sequence is the most comprehensive reference

mammalian reference genome ever. There are six new genome related publications that are coming out in the journal Science that will lead to an even better understanding of human evolution and the discovery of ways to treat disorders or targets that should be uh isolated to treat a variety of disorders.

Were we're on the bleeding edge now. And Michael shots, a Johns Hopkins University professor of Computer science and biology, another senior author some of this research, says, quote, we always knew pieces were missing, but I don't believe any of us realized how extensive they were or how interesting they were, and segue, uh no, I think that's something we can say about our own results. So we completed a twenty three and me test. I found out that

some things were pretty normal. Other things were pretty surprising, like I am genetically likely to be of average weight. That seems like a pretty normal thing. You can also see that I am not likely to be lactose intolerant. One of the big things for me was the Malungeon stuff is true. Uh, my paternal line is a pretty crazy mix of genetic spaghetti Hashkenazi, Congolese, French, British, Irish,

and then like two percent other. So don't know if that's Native American or it's just what they call unassigned. At this point, well, before I get into that breakdown of mind, I just found out. I just found a really amazing new little section on the twenty three and me interface, which you get, you know, log in when you send in your tests and then using this whole like dashboard, and it's like the stuff that I keep finding that I didn't even notice that when I first looked.

One of them is a button that says Neanderthal. I apparently have more Neanderthal DNA than thirty five percent of other customers. Neanderthals, of course, being prehistoric humans who interbred with modern humans before vanishing around forty thousand years ago. And this is, uh, you know, pretty amazing to me because one of the rates that I may have inherited from my Neanderthal ancestors is having a worse sense of direction.

H I have an awful, awful sense of direction. If I did not have my Google Maps, I would never find my way anywhere. Uh. And that is just the fact. So now I can at least blame you know, my my my Neanderthal brethren on that. Uh. I get more, I think, than than just again, this is all rated to the average. Part of the reason these tests are more specific now is because there are more people who

participated exactly. And that's the thing. Once you, you know, become a part of the twenty three and me kind of community, you are you know and and you you are able to there's boxes you can check to keep all your data private and all of that, you know, at least in terms of like, you know, having your identity associated with it. That's an important thing to consider and that is absolutely a thing that they can do,

and then they do do. But my breakdown is a little bit dull, but still a lot more detailed than it was when I took it previously. When I said dull, it is mean, um, ninety eight point six percent Northwestern European, and that breaks down to sixty three percent in British

and Irish. Uh. And then they go into a little more specifics with Glasgow City, the UK and County Dublin plus eighteen other regions and I've got thirty point five percent French and German and two point eight percent broadly Northwestern European with a dash of Ashga Nazi jew uh ancestry thrown in their point. Welcome, welcome, Yeah, the uh this stuff is fascinating. One one thing that we really enjoyed that uh, we just learned before we're recording this.

I found a really interesting thing in the paternal Haplow group that uh lad us to one last short story. We want to tell a man named Neal of the nine hostages. We don't speak this language, so maybe mispronouncing it. Uh, here's what we found in twenty three and me quote perhaps will myth in and now of the Nine Hostages is said to have been a king of Tara, northwestern Ireland,

in the late fourth century CE. His name comes from the tale of nine hostages that he held from the regions he ruled over, though the legendary stories of his life may have been invented hundreds of years after he died. Genetic evidence suggests that the we Kneil dynasty again apologies to native speakers whose name means descendants of Neil, did in fact trace back to just one man who bore a branch of Haplow group r M two six nine. These descendants ruled to various degrees as kings of Ireland

from the seventh to the eleventh century CE. I am descended from them, and just before we started to rule, we found out, Noel, you're descended from the same dude brother that's Cheered right, and that's Um again, that's that common ancestor for us goes to ten thousand year years ago. I think that must be why we haven't seen each

other at the reunions. Must be it's pretty interesting. Um. There is also a lot of health data that you can clean from this twenty three and me test various variants that show up in your your you know, your genome that can point to certain risk factors, you know, for diseases. Mine was pretty solid. Didn't have anything that was outlying that should be like a watch out. I think I I'm a little bit more than averagely predisposed to age related macular degeneration, which is the most common

cause of irreversible vision laws among older adults. Which is funny considering that I have really really good vision. Um, maybe it's just as I get older, it's gonna it's gonna wane on me. But everything else was pretty solid. I uh, you know that's that's funny because I have a couple of things that stood out to me as only one seemed woefully incorrect. My caffeine consumptional I am likely to consume less and no, Max, you guys know that is fundamentally untrue. I beat the odds on that

one because I drink way too much coffee. But overall, this stuff was really exciting for us, and and Nol, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about just how were you surprised by how much more, as you said, granular, this became in just uh, how many years has it been what's our time interval here at least four years? Um, yes, I was, Oh my gosh, there's even a thing with an asparagus p detection was as we know that you did the thing for for

I believe the stuff of Jesus. No, maybe that was Josh, but it was one of the shows that you wrote for and worked on. All people's be smell like asparagus when they eat it, only some people can't smell it, and and under traits here there's a section for asparagus odor detection and I am listed as likely can't smell him and boy can I ever? That is so interesting. So yeah, it's incredibly granular um like things like cleft chin or having dan drift. I've got a chance of

getting dan drift. Early hair loss likely no hair loss, baby, I can tell you that I've got a good head of hair. Very excited. I've got a slightly higher than average odds of disliking cilantro. I know there are a lot of people who are probably wondering about that. I don't flush when I drink alcohol. I have the red face that happens. Uh. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff here, and I think we're both surprised by it, uh, and I'm also interested in seeing where the technology goes in

the future. One of the big takeaways I learned from this is that if you take a if you take this test again, you might find even more information. Would you say that's fair? I think so. Yeah. And so that's where we end today's story. We went from the ancient past all the way to two where people are still asking what makes me me? What makes you you?

What can I learn about myself and apply It's not just the past but the president in the future, and with companies like twenty three and me, it's easier than ever before. So thanks thanks to the good folks, to twenty three and me, Thanks all I fellow ridiculous historians for tuning in, and thanks of course to Mr Max Williams. Max, are you gonna? Have you ever taken a DNA test? I have not taken a DNA test before, mostly because

I'm just kind of paranoid about it. But know also that part about it, he's your identity, like like secret stuff. So maybe I will, you know, and find out that maybe I'm related to that same guy that y'all are all related to. And hey, if you like this episode.

Why not check out some of our other fellow podcasters on the iHeart podcast network, like Many Questions with Many Driver, or Prodigy with our buddy Lollell Berlanti or a Hundred Words with Andrew Cannon Um, where they these hosts share their journeys to health discovery or you know, finding out what makes them them or we we are you you all the same stuff that we talked about from a

completely different angle. You can find their episodes in the spit feed Um, which is another show hosted by a dear friend of ours, Barrett Tunda Thurston on the I Heart Radio app or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Yes, and of course our good pals Annie and Sam over its stuff, Mom Never Told You and waiting on reparations with our pals Dope Knife and Link What Frank Up.

Thanks also to Jonathan Strickland ak the Quister, Thanks of course to Alex Williams, Christopher Hasiotis and us Jeff got absolutely and you know what, We'll see you next time, folks. And that's it on another dope show. Did this episode inspire you to take a closer look at your health history, your genetic makeup? Who new DNA could reveal so much about our past, while also holding the keys to certain

health insights that may impact our future. I continue to be inspired by these stories, and I hope you do as well. Catch you next time. Listen to Spit, an original podcast from I Heart Radio and twenty three in the on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast