Genographic Project

» see genographic.nationalgeographic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the Genographic Project wanted $99.95 on a card and a cheek swab in an envelope going to the United States. in 2005, from Turkey, that was not one obstacle but a small stack of them, and in fairness none of it ever occurred to me at the time. i knew the project the way most people knew it, as National Geographic covers and a map of the world with lines drawn across it, made out of data i had no part in producing.

it launched on 13 april 2005, run by the National Geographic Society with IBM doing the computing and money from the Waitt Foundation, with the geneticist Spencer Wells as director. the scientific half was field work. researchers took DNA samples from indigenous populations through eleven regional centers around the world, working on the premise that people whose ancestors had stayed put held the clearest surviving record of where everybody else had come from.

the public half is the part that changed things. anyone could buy a kit for $99.95, swab the inside of a cheek, mail it back, and get a haplogroup and a route: the branch of the maternal or paternal tree you sat on, and the path that branch appeared to have taken over tens of thousands of years. you got no living relatives and no health report. what you got was a line on a map going back forty thousand years, and for a while that was an astonishing thing to be handed in the post.

more than 450,000 people bought into the first phase alone. the Geno 2.0 kit in july 2012 moved the test onto a genotyping chip at $199.95 and read far more of the genome. by the end the count stood at 1,006,543 participants in over 140 countries, which is a remarkable number for a piece of public science and a modest one next to what the commercial testing companies were processing by 2019.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was actually for ~

this was a research project that happened to have a shop attached, and the order matters. the kit was not the product, it was the funding mechanism and the consent form, and the thing being built was a population genetics dataset large enough to argue with. participants were volunteering to be data points in somebody else's paper, and were told so plainly, which is a very different transaction from the one the industry settled into afterwards.

the commercial testers inverted it. the dataset became the byproduct and you became the customer, buying a story about yourself with a percentage attached. that turned out to be the version people wanted, and it also turned out to be the version that ends with a company in a bankruptcy court fifteen years later, everyone's genome sitting on the balance sheet as an asset.

~ the objection ~

it was contested from the first month. in april 2005 the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism warned communities against taking part, on the grounds that a genetic origin story contradicting a people's own account of where they came from could be used against them in disputes over land and status. the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues recommended suspending the project in may 2006. the objection was never really about the science being wrong. it was about who gets to hold the conclusion and what they can do with it afterwards.

the project kept going and kept sampling, and by december 2012 it counted over 70,000 indigenous participants. both things are true at once: the work produced genuine science, and it was carried out over a formal objection from some of the people it most wanted to sample.

~ how it ended ~

kit sales stopped on 31 may 2019. results stayed reachable for another year while participants were told to download their own data, and after 30 june 2020 the website went. National Geographic retired the site the following month and pointed the last of the traffic at its magazine coverage. nobody was sued and nothing leaked. the project simply finished, having been overtaken by an industry that would not have existed in that form without it, and which had learned to sell people their cousins instead of their ancestors.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »