I want to send kudos to Jenna Pelletier for her excellent article in Science Tuesday (“MED professor helps blacks connect with their African roots,” April 20, pg. 5) about professor Bruce Jackson’s work on ethnic markers in DNA samples from African-Americans. Without using jargon, she accurately described the project and its implications and did so in a way that holds the reader’s attention from start to finish. I often despair of journalists ever “getting it right” when they report on scientific subjects, but this piece reawakens hope.
I also would like to add two points. The first is that knowing at least some basic facts about one’s ancestry means a great deal to most people. It is quite literally a birthright. By helping to provide such information to African Americans, professor Jackson is performing a great service that hopefully will help mend the fabric of our society, so savagely torn as the result of 350 years of the slave trade. The second point concerns a now-well-established fact from DNA sequence analysis: The genetic diversity of the peoples of Africa far exceeds that of all other human populations. This not only strongly supports the African origin of our species, but also underscores the importance of African populations as reservoirs of valuable gene variants – including those that contribute to winning marathons!
Scott C. Mohr
Professor of Chemistry
Director
M.S. Program in Bioinformatics
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
