So, I don’t think that these tests are very informative
about the types of relations between people, beyond
first, second, or third cousins, because everyone is,
roughly, as related to each other at that point. The
notion that these types of products can tell you
things about your ancestry and your sense of selfidentity,
I think, is really short.
They’re commercial products, and the market will
determine how successful they are, but I think that
as scientists, we are obliged to explain what the
product is.
SG: In your most recent publication, you
mention that the utility of customer genetictesting
can play a part in white supremacy
discourse. Does the notion of ancestral
purity have any scientific grounding?
Dr Rutherford: There’s been a normalisation of
what we might call biological essentialism, the idea
that your character, your identity, is innate, and
engrained in your DNA. I’m a geneticist, and I don’t
think that’s true. Our genetic relatedness to our
ancestors is relatively weak. That doesn’t mean that
cultural identity is not important. Much of the
argument in the book and the lecture, is that cultural
identity is important, but when you try to wed it to
genetic identity, that is where we have a scientific
problem.
When white supremacists rely on the notion of
ancestral purity in order to prop up their hateful
ideologies, they can’t use genetics to do that,
because genetics doesn’t say that, it doesn’t say that
there is racial purity, it says quite the opposite. The
concept of racial purity is just non-scientific.
That is where these types of products, I think, are
unhelpful in these conversations. People should
know what they’re purchasing, and understand what
it is that these products can actually say, and then
people are free to make their own decisions. Caveat
emptor.
SG: In your book, ‘Creation’, you refer to
bacterial reproduction as a major challenge
associated with determining the origin of our
species. Bacteria do not only vertically pass
on their genetic material, but also
horizontally transfer their genes. Recent
human feeding studies have displayed the
potential for genetically modified soybean to
transfer the gene for antibiotic resistance to
natural bacteria of our small intestine. Do
you think that the hitherto lack of viable
solutions for antibiotic resistance stems from
such multifaceted methods of bacterial
reproduction?
Dr Rutherford: Yes, quite right. I think that
antibiotic resistance is one of the great crises that we
face at the moment. It’s showing limited signs of
improving. There are multiple reasons for this, but
the basic scientific reason is that horizontal gene
transfer is something that bacteria do very
efficiently. Couple that with overuse of antibiotics,
and you’ll see that we have effectively driven the
artificial selection of antibiotic resistance. Add that
to the fact that there are no new classes of antibiotics
that have been discovered for ten, fifteen years
(although new antibiotics have); the financial
incentive for developing antibiotic chemicals and
compounds, into becoming drugs, is very low. It’s
very expensive to develop drugs; it’s a billion dollars
to get from chemical to market.
So, there isn’t a lot of investment into developing
new drugs. There are new techniques, we reported
on one last week: artificial intelligence using
machine learning to identify already existing
compounds that have antibiotic potential. They still
need to be turned into drugs, it’s a multi-stage
process. You know, identifying a compound that is
antibiotic is not the same as manufacturing a drug.