The DNA of Culture
The Creation Myth of Popular Genetics
by Eugene Thacker

Journey of Man, a NOVA science documentary produced to much acclaim in 2003, ought to be subtitled "The Benetton Theory of Genetics." In its own roundabout way, Journey of Man suggests that globalization is about DNA, and that
DNA can explain race and ethnicity. It consciously fashions genetics as global — but it does so in a way that masks or hides the ways in which this global science is linked to a global industry in intellectual property, market-driven health care, and pharmaceuticals.

Population geneticist Spencer Wells retraces the presumed steps of the earliest human beings, beginning in Africa, then on to Australia, India, China, Russia and finally to Europe and America. Along the way, Wells also takes samples of volunteers in order to build up a set of genetic markers to tell his genetic narrative: that each individual on this planet is related to every other individual, that "we" have a common genetic heritage, one that originated in Africa, and spread outward to Australia, China, and the Middle East.

But Journey ultimately fails in its quest: in setting out to prove that genetics can explain race and ethnicity, it ends up showing how genetics is totally unable to account for cultural and social variations.

The premises which the program makes are twofold: First, that all human beings on the planet — and all their ancestors — are "related" via their DNA. This is, in a nutshell, the idea behind genetic archaeology, or the use of molecular genetics technologies to discern archaeological and anthropological relationships. One popular field has been the use of genetic analysis to construct or re-construct human lineages, thereby re-telling the "story of man." The problem with Journey is its intimation that the genetic narrative of man is also a progress narrative, stretching from the “primitive” cultures of African plains to the electronic pulse of Western cities, from the “Dark Continent” to the Developed World.

Journey’s second premise is implicit in the first, and only emerges near the program's end: that "our" common genetic heritage is ground for seeing all people and cultures as essentially alike. Wells' genetic narrative is Janus-faced: on the one hand it sets itself up as irrefutable science, and on the other hand it also claims to explain something about the universality of "the human," irrespective of cultural difference, the particular, the local, the translocal.

There is something ironic in seeing a very American geneticist supposedly hanging out with the world’s remaining indigenous people, generously sharing with each group the irrefutable origin narrative of genetics. (Upon first meeting an African bushman tribe, Wells, indulging in a bit of physical racialism, immediately notes how he can see the myriad of human races in the foreheads, cheekbones, and bodily features of the tribespeople.) At every step of the way, Wells encounters dissent from his supposed so-called ancestors. African Bushmen, Australian Aboriginals, Native Americans — each ethnic group Wells visits directly questions his scientific proposition. They question him not on the details of his science, but on the level of culture.

One instance is instructive. After an elaborate lecture in genetics, an Aboriginal tribesman plainly states he does not believe Wells' "story" about the common genetic roots of all human beings. The reason? The tribesman points to the
long tradition of stories, myths, and cultural traditions that explicitly state that the origin of Aboriginal tribes is in Australia, and not in Africa. Wells’ only response is that perhaps genetics is the Western world's own origin myth. (This is, to my mind, the real message of this documentary.) The people Wells visits often just smile or even laugh while he tells, like nothing so much as a salesman, his genetic narrative. Wells’s most preposterous statement comes at the close of the documentary: "We are all literally 'African' under the skin."

The issue, obviously, isn't one of right and wrong. What is important are the irreducible differences persistently encountered by Wells between Western science and local cultural traditions. The only thing Journey of Man proves is that the supposedly universal, global science of genetics is anything but global (or local).

Journey of Man purports to be about genetics, but is really about culture. This is, I agree, an easy target, and a part of me is still trying to see programs like these in a more complex way, as more than attempts to use biology to answer problems that are social, economic, and political. But it is hard to see this documentary, and fields such as population genetics, as disconnected from the medical and economic interests of drug development, intellectual property, and the growing hegemony and privatization of Western and U.S. healthcare systems.

If research like this can convince people in various cultures that genetics is the answer to questions of social and cultural origins, it follows that genetics is also the answer to medicine and healthcare — and that a market-based healthcare system is the answer to delivering genetic medicine to the "rest" of the world. This is perhaps reductive, but it is worth noting that Wells himself comes from an interesting professional lineage. His mentor, Luca Cavalli-Sforza, is a well-known population geneticist, a researcher largely acknowledged for playing a key role in the development of population genetics. Cavalli-Sforza is also well known as one of the lead researchers of the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), a National Institutes of Health-funded program begun in the early 1990s to collect genetic samples from thousands of genetically-isolated populations world-wide. The reason was twofold: first, to assemble a genetic archaeology of the human race, and second, to use these samples to develop genetic medicines. Cavalli-Sforza's name, and the HGDP project, gained media attention when activist groups showed that project teams had filed patents on biological samples without fully informing the communities from which the samples were taken. By 1996 the HGDP had dropped several of its patent claims and had publicly issued a set of protocols for the acquisition of biological and genetic samples. None of this was mentioned in the documentary.

My big question to Wells and the producers of Journey is this: why is it so significant to travel around the world,
lecturing people from different cultures about genetics? Perhaps the aim is to foster a greater sense of community among the human race, or some such idealistic notion. But if this is the aim, it demands more than genetic reductionism. Along his travels, Wells encounters people experiencing economic hardship, political unrest, unequal social development, religious fervor, and suspicion of American culture. His "incredible story" of DNA has very little to say in the face of such difficulties.

Eugene Thacker is Assistant Professor, School of Literature, Communication & Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology.