[ Silence ]
>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
[ Silence ]   >> Well, good afternoon everyone.

I'm Carolyn Brown.
I direct the Office of Scholarly Programs
in the John W. Kluge Center here at the Library.
I'm delighted to welcome you here this afternoon
for what I know is going to be a very interesting presentation.
My Professor Jennifer Hochschild, who is currently the Kluge Chair
in American Law and Governance here at the Kluge Center,
and she will be speaking about the political implications
of human genomics.
Before we begin, let me remind you to please turn off your cell phones
and any other electronic equipment that can go off
and disturb the speaker, the audience, or the recording.
The event is sponsored by the John W. Kluge Center,
which was established through a very generous endowment of John W. Kluge,
to create a scholar venue on Capitol Hill
where the nation's leaders would have at least the opportunity to tap
into the mature wisdom of scholars, senior scholars, and use,
in some way, their judgment and knowledge
to bring fresh perspectives to government.
The vision was for a Center that would provide a space
as the Founding Document said, where the world of affairs and the world
of ideas could meet, where the thinkers
and doers could come together from mutually enriching conversation.
These highly accomplished scholars would be part of a community
that would include the most promising rising generation
of junior scholars, and all would come together to draw
on the collections of the Library and the Library's wonderful curators
and form a rich intellectual community.
The Center also promotes lectures such as this one,
small conferences, symposia.
If you're interested in knowing more,
you can sign up for e-mail notification.
Go to the front page of the Library of Congress, right-hand side,
click on the Kluge Center and then at the bottom of the Kluge Webpage,
you'll be able to sign up for notifications.
Today's speaker Jennifer Hochschild has been in residence
at the Kluge Center for six months, actually.
It's gone very fast.   She's been very diligent.

But I really haven't had much time to talk to her
because she's been busy, and I've been busy.
But I hope it's been a very productive six months.
She'll be returning to Harvard University,
where she is the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government
and a Professor of African and African American Studies.
She works on the intersection of American politics
and political philosophy, particularly in the areas of race,
ethnicity, immigration, and education policy.
Issues related to public opinion
and political culture are also part of her concern.
To give you a more sort of solid sense of what she's been up to,
I'm just going to mention a few of the books that she has co-authored
or authored and that will give you a good sense.
Co-authored the American Dream in the Public Schools, 2003;
and is the author of Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class,
and the Soul of the Nation, 1995.
The American Dilemma: Liberal Democracy
and School Desegregation, from 1984.
What's Fair: American Beliefs and Distributive Justice, 1981.
Needless to say, this is a small selection of the books,
and I didn't mention any of her numerous other publications.
She's also the Founding Editor of Perspectives of Politics,
which is published by the American Political Science Association,
and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
I'm not going to go and list all the fellowships
and other accomplishments
because you really didn't come for that part.
You came to hear what she has to say, which is also what I want
to say, want to hear, that is, The Human Genome Project --
which I think you all know --   is an international effort

to understand the genetic makeup of the human species.
We read about it in the newspaper all the time.
It is driven, of course, by the unquenchable human --
unquenchable -- sorry -- human impulse to understand the world
and also our own physiology, but also by the potential importance
for developing medicine
and important other health interventions.
As a species, however, the human race has a rather sad record
of using wonderful innovations in all sorts of ways
that are less than wonderful.
As a Political Scientist, Dr. Hochschild is interested, therefore,
in what we're going to do with this amazing genomic knowledge,
what are its public policy implications
and then the really hard question
of who decides what we're going to do as a society.
So the social implications of the issues raised
by these scientific advances are very important and, so far,
mostly haven't gotten into the mainstream
in the areas of great controversy.
But I think today we're going to hear about some of the implications
of the human genomics as well as maybe a glance into the future
as to what we might expect as the public and the Congress
and others grow increasingly aware of the implications.
So please welcome Jennifer Hochschild.
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you, Carolyn.

Thank you all for coming.
On a hot muggy day, we should all be out at the beach,
but I'm delighted that you're not.
The first thing I want to say is just thanks to the Kluge Center,
to the Library of Congress, to the staff, to Carolyn, to my colleagues.
It's been an absolutely fabulous six months.
My office is now completely bare.
And I'm going home the day after tomorrow with considerable regret.
It's just been a wonderful time.   So thank you very much.

This is one of the first times I've been talking.
This is a new project.
It grows out of my work on racial and ethnic politics, public policy,
political philosophy, American political beliefs
over the last now 20 or 30 years.
At the beginning of my last six months, --
over this past six months, I finished a book project
that I've been working on for close to a decade.
And I was delighted to turn my attention to a new one which grows
out of that material, but it's really moving
in quite a different direction.
First thing I should say is that my ascend here is my co-authors.
And so when I say, we, it's actually not a royal we, there's a real we.
She's a PhD student in the government department at Harvard.
She has a law degree.   So one of the directions we're going

with this project is looking at the forensic stuff.
And she has done most, or not --
oh, maybe perhaps all of the data analysis.
So when I talk about the data themselves,
I'm mostly mouthing Mia's analyses.
So if you ask me hard questions, I'll just say wait
until she's done in Washington.
So the project is looking, as Carolyn said, at the politics
and policies that are going to develop
out of this relatively new field called, Genomic Science.
I'll explain in a minute or so what I mean by that.
But just to kind of motivate your interest, which is a part
that motivated mine, this is a paragraph in the Economist.
And as you all know, the Economist is sort
of on the one hand, the other hand.
It doesn't really go far out on a limb, with the possible exception
of support for free markets.
So when I read this paragraph, I was fairly struck by it.
I had begun working on the project but hadn't really thought
through how important I think it actually is.
But four or five years ago, the Economist wrote;
there is in biology a sense
of barely contained expectations reminiscent of the physical sciences
at the turn of the 20th Century.
Well, if you think about what physics did in the 20th Century,
it transformed the world.
It's a feeling of advancing into the unknown.
That's what biology is now doing for us.
Where this advance will lead is both exciting and mysterious.
Again, we turn to the analogy with 20th-Century physics,
and we'll continue for both good and ill.
And both in analogy itself and the importance of physics
to the 20th Century transforming how we travel,
how we understand the universe, also allowing us
to create nuclear destruction, and so on.
If biology is going to do that in the 21st Century,
then political scientists -- which I need to pay attention to it,
so does the public as a whole, of course --
and so what I'm trying to do is bring the politics
and policies issues that are just beginning to come into this,
sort of the public horizon, try to bring some focus to them.
What is genomics?
Well, first most straightforward definition --
this is some dictionary.com or something like that.
It's simply the study of genetics that studies the full DNA sequence,
rather than gene by gene or DNA segment by DNA segment.
So it's all, rather than part.   That's the simplest explanation.

A slightly more philosophical explanation of what it means
to think about the whole genetic composition of the human body
or any other cellular organism is
that somehow it's a systemic phenomenon that can't be reduced
to sort of counting out genes and the spaces in DNA
that are not themselves genes.
There are so many interactions, so many contingencies,
so much complexity to the composition of the whole genome
that it's involved, quoting,
governance of whole novel forms of information.
So that takes us kind of one level
of philosophical discourse beyond counting genes.
A third definition or a third understanding comes from one
of the interviews that I've been conducting
over the past couple of months.
This is from a scientist, who is a very fine biologist,
but has a much more sort of mystical understanding
of what this whole phenomenon is.
It's pushing us to new stages of understanding how identity,
the genome as an entity, as a thing is pushing us.
So it's an active force.
Parts of the genome were designed to push us into larger life,
stimulating another stage of human development.
And this person, this [Inaudible] subject went
on for quite a long time explaining what this sort
of much more elaborating philosophy means.
I won't go there because I'm not a philosopher, nor am I,
for that matter, a real biologist.
But here's a more sort of practical or pragmatic or sort of minute
to minute understanding of what genomics can do for us.
Genetically engineered food, which is a big political issue
in some places, actually less politically contentious
than I would expect it to be, but it's out there.
Certainly, the ability to identify the genes for rare
and devastating diseases.
That's been around for a while before genomics became a visible
science, but it's been -- or as a magnitude made more --
its [Inaudible] magnitude faster and better as a consequence of moving
from gene by gene into the genomic whole.
Thinking about the environmental interactions with the genes,
for most diseases, of course, we know that the old nature
versus nurture logic simply no longer obtains genes turned on
or off, or genetic impact is largely a consequence of environment.
And it also turns out that the environment can transform
the genome.
So the causal direction goes both ways including for inheritance
from as yet on border, even in unconceived children.
So there's a very complicated environmental interaction.
Identify victims of massacres, identify, of course,
whether the person claims
to have been Osama bin Laden was, in fact, him.
You can identify Doug or any other kind of waste through genomics,
which some cities are beginning to do.
You can determine whether someone who is -- yeah, whether --
well, whether King Louis the 17th, really the son
of Queen Marie Antoinette.
So you can trace lineages not only from living people,
but also from people, of course, long of the past.
You could tell whether the fish in your souche is salmon.
You can use it in the forensic arena for determination of rape victims
or rape committers and, of course, it can be used for exoneration.
I'll talk about the criminal justice system in a minute.
There's also dating services, matchmaking cruise ships.
People are suggesting that if you send in your DNA swab,
we'll match you with someone whose genome matches yours,
or maybe someone whose genome is opposite from yours,
whatever that means, depending on what you want.
This is my favorite use of genomics.   This is -- you send in a cheek swab

and you get your own personalized poster from this company.
And it's from various sizes and various color combinations.
And you go to the Website, you can choose whatever color.
And I've actually talked with these people.
They're quite interesting.
And they're going to be on my list of people to interview.
Their mission they say is not making money, which is, of course,
you pay for this little poster, but they're trying to demystify genomics
and bring it into the public arena in a way
that people will understand the magic and beauty of the science.
So buy yourself a poster.
So our project more seriously is looking, as I said, at the genomics,
politics, policy intersection.
And we start with the presumption that as citizens
of the United States, but also elsewhere,
there's a small comparative component to this project,
and there's going to be much more as it develops.
But I'm still trying to get my hands around the American context.
As people learn more about it, see more of its impact
in their daily lives, and in larger sort of scientific endeavors,
it will develop partisan in ideological pasts; that's the sort
of underlying hypothesis.
The analogy, for example, is placental stem cell research,
which nobody had any idea what that phrase meant,
and then suddenly it came into the public arena,
and about 24 hours later,
it got very tightly attached to abortion politics.
So people who were, roughly speaking, pro-choice tended
to support research and placental stem cells;
people who were pro-life tended to oppose it.
Now it's not a one-for-one relationship.
There are famous people on both sides.
But it became politically attached very, very quickly.
Global warming, climate change, of course, has done the same thing.
It's nothing inherent in the science of carbon dioxide use;
that would be a Republican or Democratic position,
but it has become politicized.
So our starting hypothesis is the genomics, which hasn't
yet developed those kind of valences, will.
Policy disputes will move out of the scientific community
into the public arena.   That's part of the politicization.

And so today what I want to talk about is what Americans know
and think about genomics, and particularly, its relationship
to race, race or ethnicity.
Not so much because I think there is a strong politics around this,
there isn't, but because I think there's going to be;
and it's important, or at least it's plausible that there's going to be.
And it's important that we have a sense of kind
of where people are now so that we can trace the development
of this politics.
From a theoretical perspective, as a Political Scientist, I'm interested
in tracking how politics gets created where there isn't one.
So I'm going to talk about two arenas
of work that we're working on.   One is the DNA ancestry testing.

You send in a cheek swab, and you don't get a poster,
but you get a statement of what your ancestors -- where they're from.
I'll talk about that a little more extensively.
And that's really a political issue.
It's not a policy issue, or at least it isn't yet.
And then, of course, there's a very important policy issue
of using DNA databanks in the criminal justice system.
So I'm going to talk about those two pieces of the research project
to try to give you a feel for what the rest of the enterprise is about.
So what is a race if we think about it from the perspective of genomics?
Well, the first wave, roughly the first decade
or so when the Human Genome Project was being developed,
and at least in the initial stages, and many people will continue
to argue what these two quotations are saying,
is that genomics have proven definitively
that there is no such thing as a race.
J. Craig Venter says, what we've shown is the concept
of race has no scientific basis.   Cavalli, Forbes, and his co-authors,

who wrote earlier during the beginnings of the Genome Project,
explain why Venter can make that claim.
Classification into race is a futile exercise.
We can identify clusters of populations through genomic science.
But with no level can any cluster be identified
with what we understand to be a race.
Since every level of clusters produces a different partition,
there's no biological reason to prefer one or the other.
So you can ask the computer to take a sample, genomic sample,
and give me five different divisions;
and they turn out to look a lot like black, white,
Asian, Latino, Native-American.
You can ask the computer to give you 17 divisions,
and they turn out to be a coherent set of locations
that we can attach labels to.
You ask the computer to give you 27, and it will do 72, whatever.
There's no scientific reason to choose one, five, seven,
seventeen, any more than any other.
So there was nothing biological about the language of race.
That's what these people are saying.
However, subsequently, the argument got a little bit more complicated,
maybe a little more subtle, but at least a little more complicated.
Things that we think of as conventional races,
the sort of Bloom [Phonetic] and Vacki [Phonetic] in five categories
that we normally use, or black, white, yellow, red, and Brown,
to put it at its most crude language,
turn out to have patterned differences in the one-tenth
of 1 percent of the human genome that differs across populations.
It's a tiny fraction of the human genome.
It's 3 million base pairs.
So there are 3 million possibilities for clusters that have something
that look a lot like what we tend to think of when we talk about races.
So there's very susceptibility to some diseases.
You can identify the beginning, to be able to identify phenotypes,
skin color, eye color, hair patterning, and so on.
So the scientists that I've been talking to, and the quotation
that I have here are no longer quite willing to say there's nothing going
on in the arena of what we conventionally call race.
They don't want to use the term correctly.
It's not sort of simple and straightforward.
But as this researcher says, how distinctive are these categories?
They're not distinctive at all.
Race is a complex construct, social factors, self-identity,
third-party factors of identification,
but it also includes biological factors.
And the scientists working in this arena will consistently say that.
You know, we know the history of eugenics.
We get the idea that race is a social construction.
We know that.   We know that.

Nevertheless, they will say over
and over there's something biological going on here
which we can't just ignore
because we know what consequences it's had in the historical past.
And probably one of the underlying issues for me
for this whole project is how do we think about that.
Is there a way of talking about race, all scare quotes all the time,
and biology that doesn't just throw us back into the old racial science
of the 19th and 20th Century?
The genomic scientists say we have to figure out how to do that.
We as a society as well as we as individuals and authors,
writers, speakers, researchers.
So that's the big question for the project.
The small piece of it that I'm working on today is, as I say,
is ancestry testing and forensic science.
I won't go into the details of how to do the ancestry testing.
There's several different kinds of tests, partly depending
on which you choose, depending on how much money you spend,
depending on your own sex, and so on; but basically, for our purposes,
it can do two different kinds of things.
It can show blurred or mixed standard ancestry.
So you're 27 percent Asian and 32 percent European
and 48 percent African, and whatever is left over to get you
up to 100 percent Native American, or something like that.
So lots of people, of course, are very mixed ancestry
and the ancestry test will show that.
A second thing the ancestry tests can do --
if my screen will come up -- is what we're calling,
reify a single ancestry, and it can do that in two different ways.
One, it can say actually you are purebred, pureblood something
or other, from whatever continent.   So you're 97 percent Asian.

You're 100 percent European.
You're a full blooded African, or something like that, the test --
I mean, the language is mine, but the test results will be --
can show that kind of single continental ancestry.
Or a different kind of test which focuses much more
on a particular ancestral line, not your whole ancestral background,
but a particular line purports to be able to say you are a descendent
of what is now the something or other tribe
in a particular geographic location.
You're a descendent of what is now understood to be the Zulu
or the Mende or the Celts
or the Jewish colony, or something like that.
These are different kinds of tests.
It's not worth going into the details of why they produced.
But the basic point here is that you can either produce a blurred
or mixed result, or you can produce a quite focused racially pure
or tribally-based or group-based result.
So the question for us is how much does any of this have to do
with the person's racial identity?   One, we care.

Well, because there's very different emotional connotations
and very different political implications.
And again, I'm just going to use a few quotes to suggest the flavor
of the way in which this could be politicized or could feel important
to the individual themselves.
Blurring, this is your 42 percent this and 37 percent that category.
Jack [Inaudible], this is written as it comes from the Atlantic.
He describes himself as being red haired and freckled
and having a Scottish ancestry.
Turns out, he says, I carry the DNA marker
from the Fulbe Tribe contemporary Nigeria.
And he claims that he's now actually much more interested
in African politics and Nigerian history economy society
because he feels an affinity.   He feels an association.

So that's the sort of the blurring mixture --
it's a small world after all sort of logic.
Right. There's an opposite kind of positive valence
from these ancestry tests.
This is from a Chicago -- University of Chicago Alumni Magazine.
The Reverend Al Simpson says,
500 years ago my DNA is removed from Sierra Leone.
He was, of course, part of the --
his ancestors were part of the Middle Passage, taken to America,
I'm coming back from my seat.   My seat has been vacant.

He asks for a [Inaudible] name
to reclaim what was taken away from him.
So it was a very deep emotional attachment
to a very particular location in a very particular ancestral line.
So the reification logic has a very different feel
than the blurring logic.   How about the politics of this?

Well, this is my favorite.
If I'd had time, I was going to pull up the YouTube video.
But you should all go look at it.
Snoop Dogg's DNA ancestry testing was done on the George Lopez Show,
when he finds out that he's got 75 percent African.
He's got more European ancestry
than Charles Barkley, who'd been done earlier.
He says we got to have a re-vote.   This ain't right.

He's clearly very unhappy.   And he's joking.

But he's not very happy about it.
And Barkley says well, I'll just call you Whitey from now on.
And Barkley pulls out a bunch of presents
and gives him a tennis racket and he gives him a pink scarf
and he gives him a whole bunch of things.
Then he said Whitey, you know, presents for Whitey.
Right. So, it's, you know, it's funny.
It's a joke.   But there's an edge to it.

They're not altogether happy about this.
On the other hand, so that's the sort of the --
the blurring can be not so positive.
The other side of it, this is from a professor at Penn.
He says when people discover I thought I was black,
but I'm also Asian and white.   Again, the small world logic.

They have different conversations.   They're less bigoted.

They ask people questions.   They're more open to difference.

So that's the positive kind of politics of blurring.
What about reification?
Again, there's negative politics to it.
Troy Duster, says sociologist, says the use of markers
for individual identification, the I am a descendent
of this particular tribe.
I am 97 percent this particular ancestry.
It will be suddenly inadvertently we inscribe race
at the molecular level.
So he's worrying that what we understand
to be a social construction is going to be turned one more time
into a biological reality with all kinds of harmful consequences.
We've seen that in history over and over, says Duster.
We're going to see it again if we just kind of go
in this reification direction.
My colleague Henry Louis Gates is much more positive.
He also runs one of these companies, perhaps not coincidentally.
For the first time, since the 17th Century,
we can symbolically reverse the Middle Passage.
Think back to the Reverend Simpson I was describing a minute ago.
Our ancestors brought something
that not even the slave trade could take away
to their own distinctive DNA.
A match reveals a shared ethnic ancestry
that has been lost for centuries.
So he's, in some sense, celebrating the biologicalization of race,
at least in this very particular historical understanding
of what that means.
So again, there can be positive and negative politics of the blurring.
There can be positive and negative politics of reification.
All right.
So we took all of these background and we ran a survey experiment
in which we basically did something or other.
We ran it through knowledge networks.
We used about 1000 samples, done about a year ago.
We selected people on the basis of their race ethnicity; so black,
white, Asian, Latino, self-defined multiracial are our five groups.
I know those are not the same thing, and we can talk
about why they're not the same thing later, if you want.
But for the moment, allow me to assert that they are sort
of parallel constructions.
Right. And we gave him vignettes, since most people hadn't
in fact done these tests and didn't really know much about them.
We had to explain what was going on and ask them
to put themselves in the position.
So we gave them the name of a person who was the same gender
as them, Isabella or Michael.   I think we used David.

It's a woman who identifies whatever your race is.
So we matched the vignette person by race and gender
to the person responding to the survey.
She's taken a DNA test and then we gave them two alternatives.
It can be traced primarily to a particular continent,
either reification logic, or her ancestry is blurred
across a bunch of different continents.
So we basically gave people the reification and blurring vignettes.
We provided them with a little map that would light
up on what we were showing them,
either a particular continent, or the world as a whole.
It turns out, this map actually was quite difficult.
Mia and I went through a lot of discussion.
What do you do with Australia?   What do you do with the Caribbean?

What do you do with Brazil?
She was insisting that the Middle East belongs as part of Asia.
It's not part of Europe.
We went to the census document, and it turns out, that depending
on which census you used, the Middle East migrates back
and forth between Asia and Europe.
It's actually -- it's not so easy to do this very simple map,
but we did it in any case.
So we asked them -- so we gave them the vignette
and we asked them three questions.
How would you feel if you were this person?
And we were hoping they would identify with the person.
Would you be pleased?   Would you find it believable?

And would it matter to your identity?
So how pleased are people?
Well, people who define themselves as being multiracial are pleased
to be associated with more than one continent;
and that seems fairly self-evident.
So I mean, in some, I'm glad of that result, because,
if we didn't have that, then I'd be quite nervous about the vignette.
But basically, it's not terribly exciting.
A more interesting result, blacks are most --
are pleased disproportionately more than any other group
to be associated with Africa, in particular,
the reification result associated with Africa.
Whites are least pleased to be associated
with only one continent, Europe.   So we have a complete reversal here

of the traditional American One-Drop of Blood Rule.
Blacks want to be associated with a single continent,
single ancestral lineage of Africa.
Whites, perhaps the most surprising, at least if you think
about 20th-Century history, don't want to be associated
with a single continent of Europe.   Now do we really believe this?

Or are they understanding what the politically correct answers?
Who knows.
But the reported results are the reverse of what the last 150 years
or so over American history has spent a lot of time and effort
in law and death to try to create.   It's a very interesting result.

And most of the groups prefer the reification rather than blurring.
They prefer to be associated with a particular ancestry,
particular continental ancestry, rather than the small world,
sort of we're all brothers under the skin kind of logic.
Do they believe these results?
If you were Isabella or David, would you believe these results?
The answer is, roughly speaking, is yes.
They find the scientist.
Now the scientist don't find this ancestral science very persuasive,
but certain respondents say yeah, we believe it.
Americans have a lot of confidence in science.
They find that the reifying results, however, more believable
than the blurring results.
So once again, they're more persuaded by as well
as being more pleased by a single continental ancestry.
And most of the other responses are either
which is sort of the default position.
So most people believe the results
and to the degree that there's variation.
They believe the more when it's focused on a single continent.
What about the impact on your identity?
Well, it turns out black,
African-American respondents are more effected
by the results regardless of whether they show reification or blurring.
So the phenomenon is sort of wanting to know
and believing the science about one's ancestry.
It's just a more powerful phenomenon among the black population.
Now, again, maybe that's because they don't have paper genealogies,
maybe it's because the racial history is so complicated
and so front, maybe it's
because they're answering the survey in some way, and so on.
But the test results show very clearly
that the identity issues are much more important.
They just matter more to the black population regardless
of the results.
Whites are least effected by these results.
So which is, in some sense, it's a symmetrical flipside
of the same story, maybe
because whites don't care about their ancestry.
They're confident that they came from the right continent.
They can do genealogies.
But who else knows, whatever reason, whites are least interested.
And close to half of the population and a majority say no,
this wouldn't actually make any difference to me one way or another.
But from a quarter to a half of the population say yeah,
it would actually make a difference.   Okay. So what are the conclusions?

Blacks are most, and whites are least pleased with sharp or reified
or distinct continental boundaries.   Most respondents trust the science.

Blacks are most effected by the testing; whites are the least.
So we've got something, I think a developing conflict
between the genomic science which says there is no
such thing as race, largely.
There are population affinities or associations
with particular diseases or particular phenotypes.
But no genomic scientist will say there is such a thing as race.
And they absolutely will resist anything that looks
like a reification or a strong association
with a single continent or a single location.
But the population as a whole are all more engaged with reification.
They're more interested in it.   They're more persuaded by it.

The possible exception here are self-defined multiracials,
but that's more or less a circular result.
They wouldn't be self-defined multiracials
if they weren't already committed to the blurring logic.
So the sciences seems to be going in a different direction
from the popular interest and commitment and identity.
If I had more time, we've got other results from the media analysis
that show essentially the same thing.
With the reification logic, is a much more powerful logic
in the public arena than the blurring logic.
Although, every genomic scientist will tell you
that blurring is the right way to understand race, not reification.
So there's a potential conflict developing in the public arena,
as this moves into more visibility.
Okay. Second topic that I want to talk briefly about is this,
is more policy specific rather than politics.
It has to do with the bio banks and law enforcement.
Again, it's a complicated story,
which I will just very briefly give you three sentences.
All states collect DNA from people convicted of felonies and do tests
for markers in 13 different locations.
All states also collect DNA from crime scenes.
About half of the states, an increasing number,
this number of half is unstable.
It will be more in the next couple of years --
collect DNA from arrestees and, in principle, who's supposed
to have expunged it if the person is not convicted; but in practice,
they almost never do, as far as we can tell.
Some of them collect DNA
from deportable immigrants subject to deportation.
Three states permit the use of databanks for familial matches,
which is to say, you can use the DNA from the crime scene not only
to search for a perfect match, which is what most states do,
but also for a partial match, somebody who's two-thirds,
three-quarters, nine-tenths the same as the sample of the crime scene.
You know it's not the criminal because it's not a perfect match,
but it may well be a family member of the criminal.
So you can track the family member who seems --
track the person who is a plausible family relation
to the potential criminal and figure out what relations he --
because it's almost always a he -- has, where they were, go to the door
and say we know you didn't do this but, by the way,
where was your cousin Johnny last Friday night, and so on.
So the familial searches are a growing use of the DNA
and expand the population potentially subject
to forensic bio banks by a very large proportion.
The FBI -- well, some states also allow the collection of,
quote, abandon DNA.
So if you smoke a cigarette, if you both comb your hair,
if you eat a piece of pizza, if you drink a cup of coffee,
somebody can follow and retrieve that abandon DNA.
This is part of [Inaudible],
and then collected the DNA sample from that.
The FBI coordinates.   This is the national level.

I'm going to go interview the FBI tomorrow, which took a lot of effort
to get somebody to talk to me, but they claim they're going to.
So how do people view about this?
How do people feel about the use of DNA in the criminal justice system?
So again, our project is looking at public views on the grounds
that this is going to become more visible and more important
over the next 5, 10, 15 years.
Again, we're focusing on racial and ethnic variation.
This is a different Internet representative sample.
It's got 4200 respondents with the same US groups of the same groups.
And we basically organize it not around reification and blurring,
but around three fundamental principles, three theories
of how these forensic bio banks might effect people
of different races and ethnicities.
One logic is racial harm, which is that you start from the fact
that Black and Latino men are very disproportionately
over represented in these bio banks.
There's now about 10 million samples, and probably half or more
of them are Black or Latino.   So they're more likely to be caught.

Also through the familial matching, it's much more likely
that family members of Blacks and Latinos will be investigated not
as potential criminals themselves,
but as having a close family relationship with someone
who might be a person of interest.
So one calculation, and this is now a calculation from five years ago
when the bio banks were probably half the size they are now,
the calculation then was that roughly 20 percent
of the black population was available
for a familial investigation compared
to roughly 4 percent of the white population.
Somebody else has done a calculation for Latino families,
given that Latino families are simply larger.
There's a larger fraction of the number of people
in any given nuclear family.
They're also even more disproportionately subject
to familial matches, perhaps than black families,
according to that argument.
So group disparities will continue to rise as the databases grow.
And some people describe this, for example,
as building Jim Crow's database.
It's sort of surveillance through DNA testing rather than surveillance
through the more crude old-fashion measures.
A second logic is that it's actually black
and Latino populations will benefit rather than be harmed.
After all, if you think about the other uses of evidence
in the criminal justice system,
they actually may be more racially biased.
Do we trust eyewitness reports?   Do we trust police reports?

Do we trust juries?   Do we trust public defenders?

Well, not all that much, according to the evidence.
There's clear evidence of racial bias at a whole series of stages.
Arguably, DNA bio banks are more trustworthy from the perspective
of an African-American or Latino because race doesn't have any --
because genes don't have any race.
They might actually be a benefit rather than a harm.
Black and Latino communities are under policed
as much as they're over policed.
Many of the worst horrific forms of crime actually occur
within African-American Latino communities.
So there might actually be a benefit to using the bio banks.
And even the targeted searches through the familial matches,
the sort of the surveillance.
It might be preferable to kind of broad sweep,
bring in every young black man between the ages of 15
and 25 and do a fingerprint.
So it's arguable that these bio banks will benefit rather
than harm African-American communities.
And a third logic is, of course, they won't do one of these.
They'll do neither one.
Yes, for open-ended responses, we asked our survey respondents
to tell us what they thought about these things.
And one guy wrote, well, if I'm not guilty, it's not going to effect me.
It doesn't matter what race I am.   This is not about race.

This is about guilt or innocence, period.
Okay. [Inaudible] political valences, President Obama
in a TV interview reminded the audience that he's the father
of two young daughters, and it says he supports forensic DNA bio banks
and supports federal funding to develop them at states
and the federal government.
It's so important to every family across America.
There are too many horror stories.   We're not doing enough.

We insist on justice.   So that's one logic.

The opposite of politics is the ACLU.
Family searching is an imprecise tool.
It will invade the privacy of a lot of people, or even more starkly,
you're going to see the majority of the African-American population
under genetic surveillance.
If you do the math, that's where you end up.
So there's a real political sharp edge to this question
of DNA bio banks, and particularly, the racial component of it.
There should be implications of the three theories.
If you look at the public opinion survey, which I'm about to do,
Blacks and Latinos will be skeptical if they think
that these are going to cause racial harm.
They'll be supportive if they think forensic bio banks are going
to cause racial benefit.
And they won't differ from whites, multiracials,
Asians if they think it's neutral.
I'll go very quickly through the results just
to give you a feel for them.
Basically, almost all of the groups say, essentially,
roughly half of the people in almost all the groups say they know
something or a lot about these bio banks.
We define the bio bank in a survey and then said have you ever heard
or read about this thing.
And everybody -- roughly half the population say sure,
I know what this thing is.   Do we believe them?

I have no idea.   But they didn't differ across race.

Are they desirable?   This is a more interesting result.

Basically, close to two-thirds of the sample as a whole said yes,
they do more good than harm.
Only 40 percent of blacks said they do more good than harm.
Blacks are clearly skeptical of the good that the bio banks are likely
to do and that holds up with controls.
We asked people would you be willing
to contribute your own DNA sample to such a bio bank?
And about 60 percent say yes, they would be willing.
It's a much higher number than I thought.
I expected that to be much lower.
But again, if you believe the survey, 60 percent said yes.
Hispanics were actually more willing.
And blacks considerably less willing.
So again, there's a disparity between black skepticism
and unwillingness to participate as compared
with the rest of the population.
Do you trust the government to oversee the use of them?
Again, about 70 percent say yeah, I trust the government.
It knows what it's doing.
Blacks are much less likely to say that than all other populations.
They're significantly more mistrustful.
Do you trust private companies?
Again, blacks are significantly more mistrustful
than the rest of the population.
Should the government fund more extensive use?
And should the government regulate the use of bio banks more fully?
No racial differences here.
I mean, 80 something percent of everybody said yes,
we should fund them more; and yes, we should regulate them more.
Those aren't even consistent responses
but they are complicated politics.
Right. They don't provide neatly into sort of law and order
at all costs versus regulate caution, hold back.
People want both.
They want law and order, and they're willing to spend money for it
and they want a lot of regulation
and there's no racial differences there.
In some, there's little difference across the groups in knowledge
of bio banks, support for funding, or support for regulation.
High support for funding in regulation,
same amount of claim to knowledge.
But blacks are much more likely than whites, especially to see harm
to society as a consequence of using forensic bio banks.
They're much less willing to contribute their own DNA.
They mistrust government officials much more than whites do.
And they mistrust private companies much more.
There's a broad pattern of just mistrust of this new technology.
Asians and Hispanics are more or less in between,
which turns out to be the result in any survey
that you do on any subject at all.
They are more positive than blacks and less positive than whites,
and multi-situations turn out to be very similar to whites.
So the big gap is between the black population and everybody else,
roughly speaking, although it's more of a continuum.
It's not an absolute sharp divide.   So this is my final slide.

I promise you.
What are the big issues that are going to be emerging politically
in policy terms around these two topics?
Will genomics have any impact in American racial identity?
It might simply be irrelevant that the history and the practice
and the culture and the identity issues are just so powerful
that genomics is just going to be an odd little blip that three people
in the world, two of whom, Mia and myself and my co-author study.
It could dissolve American racial identity if lots
of people do ancestry testing and discover that they have, in fact,
a greatly mixed racial ancestry, and they take it seriously.
Or it could reify group boundaries.
The scientists say it ought to dissolve racial boundaries.
It shows that there is no science or race in any very meaningful way.
The public opinion surveys and the media analyses,
we do show the opposite, the sort
of racial boundaries are getting reified, sharpened,
intensified rather than blurred.
Will genomics bring biology back into race?
Again, the genomic scientists will tell you that,
that's a false association.   There is no race in biology.

There's no biology in race.
But they'll also tell you that you can't simply assert
that race is a social construction.
The easy kind of social scientist, anthropologists answer,
that says there's no biology here anywhere.
That's equally wrong.
That, we've got to figure out how to talk about the relationship
between biology and race.
Will it, in fact, as we embark on that conversation
over the next couple decades, will it be just harmful?
Or will it bring back eugenics racial science measuring skull size
and all that stuff from the 19th-Century?
Is it inevitable?
Which is what the sciences will tell us.
Or could it actually be medically helpful?
Again, the genomic scientists are very excited about the possibility
of finding population clusters
through genomewide association studies in various
because it gives them a volume of material to work
on finding the genetic pathways for particular horrible diseases.
They think if they've got a handle on populations
that have these medical -- genetic mutations,
they'll be much further ahead and can do the science.
So they actually want to find -- they're actually, in some sense,
is pleased when they find a population association
because it allows them to advance their science much further
and benefit that population.   Third big question, maybe.

So what's the impact going to be of forensic bio banks
in the criminal justice system?   Again, will it be irrelevant?

These things are expensive.   They're politically controversial.

The science isn't that good yet.
Police departments don't how to use it.
It may not matter.
I think it doesn't matter a whole lot now.
I think it's likely to matter more in the future.
Is it going to harm racial and ethnic minorities,
in particular the black population?
That's what the public opinion data were saying.
Is it going to benefit racial and ethnic minorities?
That's what the people working on forensic bio banks,
perhaps not surprisingly are saying.
There's a whole area of which I haven't talked about,
about exoneration using DNA to actually release people
who were falsely convicted of felonies
who are overwhelmingly disproportionately young male,
black, Latino, and poor.
So the forensic bio banks might actually have a beneficial as well
as a harmful or instead of a harmful effect.
And finally, what about public support
for the criminal justice system where people believe
in the legitimacy and validity of the criminal justice process?
Will DNA bio banks increase black mistrust?
That's what the data is showing us so far.
Will they offset black mistrust to the degree
that people believe the science
and they find the science actually more trustworthy than the politics
and the policing that we now have?
Will people increasingly come to endorse the use of DNA
for exoneration rather than for conviction,
which stands the whole logic on its head?
The Innocence Project not only supports the idea of using DNA,
it's seeking a national right for every convicted felon to have his
or her DNA tested for purposes of pursuing exoneration.
So there's a totally flipside of possibility
to what I have been talking about so far.
Conclusion.   The old Chinese proverb;

may you live in interesting times, and I believe we do.
And I want to -- there's a long list of people I want to thank,
especially the Kluge Center.   Thank you.

[ Applause ]   >> Of course.

Comments? Any questions?   Yes.

[ Inaudible ]   >> Why I want to polarize the issue?

I don't.   [ Inaudible ]

>> I'm not sure that's the route that you may
or may not want to take in this.   >> Yeah. Fair enough.

I don't know if everybody was able
to hear before she had the microphone.
The question is why do I want to polarize?
I said at the beginning that I'm trying to understand the parties
in an ideological cast, and I may not have used the word, understand.
I can't remember what verb I used.
But the question is do I think it's a good thing for this
to become polarized or ideologically sharp?
Is that fair?
No, I don't think it's a politically good idea.
It seems to me that, you know, if you think about stem cell research,
or you think about climate change,
the political polarization has been harmful to the science and harmful
to the public in general on both of those.
What I do think is -- so this isn't so much a normative claim
that we ought to go in the direction of partisanship or ideology.
It's more of a empirical prediction that it's hard for me to believe
that we won't, we as a society.   I think, or at least I think --

my co-author and I think
of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was willing
to support us the thing, it's going to happen.
It's very difficult for anything that's as important as physics was
to the 20th Century that has billions of dollars of investment
that it has huge industries that has implications, again,
ranging from your souche to your conviction
to the cure for your cancer.
I mean, it's going to be political just
because it's too damn important not to be.
So our goal is to understand the early stages of how
that politics might get played out rather than to endorse


Yes, sir.
>> You used the phrase in your orally, that Americans have a lot
of confidence in science.
And one of your view graphs said, they have a lot
of confidence of DNA science.
Could you say a few words about what you think that phrase means?
>> I'm sorry.   Repeat the phrase.

I just didn't hear it.
>> You said, Americans have a lot of confidence in science.
And one of your view graphs has said, Americans have a lot
of confidence in DNA science.
I was wondering if you could say a few words
about what you think it means when you say,
Americans have confidence in science?
>> Yeah. Fair enough.   [ Inaudible ]

>> Yes, it's a loaded question.
Well, what I was thinking about was a somewhat superficial response,
which is to say, if you look at public opinion surveys
and you say how much confidence do you have in the following 10 things,
science always comes out at the top.
So compared with -- this is an easy one compared with Congress,
compared with the Presidency, compared with banks,
compared with newspapers, reporters, compared with insurance salesmen,
you know, it comes that way.   But it also comes out very high

with a slightly more serious competition compared
with the military, compared with the sort of major industry.
Every survey that I've ever looked at, scientists --
science and the military actually come out at the top
of that set of comparisons.
Not just by comparison, but also 70-80 percent
of the population say they have a lot of confidence
in science or scientists.   What does that mean?

You know, it means as much
as we think any public opinion survey means.
If you asked people about, for example, do they believe
in scientific literacy, do they think children ought to be required
to take science courses,
do they wish they knew more science themselves,
do they think scientists are engaged in important endeavors, I mean,
a more robust set of questions, again,
you get very strong positive support.
It gets more complicated in the public arena, which is, of course,
what you're referring to.
There's a religion versus science trope which is about as persuasive
as the nature versus nurture trope.
They're both just wrong constructions.
For instance, Collins who, of course, is one of the heroes
of Genomic Science and now the Director of the National Institute
of Health, is a deeply religious -- I guess, he would describe himself
as a fundamentalist, I mean, deep.
And many, many scientists will describe themselves as deeply
in religion, and scientists have been operating on different planes.
This is not a dichotomy.   That's a false understanding.

But in a simplistic sense, people who are deeply religious,
and creationism, the most obvious example.
There's some people who will pose religious commitment to a conviction
or biblical inerrancy against science.
And when they set it up that way,
they will support typically the biblical side.
So there's a part of the American population that's mistrustful
of science, or at least the science says conventionally understood lab
science, and so on.   I think that's relatively small.

I think it's probably declining.   It's not unimportant.

Chris Mooney wrote a book called, the Republican War on Science,
as an attack on the Bush Administration and its refusal
to take seriously what he at least understood to be.
So I think there's conflict out there but I think, on balance,
the population trusts science and scientists
and scientific knowledge more than anything else, with some people
who are cleared exceptions.   You're not persuaded, but.

Yes.   [ Pause ]

>> Hi. I just was thinking about the survey that you reported
where the subjects were, hopefully, to identify with someone.
You would have their DNA sample.
And I was thinking as you described it,
and I guess most people would call me white
at this point in this country.   I was surprised that the results

for the chronicle whites didn't match what I would want.
So that got me to start thinking about why not.
And just to maybe complicate some of your categories,
or ask if you thought about complicating them in further work.
It occurs to me that my particular issue is I'm second generation
of 100 percent Eastern European Jewish extraction, and I know that;
so I don't need that immediate yes, she's European.
What would be interesting would be -- were the ancestors that were Jews
in Europe for so long 100 percent this or that European?
Or I saw a study recently, for example,
it suggests that there's more Middle Eastern DNA in Eastern European Jews
than previously realized.
So that would be -- but those are long way back things
for me and not immediate.
So it seems to me, the amount of time that you --
maybe you've been in the United States could effect your interest.
I'd be much more interested in the little bit of this and little bit
of that than the yes, your European, like, well, that's not news.
And then the other, just to add to that, is that goes along
with a change that we've seen in the rhetoric about race
in the United States and adding there, the word, ethnicity,
and in the last 30, 40, 50 years, and certainly, the whole rise
of multiculturalism within the academy and the shift let's say
from I'm calling people black to calling them African-American,
Asians to Asian-American, the idea that these are not races.
They are ethnicities.
And that's something that's arisen partly in the academy,
partly in the larger world to deal with exactly the kind of problem
of race that you brought up at the beginning.
But the other side of that, is let's say people who think of themselves
as Irish or German, they can't get that fine level
of information out of their DNA sample.
So again, they may have a different interest in what they -- they --
like, they may know they're Irish so they may be interested, you know,
in what -- they want something different.
So anyway, I wondered if you thought about ways
to complicate those categories in your own research?
>> Yeah. No, we definitely need to.
The problem is that the term, what you just said into a question,
that's available in a public opinion survey for people
with education from, you know, second grade.
Right. So clearly, I mean,
the survey is just the very bare beginnings.
I will report that.
I did my own DNA ancestry testing very early on, about five years ago,
when it was five, six, seven years ago, and it was just starting
to be done, and I turned out to have some fraction
of Native American ancestry and some fraction of East Asian ancestry,
neither of which shows up in my families,
my two sides of my family's extensive genealogical knowledge.
So my mother spent a lot of time trying to figure
out where the Native American ancestry came from.
My father said -- I asked him about the East Asian,
and he said don't believe the test.
So, you know, there's lots of kind of responses to these [Inaudible].
The short version is that, clearly,
this needs to be much more sophisticated, much more subtle,
much more elaborated for people
who are genuinely interested in their ancestry.
The kind of question I'm asking is, essentially, is laughable.
It just doesn't take you very far.
So most people who do these ancestry tests, the DNA tests have done a lot
of genealogical sort of conventional paper-based,
record-based genealogical research and then they do much,
much more elaborated DNA test, which actually you can do, you know, 67,
122 markers and get very fine-grained results.
If you yourself and your cousin and your aunt and your nephew
and you're this and you're that, and you do sort of -- so yes.
A serious study of the actual use
of DNA ancestry testing will produce a much more complex story
than anything we can remotely produce in a vignette
on a public opinion survey.
For our purposes, it was really more the question of --
kind of, if you think of yourself as being some race
and the test tells you you're some other race, do you believe the test,
or do you believe yourself?   Do you care?

Does it matter?
How does that pairing vary depending on what race you think you are
and what race the test is telling you?
We're interested in sort of a much more less fine-grained understanding
of ancestry.
For political purposes, you're talking
about the actual genealogical knowledge,
which is a somewhat different enterprise.
Yes.   >> I have a question and a comment.

The comment is that a few years ago I was being treated
for high blood pressure, and so they couldn't find anything that worked.
And they said well, you know, we're going to try this, that,
this, that, that and that.
And they said we're not going to try particular drugs, ACE inhibitors,
because they don't work in black people.
And I said well, they worked in my sister.
Lo and behold, they gave it to me and it worked.
Does that make me not black?   Certainly not.

And then the question that I had, is that --
did you dig deeper to find out what were the reasons behind whites not
being pleased about being associated with Europe in particular?
>> Yeah. Whoever told you that you shouldn't try ACE inhibitors
because they don't work in black people is just a bad mathematician
as well as a bad doctor.
I mean, that's just a stupid comment.
What's correct is that there are certain populations
that are proportionately more and less likely to respond
in particular ways to particular drugs or particular drug dosages.
So it's not crazy to start out by looking at any one of us and say,
all right, the first thing I'm going to try is this rather than a
that because you look European or you look African.
And I know probabilistically that, that's the best starting point.
That's, you know, the medical people will tell us that,
that's a perfectly reasonable starting point.
But it's a starting point.   It's the first step.

So yes, you're right.
My advice on that case is change doctors immediately.
Don't stop thinking you're black.   Do change doctors.

So, you know, probably, I mean, it's a synergy
of probabilities and likelihood.
It's not an issue of black-white, so to speak.
The survey, we had a few open, and we asked people sort
of why did you give the answers.
And we haven't really gotten into those very much
but most people don't bother to respond to [Inaudible].
It didn't give us very much.
What we have done is content analyses of media reports of people
who have done these kinds of tests.   So it's a beginning.

It's a beginning of an answer to your kind of question.
Why do people take these tests?
What do they think they're going to get out of them?
Are they pleased or displeased?
Why do they like or dislike the results?
But it turns out, and, of course,
that's a totally non-representative sample of anything.
Right. It's people who happened
to take the test whom journalists happen to know
who journalists happen to interview who editors happen
to accept the quotation for the [Inaudible].
I mean, it's 47 layers of filtering.
Whites are doing it, -- you know, the set of people
who give answers it's sort of --
it's, you know, a multicultural small world kind of logic
that some fraction of the white population, probably very small,
is a little embarrassed about being pure blood white, right, I mean,
you know, we're supposed to be citizens of the world.
Right. And, you know, and we all know that history of the One-Drop
of Blood Rule, and we don't want to personify it.
Right. You know, I'm not one of those Virginians from 1924.
You know, so I think that's kind of -- it's kind of a genuine.
I don't mean to make fun of it.
It's genuine politics that says this is just an inappropriate kind
of person to be in this century with this political
and racial configuration in the world.
That's the best I can get out of the newspaper stories,
but I don't know that I trust them.
Again, because it's such a filtering process
to get those kind of quotes into a story.
I was quite surprised by these results.
And I've only actually talked about a small fraction
of the survey as a whole.
We've got other vignettes that kind of will come at this
in a slightly different direction.
So maybe they'll give us a better handle on what's going on.
I'm much less surprised by the black results in some ways.
I mean, Skip Gates articulated it.
You know, you don't know what the history was,
and it becomes profoundly meaningful
to get a sense that I have a real link.
So the short answer is that I don't really know except --
I don't want to use the word, political correctness for whites,
because I don't think that's fair.
I think it's a genuine belief of a desire to abjure that racial history
in my own person as well as in my politics.
But that's the best I can suggest as a possible answer.
[ Pause ]
>> I was just wondering from a policy perspective,
it seems that really the most important issues, the distribution
of benefits and or kind of compensation
for harms and social harms.
And so I think that the threat here or the felt threat,
the perceived threat is that the biology won't line up with that
or that somehow the biology will be used to take that away
or change the distribution and, to me, that seems to be so,
how this is used in a political context as a basis, potentially,
for distributive or redistributive policies, is probably one
of the major political implications and, that,
on the social side you have -- if a group is a recipient of harms,
then that's going to consolidate the identity and the link
to the identity, but that's a social issue really,
more than a political issue in my mind.
So I was just wondering if you could comment on that.
>> My main hesitation is
that I don't think we actually do distribute benefits
or policies by race much anymore.
I mean, you know, the affirmative action has largely disappeared
as a serious public policy endeavor.   It's certainly in the public arena.

There are pockets in private universities, and so on.
So it's not, I mean, there aren't --
I don't see any direct one-for-one relationship between racial identity
or identification and distribution of public policies.
Am I not just thinking of what you have in mind?
Or what?   [ Inaudible ]

>> Say that again.   [ Inaudible ]

>> The Indian population, yeah.
Is that the indigenous, the indigenous Indian population?
I just couldn't hear you.
That's a very interesting question, and I haven't talked about that
because I already had too much in this talk.
So I was trying to kind of simplify, believe it or not.
Indigenous populations are deeply mistrustful
of the DNA ancestry testing, in general, generalization, you know,
there are exceptions, and so on.
And I think there are a couple of reasons.
One is a philosophical religious ethical belief,
which people will articulate that, actually almost the opposite
from the mainstream population.
The mainstream population, the big anxiety is my DNA is my own,
and you criminal justice system
or you medical researcher can't have my DNA.
It's private.   It's mine.

My baby is mine, privacy, privacy.   The indigenous populations,

or at least most people will say my DNA is not my own.
It belongs to the community.
I don't have the right to do my own personal ancestry testing
because it will produce information that the rest
of my community might not want to have public.
Again, I'm simplifying a little bit on both.
Actually, I'm not simplifying on the privacy side.
So the indigenous populations have a very different view,
at least some, most people do.
And there is clearly the question of benefits, and yes, because,
you know, given the history of definitions of who counts
as an American Indian, you have to have a certain fraction
of black Indian blood against scare quotes around all these terms
in order to be registered and enrolled private member in order
to get a whole series of federal benefits, and so on.
And it turns out, that, of course, indigenous populations are very,
very, very much intermixed racially and have been for many generations.
So lots of people who identify as Indian or want
to get those benefits don't actually want the testing
because they're not very happy about what the results might show.
So there's sort of a material benefit reason and a more sort
of general philosophical argument against.
So yes, so I think indigenous populations are quite different.
And this, roughly, what I've described is true around the world.
There is an effort to kind of do ancestry testing of lots
of indigenous populations around the world, and it just ran
into an absolute roadblock and got stopped for that kind of reason.
But I don't think that explains much of the rest,
of any of what I'm talking about here because, in fact,
we had too few Native Americans in our sample to do anything with.
I mean, we had six people, or something like that.
So I'm not sure that I've answered your question really.
[ Inaudible ]   >> I'm sorry.

Can you use the mic?
>> I'm just interested in the political versus the social,
and so how this is going to actually enter the political arena
or the policy arena in a debate?
>> [Speaking Simultaneously] I don't know
that the ancestry stuff will, frankly.
I mean, that's why I wanted to do the forensic DNA,
because that's an obvious policy issue.
>> Right.
>> So I see the ancestry stuff as more I guess political,
very broadly defined, political really as much as defined as social.
But it has to do with, you know, construction of group identity
with who you want to be affiliated with, with a set of things
that will bleed into political discourse
or political decision-making.
I don't think that the ancestry testing is itself a policy issue.
I think, -- I mean, the forensic bio bank --
I mean, the use in the criminal justice system is obviously a
policy issue.   >> Okay.

>> You will notice that's why the title of my talk was politics
and policies, because I knew
that the ancestry stuff didn't have much to do with policies.


>> Thank you.
This is a very fascinating presentation.
The effort to anticipate policy areas that will be on the agenda
and where the tension should be when they arise.
To help a little bit with understanding where you are on this,
I have two questions that have to do
with the survey results, the attitudes by race.
One, is do you have any data from elsewhere in your own work
that looks at the attitudes as it relates to the use of DNA testing
or genomics in other areas, for example, in healthcare?
Do you get something that's race-based sickle cell or hyper kind
of things that are considered to have racial?
And are the attitudes any different there as opposed
to the criminal justice orientation?
And the second is within the criminal justice orientation,
do you have anything in your identification
of the people you have visited that indicates class,
that indicates social or economic background in addition to
or as opposed to race as possibly an explanatory factor?
Thank you.
>> The answer to the first question is yes.
The criminal justice data come out of a survey that we design.
It's a 20-25 minute survey.
So we've got like six or eight questions about criminal justice,
but we've got a whole slew of other questions about use in the health.
We've got ancestry questions, test questions.
We've got healthcare.   And we just haven't analyzed those.

We just got the results a few weeks ago.
So let's talk.
Six months or a year from now I'll be able to answer it.
In regard to the criminal justice stuff, yes, we do have --
we've got kind of standard demographics and we have some --
again, it's because this was done by knowledge networks,
and we had access to whatever they provided us.
There aren't as good political
and ideological questions as I would like.
I'm trying to remember.   I've got the results here

which I can find afterwards if we want to talk.
There are a bunch of small statistically significant
correlations and substantively pretty meaningless.
It's interesting.
Women tend to be more pleased, more influenced,
and more likely to believe than men do.
People with high education believe it more but are less pleased.
I mean, it's just hodgepodge small results.
You know, they're real.
I mean, they aren't, I think, purely random.
But the biggest thing that comes through is that there is no --
the race is actually the strongest explanatory factor in relationship
to gender, class, education, ideology doesn't matter,
political identification doesn't matter, religiosity doesn't matter,
whether you work inside the home or whether you work with technology,
all those things basically don't seem to make any difference.
This is a pretty noisy process.   Race seems to be the one thing

that actually shows some systematic pattern,
which is what I was pointing out.   I think that will change.

I think as this becomes more publicly visible
and more publicly known, there will be a set
of class implications, and so on.
But at the moment, it's mostly noise.
I can show you the specific results afterwards.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at LOC.gov.   [ Silence ]