Published on May 01, 2005

So from where did your ancestors come? No, not your grandparents or even your great grandparents, but those from hundreds and thousands of generations past, your own ancestral record back to the origin of humankind.

Scientists are concerned that the rapid decline in indigenous communities means we are losing our chance to find answers. The disappearance of these people means that the genetic information needed to understand how humans populated the earth could be lost.

The newly-launched Genographic Project plans to take 100,000 samples from indigenous people across the planet before it is too late. The project has been hailed as an intriguing scientific endeavour by many, while others have raised concerns about ethics, equity and social relevance. Today The Nation explores the views from Thailand on this emerging controversy.

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HUMAN ORIGINS : Gene survey seen as white man’s plot

Project aims to trace paths by which mankind spread out over the continents

To population geneticist Dr Spencer Wells, the case is closed. The debate about where humans came from is finished. Genetic research, he says, has proved that we all came from the same parents in Africa. What anthropologists want answers to is the paths our ancestors took to populate nearly every corner of the earth.

“How did we get to where we are today, and particularly how did we generate the diversity we see around the world? How do we connect with each other?” he said. The answer to this he hopes to uncover through his US$40-million (Bt1.6-billion) Genographic Project sponsored by the National Geographic Society, IBM and the philanthropic arm of the founder of Gateway Computers.

Such questions are similar to what a number of Thai scientists are engaged in already, says Assistant Professor Dr Daoroong Kangwanpong, with the Genetic Research Diversity Laboratory at Chiang Mai University.

The human geneticist is working with anthropologists exploring the origins of the Thai people who emerged in this region 5,000 to 7,000 years ago to determine if the Thai evolved from ethnic groups in southern China or from groups like the Khmer, Mon and other indigenous peoples who were already here.

Dr Wells’ research hopes to answer more fundamental questions, such as how humans came to occupy this region at all some 35,000 years earlier. Did the first settlers arrive from China to the north, the east along the South Asian coastline or directly from Africa via ocean passage or possibly a combination of the three?

“If they are able to pull it off, such research may be helpful to our studies here as it’s difficult for us to obtain DNA information from neighbouring countries,” says Dr Daoroong. “But this alone won’t be enough: we shall also need artifacts and evidence of cultural links such as language.”

To obtain the best picture of the past requires DNA samples from those populations whose ethnicity has been least influenced by the present. As a result, the Genographic team hopes to recruit indigenous people from throughout the world to help reconstruct the global family tree.

“We are definitely interested in studying the Karen. We are also interested in studying the Thai people in different parts of Thailand,” says Dr Li Jin, who will be coordinating the Genographic Project’s East and Southeast Asian office in Shanghai, one of 10 regional centres around the world. Thailand’s Palaung people too are expected to be contributors to the 20,000 samples from the region, 15,000 of them from China alone.

Prue Odochao, 34, a Karen community leader from Chiang Mai, was alarmed to hear his tribe was a target of the Genographic Project.

“So they just pick us from their office somewhere overseas? It sounds like they are talking about picking vegetables in the market,” Prue said. “Just for your information, I think of me and my people as humans who have no less dignity than the Chinese, Indians or Farang.”

His group is now conducting outreach within the Karen community in response to the growing interest in recruiting Karen involvement in genetic research.

Ten years ago Prue’s father, Jorni, supported an international effort that succeeded in halting what was known as the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), which also aimed to obtain DNA samples from indigenous people throughout the world. “We did not want to be exploited then, and we don’t want to be exploited now,” Jorni said.

Dr Wells hopes things have changed, “Times have moved on: perhaps there’s less of a knee-jerk fear of a project of this nature.”

He also emphasises that unlike the HGDP, National Geographic’s focus is non-commercial and non-medical, that all sampling will be anonymous, that the samples will be destroyed and thus unavailable for future use and that information will be in the public domain.

But these assurances have not necessarily dampened concerns. “Such statements can in no way guarantee what is going to happen with this data,” says Dr Pinkaew Luangaramsri, an anthropologist at Chiang Mai University who has been working with ethnic people for nearly two decades. “It’s hard to generate a lot of trust when you just spring it on people as a fait accompli.”

She and others point out that the Genographic Project’s protocols and procedures approved by the University of Pennsylvania should immediately be made available to the public so indigenous people can see what sort of safeguards are truly in place.

Not that this will make a difference, says Waiying Thongbue, a Karen ethnic people-rights activist with the International Mountain People and Culture Association of Thailand. “We already have our own [creation] story, and if the scientists show otherwise, the government may finally have what they need to evict us from our land.”

Such concerns are being echoed elsewhere in the world.

The US-based Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism has already built an international coalation of 25 organisations calling for a boycott on the Genographic sponsors.

Le’a Kanehe, the group’s legal analyst, stresses how the project could be later used to refute their own notions about their origins and even be used to undermine their rights as indigenous peoples, as the original inhabitants of their traditional territory.

“Wells and many of his cohorts believe that we all come from Africa. Well, that is not what my people believe: we have oral histories that tell us otherwise,” she told The Nation.

Later this month Kanehe plans to raise these issues during the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York.

The Genographic Project plans to make some money available to those communities that participate in the study. They hope to sell hundreds of thousands of individual Genographic test kits to the general public, the proceeds from which, about $20, minus the sampling costs, will be given back to the indigenous people.

Prue cannot really understand this. “Money is a sensitive issue. It’s dangerous to think that money can buy everything. If the project is so good, why does it have to offer money in return for our blood?”

Dr Pinkaew further questions the project’s overall relevance. “In fact the quest for human origins is only to satisfy those white men, especially Americans, who don’t really know their roots,” she says. “So this project is not a surprise, but I want to ask how this knowledge will help the Karen. Will the knowledge that the Karen and white man share a common ancestry improve their marginalised status? Definitely not.”

She and others may get the opportunity to share these concerns when the Genographic team comes to Thailand this summer to meet interested parties and develop its recruitment programme.

“It is a consultation process at this stage. We’ve launched the project and are inviting everyone in the world to participate,” Wells said.

Nantiya Tangwisutijit

The Nation

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Genetic research raises thorny ethical issues

When the Genographic Project arrives in Thailand, it will be part of a rapidly rising tide of genetic research in the Kingdom that many scientists feel is insufficiently monitored.

“Southeast Asia’s ethnic diversity render it an increasingly popular region for researchers”, says Supaporn Nakbunlang, a physical anthropologist from Chiang Mai University.

For many years, human geneticists from developed countries, especially the United States and Japan, have operated in Thailand. But local research is taking off as well. Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand recently formed the Pan Asian Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) Consortium to study genetic diversity of people in the region. SNP, pronounced “snip”, is a small genetic change, or variation, that can occur within a person’s DNA sequence. They are studied to improve understanding of how to treat human disease. Last year, with assistance from France, Thailand also began to study and collect a genetic database for Thai people. National Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (Biotec) deputy director Prasit Palittapongarnpim said the initial state of the “Thai Snip” project studied genetic materials from 32 Thai volunteers to use as a benchmark to determine Thais’ responses to various new medicines.

“Human genetics is surely a hot field now. In the past few years we have seen about two dozen new PhD geneticists returning to the country. Now is a perfect time for us to do more and dig deeper into the field,” Prasit says.

However, the relatively early stage of the science is straining efforts to ensure good practices. Thai scientists are trying to keep-up with the field’s complex social and ethical issues at the same time as the number of projects is growing.

Ethnic groups living in close-knit and isolated communities are vulnerable to exploitation, warns Supaporn. “I don’t think villagers understand everything researchers tell them [when taking blood samples],” she says.

Urban populations are no less vulnerable. With the growing popularity of research called Pharmaco-genomics, which examines the inherited variations in people’s genes that dictate how they might or might not respond to certain drugs, people could unwittingly become guinea pigs.

National Health Foundation (NHF) secretary-general Dr Somsak Chunharas warns that anybody who uses a new medication could unknowingly become a research subject for pharmaceutical companies to improve their products.

Continued monitoring is required when new medication is released into the market. Some companies obtaining blood samples for this purpose also take blood for genetic research without the person’s consent.

Two years ago, the NHF and Biotec established the Bioethic and Advanced Medical Research Programme.

After broad-based consultation with physicians, researchers, sociologists, journalists and other related professionals, the programme developed guidelines for genetic research in three areas: protecting human rights, international collaboration and international materials transfer.

While useful, these are just professional guidelines and not legally enforceable. This has caused the Public Health Ministry’s National Bioethics Committee to begin drafting a new law to regulate human genetic research.

While not opposed to new laws, Dr Somsak cautions that Thailand has to be careful that when tightening controls it does not unintentionally jeopardise valuable scientific progress in the field. National Bioethic Committee secretary Dr Pakorn Siriyong insists Thailand must be vigilant. “This is a very sensitive issue and potentially ripe for immense profit-making. We have to make companies transparent, ensure that their research is scientifically justified and protect the volunteers,” he says. – Nantiya Tangwisutijit, The Nation

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