Life is a mysterious subject. No one fully understand it. Yet, curiosity created science as a stepping stone to one day mastering it. Many hypothesis have been made on the subject of life. Yet many unknown mysteries are to be discovered. A recent hypothesis suggested that all human beings inhabited in Africa 60,000 years ago. Many of us would say that it's an outrageous claim. But one would say the same thing to a round earth a few centuries ago. The genographic project will determine this theory's possibility.

This project was started in September of 2004 by National Geographic and IBM. Their objective is to collect DNA samples from diverse races across the globe. It is estimated that the whole process will take around five years. This project can also be regarded as a continuation of the failed Human Genome Diversity Project in the 1990s.

According to National Geographic, the project was made possible by hundreds of thousands of computers contributed by ordinary people. I don't think this will happen 100, 50 or even 25 years ago because not many people have computers back then. Technology has advanced so fast in the last few years that the latest gadgets of today are just a thing of the past tomorrow. The CD players that costed around $100 in 2000 only cost around $10 today. Plus, how many scientists knew the existence of DNA 100 years ago. These are all recent scientific discoveries. Even back 50 years it was a challenge. I mean who could trace the Y-DNA in males and Mitochondrial DNA in females back then?

As for participants, anyone is allowed to participate. For a reasonable fee of US$100, anyone (even me) can order a self-testing kit. The kit includes a mouth scraping (saliva swab) where your DNA is obtained. The person who buys the kit has to mail it back so researchers can analyze it. They will eventually reveal your genetic history to you. I think scientists should have no problem retrieving DNA samples from urbanized people because these people tend to be more curious and understand what their DNAs contribute to. On the other hand, the indigenous people wouldn't be so eager to give their DNA to scientists since they have no idea what the scientists will do. Yet, collecting DNA samples from the indigenious population is an important part of this project.

National Geographic said themselves that their key purpose in this project is to collect DNAs from "Key Populations". Genographic Project define this term as "stable populations who have lived within their respective geographic regions and maintained their present culture for many generations". They also said that indigenous people has "stability that makes the genetic signatures carried by each member anthropologically informative". This means indigenous people contain the most reliable DNA patterns. You see urbanized people have more variations so it's harder to trace their ancestors.

Shortly after the announcement of the project in April 2005, the Indigenous Peoples Council protested against this project. The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues also recommended the suspension of the project in May of 2006. Yet, National Geographic claims that the project has received a positive response from many different indigenous and traditional peoples around the world.

I am anxious to see the results of this study.