 I know that we need to get going here. So good morning, everybody, or I know we have some international participants that are from around the world. And so it might be evening for you. I'm Bob Trug. I'm the director of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School. And I'm so pleased that I'm able to introduce Professor Alondra Nelson. And Alondra, I know that you are at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and I had a very nice introduction all lined up for you. I know that you were at Columbia University before that, where you were the dean for social science, and before that, you were at Yale. You've been a national commentator on issues about how science interacts with social policy, covering many, many areas around science and technology, including artificial intelligence, gene editing, and the like. And of course, what we're going to be talking about here today is DNA sequencing and its influence on race and reparations and reconciliation. I was going to say a word, and I think you may have a slide about it on your earlier book about the Black Panthers. I had some really nice emails from people about how they have been influenced by your work, and in particular about the book on the Black Panthers. Because I think for many of us in the common culture, we identified the Black Panthers as really a radical and militarized group. And the book that you wrote that really showed the profound focus that they had upon social justice and health care and free clinics, and making health care available to poor Black Americans that otherwise would not have it. And so I wanted to mention that. I think several people had commented on the impact that that book had on them. Of course, today we're going to be talking about your most recent book, The Social Life of DNA. And I also want to mention a little bit about the technical aspects. Ashley, do you have that slide? OK, so I hope you can see that now. So our event is being recorded and live streamed. And it will be posted on our Facebook, the Center for Biowethics Facebook site. You have both the chat box and the Q&A. So the chat box is for all of the participants to communicate with each other. The Q&A will be for after Professor Nelson finishes her formal presentation. I will be selecting questions out of the Q&A box for her to answer. You can also follow the conversation on Twitter. You see the hashtag there. And check out our website for future issues. So again, my apologies that I had some technical issues here. But Professor Nelson, I think it's time for you to take it away. Thank you very much, Bob. I'm delighted to be here. And I must say, that's one of the more generous introductions I've ever had with no notes or anything. So thank you so much for that. Thank you for the invitation to be here. I was looking at the list of folks who had spoken in this series in recent years and saw my friend and mentor, Carla Holloway, so always delighted to follow in her footsteps. And I also want to thank the Stafford Center for Ethics directed by my friend and colleague, Danielle Allen, for cosponsoring my virtual visit with you today. We've been at the Social Science Research Council. One of the other hats I wear, delighted to collaborate with the Stafford Center. And I had a little exchange with Amy Marcus, who is I think an alum of your program. And I hope if Amy's here, I can't see all the participants. I just want to say a special reading to her. I think that her reporting on direct-to-consumer genetics is just quite extraordinary and is some of the rare reporting that really gets at all the complexities and nuances. So hi, Amy, if you're there. And always a pleasure to be in dialogue and conversation with you. So I'm going to share my screen now and get started. Oops, let me move this. OK, so as Dr. Trug mentioned, I'm a sociologist of science and technology and medicine and also inequality. I have been writing for, you look up and all of a sudden you've been writing for things for 20 years or 25 years or something about these topics focusing and particularly on African-American communities, although not exclusively. And my first major work in these areas was on the Black Panther Party and their health politics. And it's been my great pleasure and honor to spend a great deal of time in both nursing, medical school, medical practitioner, public health communities talking about this work. Certainly true that there is a more complicated facet to the Black Panther Party than what is typically represented. But I think people that I interviewed who were in the party would want you to know that they were militarized as well. And so I think that part of what, on the one hand, I wanted to tell a part of the story of the Black Panther Party that's not told about their health activism and indeed their pioneering work around genetic disease, sickle celledemia disease in particular, but also to understand as we sit in this moment and which we're living with both a pandemic and a necessary, critical reckoning around issues of race, that this was an organization that saw those things linked together, that issues of police brutality and health and equality had everything to do together with each other. And so I think that they wouldn't want us to forget that. And we certainly shouldn't forget it. In more recent years, I've written about direct to consumer genetics and its impact, kind of social and political impact. And as I try to sort of think back across my work and what holds these work, all these projects together, certainly genetics is a kind of long abiding sort of bridge in the work. But it really, I think, is this question. Why and how do communities that have been the objects of scientific scrutiny, technological surveillance, and what my friend and yours, the wonderful science writer Harriet Washington, calls a medical apartheid, how do they become subjects and agents of science and medicine and at what cost? And so that's been that sort of question that's been occupying me for many years now. And it was the question that, in part, I had in mind when I began to see in the early a series of news articles. There was one in the New York Times, another in the Los Angeles Times, and other smaller venues as well. Reporting on the possibility that sort of genetic techniques coming out of the human genome project might offer the opportunity or the ability to do genetic testing and use genetics for ways that had not been anticipated by the human genome project, for example. And moreover, to use them to help African-Americans sort of trace their roots this long and seeking endeavor and many black communities, but also an endeavor that we can talk about that's really central to a settler colony nation like the United States. There's always a kind of yearning for the mother country, one might say. So my work took me lots of different places. I started doing this research early on in the industry. And really part of what my book, The Social Life of DNA, is about is the kind of the first 10 years of this new startup industry. And I initially had planned to do surveys and interviews with people who, particularly African-Americans, engaged in this industry. But it became clear very early on that it was still really burgeoning and that there wasn't really, the N was too small. There wasn't a significantly large pool of people who I could sort of interview significantly. Wendy Roth at the University of Pennsylvania, a sociologist there, has now in the sort of 15 years, almost 20 years since this industry has gotten underway, the N is big enough. And so she's doing survey data with folks that it wasn't possible for me. And the project that I imagined as a survey project became an ethnographic project. And a project in which I spent time with really the early adopters and some of the pioneering kind of consumers and users of direct-to-consumer genetics who were, surprise, surprise, African-American senior citizens. Many of them, certainly middle class because these tests were and remain for people who are working class expensive and also often highly educated. So almost everyone that I interviewed had bachelor's degrees. Many of the master's degrees and PhDs, they also had the leisure kind of time and income that initially conventional genealogy and then the income that genetic genealogy would require. So this is from my fieldwork from 2006 at an annual meeting of the African-American Historical and Genealogical Society, one of the types of communities in which I did my research. Here you see the genealogists, people who have been for many decades, in some cases, conventional genealogists becoming engaged in the work of genetic genealogy. But first, actually being convinced, having to be convinced that these new DNA technologies could be efficacious for the questions and answering the questions that they had about their families and the like. So this is from a DNA kind of 101 presentation. One in here is holding a double helix. And this slide here from that same conference or convention is the people here are holding up the nucleotide, nitrogen bases that are found in the nucleotides that comprise DNA. So it literally was, was literally quite literally DNA 101. So these are, this is a fascinating kind of bridge cohort of people who are really the sort of trailblazers as the sort of American obsession with genealogy is moving from kind of brick and mortar genetics, genealogy to this growing industry and genetics. My work also took me to other places. This is a photograph of the Latter-day Saints Library and Salt Lake City, Utah. I traveled there with members of the African-American Historical and Genealogical Society for one of their annual meetings, which took place there. It was absolutely fascinating. We were, you know, genealogy is very important to Mormon cosmology. We were as a community of many hundreds of African-Americans in Salt Lake City, which those of you who know Salt Lake City know that that represented a kind of significant demographic shift for the few days that we were there for our meeting. And it was a kind of quite extraordinary experience of, you know, people across communities organized around the pursuit of genealogy. I also joined a local chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society. This was our president for a time, a wonderful woman named Sharon Wilkins. And we, in this small chapter, this Harlem chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, also called OGS, was invited on several occasions to make presentations at the Harlem Latter-day Saint Church, which is on 128th Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard and Harlem in New York City. Again, galvanizing around a kind of sort of aphorism and a spirit of sort of sensibility that in a phrasing also you often use that says one can't know where one's going unless one knows where one's been. More specifically for the Mormon Church, many of you probably know that cosmology, the kind of ideation around heaven, you know, sort of suggests that the people that you find genealogically related to you, they can then kind of go to heaven with you, which is why it's such a driving force and the Mormon religion and why Mormon women in particular have been so important in the digitization of vital records and other documents that are so important for the work of genealogy. So I went in thinking I was gonna do some interviews. I was very interested in the question of before and after and how did you feel before? How did you feel after you've done the test? And so in that regard, my kind of early thinking about this project was not terribly different from another cottage industry that rose up alongside direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry testing, which is an industry and genealogical reality television shows, which began also in the early aughts. They began in the UK and are also then a merchant in the United States. Most famous of these in the US, of course, are the series done by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., initially African-American lives now finding your roots. I think there's a new season started actually just last week. And so some of the encounters that I had with people that I spent time with reflected some of the emotion and affect that you saw in these presentations, surprise, delight, vulnerability around getting information that many had wanted for a very long time. And I would publish about this work initially in 2008 and the social studies of science journal and an article called Bio Science. But even as I was sort of writing about this transition from conventional to genetic genealogy, this really pioneering cohort and generation of African-Americans who were doing that work, I was also watching as the market, which I wanna really underscore was a startup in the same way that we think of any kind of Silicon Valley startup that a lot of these companies were startups. And there was no, it was not a foregone conclusion in the beginning that they were going to succeed. So part of the question for me besides the before and after and how people are reckoning and dealing with the tests were why did the industry stick around? Like it was not a foregone conclusion that some two decades later that genetic ancestry testing direct to consumer genetics would still be around, that it would be that people would find it useful, that the kind of wouldn't crash and burn and go the way of another kind of moment of genealogical, you know, fatism. So those of you who are, you know, my age or older, I was born in 1968 will recall a prior moment in which genealogy was very important in American culture and very important and sort of linking the sort of history of racial slavery and its violences including the loss of identity to contemporary culture. So you'll remember Alex Haley's roots, the book and then the many series in 1976 and 1977 respectively, you know, I think it's important to remember also that Alex Haley's book Roots and the Saga of an American Family was published during the US bicentennial year. So it was really like trying to lay claim to the American story and the centrality of slavery and the history of racial slavery to that and black people to this story. But, you know, by the time we get to, you know, the Reagan era, we don't really, we're not thinking about genealogy in the same way. So I wanna suggest just in brief that the Alex Haley moment kind of, you know, has a moment, almost a fetish moment. It's everywhere, you know, myself as a child had, you know, there were Roots coloring books and, you know, lunchboxes and it was just kind of epiphenomenal in our world. And then it sort of kind of dies down and we know from the people that I early encounter in my research that many people continue to do genealogy. The Augs organization that I mentioned earlier starts in 1977. So it is the start of something, but it's not at this kind of fever pitch that it is in the late 1970s. By the time we get to the early odds in which these companies are emerging. So the question for me as a social scientist became, you know, why is it sticking around? What is it doing for us 10 years out, 15 years out, now nearly 20 years out? You know, what is the social practice doing in the world that makes it stick around? And so I began to think about another as I already sort of foreshadowed another methodology and doing my work and find, trying to figure out what people were doing with these tests. So I really switched from a kind of interview format to a really wholesale ethnographic approach where I was going to just spend time with people not just, I was going to be less sort of attached to their test results and a bit more attached to what they thought the results could do for them or do in the world. And so conceptually and methodologically, I took up what's called a kind of social life approach. After the anthropologist, Arjuna Pottawai who in his important 1988 book, The Social Life of Things, which is a book about material culture and its circulation in the world, tells us that if we wanna understand what something means in the world, it's that you follow things in motion. And it's through that following that you're able to illuminate their human and social context. So the social life approach I take from a Pottawai, it's not distinctive to me. And one of the fields in which I work, science and technology studies, it's very commonplace. Sarah Franklin, the sociologist in the UK has written about the social life of PGT, of pre-implantation diagnosis. So there's other ways in which other social scientists have taken this approach to, especially follow things that are emergent, in which the sort of question of what they will mean and whether they will stick around is an open one that we're trying to answer. So I use the social life of DNA in two different ways. One is to think about the sort of circulation and spillover of genetic analysis from genealogical uses to uses in other domains, forensic, medical, familial and the like, and back again. And to the extent that a phenomenon that Abby Littman, the anthropologist called geneticization is taking effect and society, our society, other societies, I think it's the spillover. I think it's the fact that we are turning to genetics we think it can answer lots of different questions and lots of different domains that gives it its power rather than its use in one domain, clinical research, forensics and the like. I'm also use the social life of DNA to refer to the multiple uses to which one type of genetic analysis is put. So in this case, genetic ancestry testing and most of my talk today will be about the use of genetic ancestry testing and endeavors that I call reconciliation projects. But I will say in the end, a little about the spillover about the second use. So reconciliation projects are is one of the larger, the concepts coming out of my ethnography in the book. And I mean it to refer to sites and practices in which genetic analysis is put to the task of resolving controversies or answering questions about the past. So I'm particularly interested in this particular book, is about genetics used to try to answer questions about the history of racial slavery in particular. But I'm also, I think it's really important to sort of like to sort of paint the wider picture, which is that genetics is being used in lots of different ways in different societies to answer questions about the past. So an early instantiation of this is the case of the grandmothers of the May Plaza who and Argentina after during the sort of junta there and then late 1970s and early 1980s had their children and their grandchildren disappeared murdered by the authoritarian state. And we're convicted that their grandchildren were probably still living. We now know that there were effectively camps where pregnant women who were critical of the authoritarian regime were brought allowed to give birth to their children before they were killed. And these children were often placed in the families of their parents, kind of mortal enemies. And so these grandmothers were looking certainly for their children, but for their grandchildren having an intonation that this was the case. They turned to a hero of mine and probably a hero too many of you, Mary Claire King of the geneticist who initially works with HLA blood antigens to try to identify whether children suspected of being the grandchildren of these grandmother activists were related to them and ultimately early DNA analysis to do this. We might also think of the A and C widows in South Africa they're whose brothers, whose husbands but also sometimes brothers, uncles in the like were murders and political violence often buried and collective graves. And so it was important for families to be able to have the remains of their loved ones to be able to do burial rights on an individual for an individual for the closure for the family for religious reasons DNA analysis has been used there as well. And I know that there are many instances that many of you could claim as well. So I wanna shift us out of the, I love the ancestry.com commercials about Kyle and for Kyle is my favorite who switches from he thinks he should be wearing leader hose and then switches to the kilt. And there's a kind of kind of whimsy around that and around the sort of what's called symbolic ethnicity and sociology or the sort of putting on or eating of foods or things that allow a kind of performance of ethnicity. I wanna suggest to you that the use of genetics to answer questions about the past have can do that but also has potentially kind of higher and deeper stakes as well. So as I said in my work, I'm looking at a particular one might say kind of pillar of a larger phenomenon of reconciliation projects which are about the resolution of injuries produced by racial slavery and the use of genetics to resolve those. And we see this in the United States in some very important early papers, right? So as early as 1998, so this is a, you know paper in nature, Jefferson fathered slaves last child. So this is the early use of Y chromosome DNA. So patrilineal DNA or Y chromosome DNA which passes from fathers to sons and the patrilineal gene of family given though our naming conventions in the U.S. and it must have much of the quote unquote West. The Y chromosome also is often aligned with surnames. And so in this instance, there was an endeavor to try to answer what remained a mystery to some but I'll remind you that at this point the Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed had already written one of her Pulitzer Prize winning or books suggesting demonstrating with evidence that Thomas Jefferson likely fathered one or more children of the woman he enslaved Sally Hemings. But here we have this sort of turn to DNA evidence to suggest that this is further true. This creates a bit of controversy which some of you might recall with the sort of Jefferson descendants who now accept this as true as well but it also creates a little controversy on technological grounds because, you know where the Y chromosome could be from anyone in the Jefferson line, you know it could be from Thomas Jefferson and his brothers and his sons and the like. And so there was that controversy as well. So I'm gonna talk and the rest of my time about a series of reconciliation projects and this slide just as a kind of cluster of them that have to do with endeavoring to kind of put in scare quotes restore citizenship to get restitution for racial slavery through a class action suit for slavery reparations and to kind of build kind of community and new ways of thinking about kinship. And all of the stories that I'm going to excuse me, I'm having a little trouble with the slide here present to you really come through in this instance, the African ancestry company one of the very first direct to consumer genetic testing companies in the United States started in 2003 by a black geneticist named Rick Kittles who is a cancer geneticist research on prostate cancer in particular. And he has been on the faculty of the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Arizona state most recently he is at the city of Hope and Southern California and is the director of their kind of health equity program also doing his work on cancer genetics. So he starts this company in 2003. This is a screenshot that this image here is from 2006 from their homepage. You can already see that in the first three years of the company, he's been on African-American lives. There's press coverage on Good Morning America and USA Day. There's a sort of co-sponsorship with American Airlines, just to give you a sense of the early success of the organization. Kittles starts African ancestry with Gina Page, business woman who'd studied economics at Stanford before starting the company with him and they both understand themselves variously to be civil rights activists or advocates. This for them is a business enterprise and it also is a political enterprise. Now, connecting to my earlier point about the pioneering role of African-Americans in this space, I want you to understand that African ancestry begins five years before 23 and me. So in the same way that Band-Aid stands the kind of name that stands for bandages and Kleenex for face tissue, 23 and me has come to be the kind of monster in the space and the kind of brand that we identify with direct to consumer genetics, but there were earlier companies, FamilyTreeDNA, Ancestry.com, which some of you might be familiar with and one of the earliest in the U.S. was this black-owned company, African Ancestry, which remains one of the very two. So there were, in 2003 when African ancestry emerges, there's four companies and it is one of the two from that time that still remain. So this black-owned company that particularly wanted to niche market its services to African-Americans and understood it to be for the benefit of African-Americans begins, is still existing as a pioneering and now kind of legacy company and the sector of the economy. So Rick Kittles is an important figure because some of the sort of his idea to start African ancestry comes out of a research project in which he's engaged in lower Manhattan called the African Burial Ground Project, which is now a national monument that some of you might be familiar with. But before it was a monument, it was suspected to be a cemetery and then it became an excavation site and now it is a site of remembrance of folks who were lost and slaved Africans from the colonial era and New York City. So I'm gonna tell you a little bit about this story because I want you to understand, going back to the question with which I began, how and why do communities who have that have been the literal objects of scientific scrutiny, who have been quite frankly sort of scrutinized but also damaged, abused by science, technology and medicine somehow find possibilities for liberatory politics and for other ways of seeing the world and their lives. And this little detour that we're going to go through the African Burial Ground, I think offers some answer to that. So as I mentioned, in 1991, there was an endeavor to put up a building. This was gonna be a general services administration, federal building in Lower Manhattan. And initially there were some historical maps that suggested that it either sat next to or on top of the construction site what was a historical cemetery, formerly called the Negro's Burying Ground. But those in charge of the project suggested that it wasn't compelling enough that they shouldn't proceed with the construction. So no surprises that the construction site quickly becomes an excavation site because there are human remains buried there. And indeed where they wanted to put the building was the site of the Negro's Burying Ground. So initially the Metropolitan Forensic Anthropology Team at Lehman College in the Bronx in New York City is brought in to do this work, very fine scientists, but who really are more kind of CSI forensic scientists than they were sort of academic, biological anthropologists and archeologists. Moreover, there's a lot of political controversy about this site when it comes to be known that remains are buried there. So the local black community in particular, members of them, many members of them want the site to just be covered and the souls left to rest there. Others find it, want it to be, suspect think that it's, understand that it's an opportunity to know more information about enslaved Africans. Ultimately the sort of control of the research would move from Lehman College to a research project led by Michael Blakey, a distinguished biological anthropologist who at the time was at Howard University and the Ashley Monogue lab there. So part of the controversy meant that Blakey was put in place as the African Burial Ground Research Director. And Blakey prior to getting this appointment was very critical of the Lehman College technique. He said that, you know, this kind of CSI technique reduced the individuals and the burials to quote unquote, narrow typologies and thinly descriptive variables that thereby disassociated them from their particular culture and history. So Blakey had another process or another approach in mind. He thought that the, excuse me, before I go to that, let me say that moreover some of the activists pictured here that I mentioned also took Blakey's line. Like they understood that what the Lehman College it kind of again, in shorthand, a kind of CSI approach amounted to was what they called the biological racing of their ancestors bodies. At the same time, many of these same activists wanted research to be carried out that could provide some information about who they understood to be their ancestors, which is a political claim about kinship and about therefore about who could be in control of the disposition of these remains. The activists opposed merely descriptive frameworks that they argued would quote, reduce their ancestors social identity to skin color. So the strategy that Michael Blakey comes up with is a interdisciplinary research strategy that includes forms of, you know, sort of history, archeology, dental morphology that I think would be familiar to many of us, but more controversially, the analysis of phenotypic traits of craniometry, craniomic traits, and also molecular genetics. And the implication here going back to Blakey's critique is that there was a way to do genetic, biological, morphological examination of these remains that could yield not narrow typologies, not a biological racing of the remains, but a full story because it's a multidisciplinary project that's not taking one of these epistemologies as what the answer is to who these people are, but putting them all in conversation together. So it's not the genetics that, if you don't do genetics alone or craniometry alone, one reduces the risk of the sort of violence and racism and essentialism of quote, unquote, biological racing. So Rick Kittles would take this approach and create the African Ancestry Company. What this company offers is a certificate of ancestry that gives an inference to both an ethnic group and a nation state along with other documentation that's a lot more nuanced. But in this instance, Albert Sampson as being inferred to be related to the contemporary Temne people of Sierra Leone. So I wrote several years ago with colleagues, a policy paper in science that goes to the limitations of all of ancestry testing and of claims about identity, the fact that they're a historical, the fact that genetic markers and statistical assumptions are made to stand in for identity and identity processes, so I can say more about that in the Q&A, but I would also point you to that paper for more on that line of conversation. So what I wanna talk about now is the fact that, that the sort of genetically inferred identity is not the endpoint and that these reconciliation projects that the genetically inferred information becomes a catalyst for social action. And to go to my earlier question, why do we still have these tests is that I would suggest that allow people to do things in the world that are important and that reconciliation projects are one of these. So I mentioned that there were activists at the African Burial Ground Project who wanted the souls to be laid to rest. And so there was, in some instances, 24-hour candlelighting, drumming ritual and the like, there were people who just did not want even the research to be done. One of these cultural activists at the African Burial Ground Project is a woman named Deidre Farmer Palman. Farmer Palman is quoted around this time in the New York Times as saying that she was there on one of these vigils watching over the souls of people who are understood to be, deceased people enslaved Africans understood to be her ancestors and the ancestors of others there. And that she saw before it became an excavation site and it was a construction site. Skulls and bodies sort of pulled up with backhoes. And she said that she felt that her ancestors were telling her that she had to do something not only to stop the excavation process but to also restore and I've repaired restitution for the descendants of formerly enslaved people. So they take up a great deal of her life and continues, I think, to occupy her life. If she would put her through Brooklyn Law School to try to figure out a legal strategy that one might use to advance a case for slavery reparations. Some of you will recall that at the same time at Harvard University, Randall Robinson and Charles Obaltree and others had the restitution study group. And so you had some of the most elite legal minds in the country trying to come up with a strategy for how to advance a legal case for slavery reparations. And then you had this African-American woman working in a tradition of reparations activists that had been very important figures who were black women, Cali House and Queen Mother Jalois Blakey among others who had been sort of leading the charge of reparations. But she was considered, I think, by the more elite lawyers, a kind of upstart and looked at with some amusement and wonder. So it was surprising and historic when she became the lead plaintiff in 2002, a legal case called Farmer-Pailman v. Fleet Boston. A historic case for slavery reparations filed by eight plaintiffs against 21 multinational corporations in the Eastern District Court of New York. And these corporations included Lloyds of London, Fleet Boston, CSX, multinational corporations said to exist today because of the proceeds that they and the wealth that these companies had accumulated during the era of slavery. So an insurance company like Lloyds of London ensured enslaved Africans as property on behalf of their owners. CSX trafficked enslaved Africans and train routes across the United States and the like. So a little press coverage here. This is the New York Times. Companies are sued for slave reparations. The suit was filed in a federal court in Brooklyn on behalf of all living descendants of slaves in this country. It seeks unspecified damages. This is in 2002 spring. By 2004, the winter, you won't be surprised to hear that the lawsuit had been dismissed. They had gone to an appellate court in Chicago and it was dismissed for a couple of different reasons. But in part because of the standing doctrine. So this is from that 2004 dismissal. The plaintiffs cannot establish a personal injury sufficient to confer standing by merely alleging some genealogical relationship to African-Americans held in slavery over 100, 200 or 300 years ago. So again, this is 2004, this dismissal. This is Deidre Farmer-Pillman, pictured with one of her attorneys. This is not her attorney, Edward Fagan, but one of her attorneys was Edward Fagan, who a couple of years prior had succeeded and successfully suing Swiss banks on behalf of Holocaust survivors for reparations. And so that's a different court system, but they were taking a similar strategy here and going after existing sort of capitalist organizations to make the case for reparations. So they were left with this sort of conundrum. How do we argue that we're not, how do we get around the standing doctrine and this accusation, this allegation that we're merely alleging a genealogical relationship to African-Americans held in slavery? How do we, is there a way to demonstrate this further? So it's 2004, as I mentioned previously, the African ancestry companies established in 2003. So within the first year of that company's existence, Deidre Farmer-Pillman and another of the plaintiffs in the case go to the company and seek and in purchase African ancestry test kits to offer as a kind of evidentiary retort to the court's claim, the Chicago appellate court's claim that they were merely alleging a genealogical relationship to their former enslaved ancestors. So this is the first time that I've been able to find that direct to consumer genetic testing appears in the court in this way. Certainly forms of this testing has appeared in family court, we can think back to 15 years ago or something in the Maury-Povet show and these kind of gotcha paternity tests. But this is a civil court case and these are not submitted as evidence per se because it's not that kind of proceeding but they write in the legal brief in a response to the 2004 dismissal, the results that they had received and that they make the claim that they do have standing and they're not merely alleging a relationship to enslaved ancestors. So by 2006, the same court again rejects the claims and it wasn't an evident, they formally submit the DNA test as evidence but the court does weigh in on those and effectively says that genetic mapping or DNA testing alone is insufficient to provide a decisive link to homeland. And so this is a reconciliation project, it's an endeavor that doesn't succeed I think in a kind of cut and dry way but it certainly succeeds in keeping the kind of drumbeat for reparations going. It will be in less than 10 years that it's the case that Ta-Nehisi Coates writes his case for reparations on the pages of the Atlantic Magazine and now you know that we're as a society well engaged in a conversation around reparations. I also wanna suggest that part of what was at stake here is my read, which I think Alvin Weinberg might not totally agree with the late chemist physicist about the trans-scientific. So he proposed writing in 1972 kind of in the sort of wake of the 60s movements and the wake of, you know, as Vietnam is the Vietnam war is kind of starting to wind down he was very invested in distinguishing between kind of science and politics. And so this quote comes out of him writing in that tradition but I think that he speaks to something bigger here. So this is quoting Weinberg questions which can be asked of science and yet which cannot be answered by science. I propose the term trans-scientific for these questions since though they are epistemologically speaking questions of fact and can be stated in the language of science they are unanswerable by science they transcend science. For me, these are questions of morality, of justice and indeed of ethics are the trans-scientific questions and that, you know but I also think these are questions of kind of will to transformation and political will. You know, there, I think one can, you know arguably there's no kind of evidentiary barrier or sort of threshold that one can meet that will provide reparations for an aggrieved community that deserves repair and any society unless the society wants to do it. So that's one reconciliation project. Let me tell you briefly about another. This is the actor Isaiah Washington pictured here. You'll remember from his time on a Grey's Anatomy and his sort of infamous departure from Grey's Anatomy. And this is in South Carolina. I in North South Carolina, I followed him and others there for a ceremony called a Sara. Isaiah Washington had done African ancestry testing and he had been through that testing inferred to be related to the ethnic group in Sierra Leone through matrilineage. And this was a reconciliation project a sort of ceremony of remembrance on the shores of the Ashley River where important slave large slave auctions took place during the era of plantation slavery. And everyone, so three of the people pictured here lay claim to Sierra Leone through different bases of affiliation. Isaiah Washington sent through genetic ancestry testing. This is a woman named Tamalyn Colite who has traced her ancestry to contemporary Sierra Leone using the manifests and other documents from the slave trade. And this gentleman here, Amadou Masali who I believe has now immigrated back to Sierra Leone but flew in from Texas that day to sort of be the grio and efficient of this ceremony. So the ceremony took place, as I said, on the shore of the bank of the Ashley River where the Ashley Ferry landing where many enslaved Africans were brought for sale. This is Amadou Masali here. He claimed to have soiled with him that day from Sierra Leone that he cast into the Ashley River and gave prayers that were intended to rest the souls of people who had been trafficked from contemporary Sierra Leone to the Carolina low countries. So Isaiah Washington appears here in part as a member of, is a DNA Sierra Leonean with given access to this relationship to Sierra Leone via genetic ancestry testing. He would succeed in being one of the few people to get dual citizenship in Sierra Leone. This is his Sierra Leonean passport that I took at an event in about 2009 and which he and Rick Kittles were overseeing the sort of reveal ceremonies for people who had used African ancestry's genetic ancestry test including myself. That evening, the son of Marcus Garvey learned that he had Y chromosome DNA that traced to the continent of Africa to West Africa and the son of Martin Luther King, Jr. pictured here learned that he had Y chromosome DNA that was inferred to be from Europe and they both sort of gave remarks variously about that. So I'm gonna move forward now to talk about another facet of social life of DNA to wrap up the spillover that I mentioned between sites of genetic analysis from one use to another. To begin, I wanna quote Sarah, so when I interviewed who said, we think breast cancer runs in our family now that I understand my African ancestry test, the difference between the mother's line and the father's line and all that, I have a better sense of what the genetic counselor, excuse me, and the genetic counselor at my doctor's office was telling me. So that spillover there between the medical genetics and the forensic genetics. I also wanna offer you a quote from someone else I interviewed who I call Pat, who worked in a criminal forensics lab. I've seen people let off DNA sentences based on DNA. I'm not questioning about that, given my experiences, there's no reason to doubt the technology. So Pat, of course, suggests for us a kind of halo effect around genetic testing in some African-American communities that's really given a voice in the work of the Innocence Project. This is from 2016, but there's many other instances of people exonerated using forms of genetic analysis. More close to the story of direct to consumer genetics are a series of cases, some of which will be familiar to you and which the criminal justice system begins to use. Really citizen science databases and the like to access DNA information to endeavor to resolve cold cases. So this is from several years ago, filmmaker named Michael Usredi and uses the fact that he was a horror filmmaker to talk about the horror that entered his life, vis-a-vis being caught up in a cold case and he turned out not to be related to this aspect in this cases at all. More recently, we know that the JED match, also all kind of citizen science third party database was used to apprehend the Golden State Killer. I would offer here, yes, we want to find serial killers, but we need to think about the sort of ethical and legal implications of really trawling through lots of people's DNA profiles and the course of trying to find, obviously the killer that we wanna catch. I would point to also the use of DNA as part of the spillover, the proposed use of it. 23andMe offered its services to reunite immigrant families that were separated at the US-Mexico border. We now know from recent reporting this week that nearly 500 children have been separated from their families, we cannot find the parents. And the complexity of using genetic ancestry testing for that, I mean, some of these families might not be bio-ken, but they are certainly families and DNA testing can only get us so far with that. And then there's issues about where the data goes who gets to disposition of the disposition of the data and the like. I will remind you that these thorny issues around direct to consumer genetics come up when the state wants them to come up. This is from last December, just before the holidays the US, the Secretary of Defense, the DOD sent a memo to members of the services of the branches of services as well, telling them effectively that they should be careful and not use direct to consumer genetic ancestry testing that it offers or health testing because it poses an operational risk to service members, to their privacy it might be used by foreign actors to gain information about them and their families and the like. So, and lastly of course, the direct to consumer genetics is turning up and conversations about how to mitigate and better understand COVID-19. So the social life of DNA continues apace. So I know that I've run long and with that I will stop sharing my screen and hope that we can take some time for conversation. Oh, Professor Nelson, thank you very much. Can you hear me? I can hear you well. Okay, we have so many questions and we just have a couple of minutes. So I'm gonna try to be very selective here. One of the lessons from the Farmer-Pillman case, it seemed could be the conclusion that genetic genealogy testing is not going to be an effective strategy for reconciliation projects. Do you think in retrospect that it was perhaps a mistake to try to base reconciliation upon the brutality of slavery per se rather than sort of the entire history of structural racism that has followed? What sort of the bottom line lesson that you would take from that case and from the efforts to use this genetic testing as a basis for reconciliation and reparations? Yes, I think I've spent a lot of my career studying activists and spending time with activist community. So I think that they're always trying to gain advantage in the court of public opinion. And so I suspect that Farmer-Pillman knew that they might not need the standing doctrine. That's a kind of basic, I think, insight of law school. So, but it was very important for this case to be in the New York Times, to be in the Chicago Tribune, to keep the conversation going about the case for reparations. So I think it is, you know, it's into what, you know, I think that reparations activists have been making a structural racism case for a very long time. But I think that approaches to the court in particular were often in the narrow lane of the sort of damage and injury. I mean, effectively this is a tort law case, you know, not unlike saying, you know, this pharmaceutical company or this person who hit my car injured me. It's an injury claim. So I guess, you know, Bob, there's probably, I think there's two ways to answer that question. As an activist tactic, I think it was actually quite brilliant. As an actual tactic in which the genetic science could work, you know, it was a weak strategy and that, you know, direct to consumer genetics up until fairly recently was really comes out of human population genetics. It's really a kind of population lens on the world. It's not about the individual. So I think part of the sort of weakness of the strategy was that one was trying to use a technology of population to say something about eight individuals and about their kind of, you know, genealogy. And then I think, you know, of course, one can make a larger, you know, sort of argument. But we also in the courts, I mean, it also sort of who, you know, to whom is one seeking, from whom is one seeking restitution? It's very hard as we know from our colleagues who work on discrimination law to make a kind of structural discrimination case in the law. You know, one has to show intent and have, you know, all sorts of other evidence as well. And it's getting increasingly hard to demonstrate that. So I think I wouldn't call it a mistake. I would call it quite ingenious. And, you know, and probably in some ways knowing about the limitations of what was possible and not possible as well. All right. I think maybe the question I have is just too big for the minute or so that we have left. But one of the parts of your book is that many Africans look with some amusement at the desire of African-Americans to establish this homeland. And like, you know, if it's so important to have a homeland, why don't you just move here? What do you see as some of the motivations there that you might respond to somebody who says, gee, you know, why do you care so much about this? I think there's mixed responses. So I write a little bit in my book about a series of engagements in social media between African-Americans who are kind of performing their genetic inference results and, you know, people who claim to be either expats or people on the African continent. And some of them say, you know, so glad for you, we feel like the problems with African-Americans is that people don't have their identity. Others say, you know, there's no way that you can be Ebo Temne because I, you know, that's my community and to be of that community means, you know, you've done these rights, you have these obligations, you have this certain type of kinship network. I will say, even with I think the critique, I mean, it's clear that, you know, part of what these, this is the symbolic ethnicity, part of what these tests actualize or activate is consumption, you know, through tourism, through, you know, heritage trips and these sorts of things. And so I think even in some communities on the African continent that are critical, there is also an understanding that there's a, you know, it's not quite a remittance, but they're, but creating a kind of diaspora identity and African-Americans, you know, does also sort of catalyze the flow of resources through tourism and other things. So, you know, so it's, you know, I wouldn't want to speak for, you know, 54 countries, but it's, you know, it's a bit complicated and a little bit across the map, but there is, you know, there's consumption and the use of direct to consumer genetics by African-Americans, it's a kind of bourgeois pursuit. And, you know, potentially consumption in one of the ways that people sort of use this genetically inferred identity to do things in the world. And that is through traveling and trying to make connections. All right, well, thank you so much for really a wonderful talk. And thanks to everyone who participated in all of this and we'll continue with some of our students in a few minutes, Professor Nelson. So thanks everyone for being here, goodbye. Thank you.