 Do you think it'll work? So does it sound like it's on? Yes, it is on. OK, great. So thank you so much, Sheraine, for kind of doing the quick overview. The moderator of the last discussion opened up questions to the panelists of each other. I'm not going to ask you guys to do that. That wasn't the plan. But rather, we thought we might actually start by trying to bring all of you in the room a little taste of the kinds of conversations that we were having as part of this round table discussion. Now, I know that a certain proportion of you in the audience were actually participants in the round table, but not all of you were. And so I want to ask you for a moment to put yourselves in the shoes of someone who might have had a chance to participate in this kind of multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder type conversation that Dr. Royall described, where you were coming with your particular interests, your particular points of view, and you were being tasked with coming to consensus about the meaning and uses and applications and potential regulation and things like that of this interesting, exciting, but possibly, as was noted by the last set of panelists, not all that well understood yet, science. So one of the things that we ended up spending a lot of time talking about was just what is this thing, ancestry testing, right? So probably all of us have some sense of genes and genetics. And we saw images of double helices, and we saw pictures of families and resemblance. But what is ancestry in the context of genetics, and what is ancestry testing? When I've posed that question, and again, I'm not going to ask these guys because they were there, and I was there, but what do all of you, what would be your answer? If you were someone who was there and you were trying to reach consensus with people, what would your answer to that question of what ancestry testing is, what it means to you? Now that you've been here all day, how do you think about this technology in the light of the sociocultural and historical and artistic and other types of implications and meanings that we've been talking about? Please, anyone? Microphone? No? But you all had, every time we asked someone to ask a question earlier, there were people jumping up. Yes, please. All right. We got a couple of people. What I have, I'm Sandra O'Yawale from Trinity Washington University. I have family from Mississippi, and I have become interested in knowing more about the family history. So I have actually, it was interesting to see some of the photographs of the 1870 census because I was able to find that and I found my great grandfather in those records. And I had been interested and have been interested in trying to figure out how I might have some genetic testing done sort of to give us a better idea of our genetic origins. But as I listen to the conversations today and some of the concerns about the reliability of those data as presented, I'm not sure that it's going to provide for me the kind of information that I want at the level of accuracy that I would like. Okay, so I hear you saying intriguing, but maybe won't be giving you the answers that you were looking for. Is that paraphrase about right? Yeah? Yes, what would you say? Hi, my question would be, well, my answer would be it depends on the context of how you use it. And if a person is using ancestry in order to have a deeper meaning to understand themselves or if you're using it to connect you to someone else or another group of people, or you're using it from the position of trying to classify other people, it depends on the context of how you use it and what information you're looking for from it. So if you're looking to be more precise as I guess we were able to see here that the precision isn't what some would like and for others it's a lot more than what we've had before. So I will stand by it depends on the context. All right, so context dependent. Anyone else want to venture an opinion? Mike, you haven't had a chance to speak yet. Let's pretend like you weren't there. So let's see, this on. You know, I think from our perspective, ancestry testing and even more specifically genetic ancestry testing can be defined rather broadly. So one of the first questions and Charmaine mentioned that what we did is split up into smaller groups and then each of the small groups came together for a larger group discussion. And in many of the small groups in fact, one of the first questions that was asked was does a genetic inference of ancestry depend upon doing a test with DNA? So there are many types of inferences, even genetic inferences of ancestry that one can make from sources other than DNA. In fact, you can get a blood test and look at a cholesterol level and that could give you some information about ancestry. Clinicians, particularly clinicians who focus on medical genetics problems might be able to look at an individual and make an inference about their genetic ancestry. So that was actually one of the first topics of discussion in our small group was whether you had to actually do a test with DNA. In other words, get a direct estimate of genetic ancestry in order to constitute a genetic inference of ancestry. So that's one of the points that we struggled on. And then there were also questions, weren't there Charmaine, about which sort of ancestors one might be able to access via genetic test, right? So we have people who might be interested in understanding their heritage going to the 18th century, for example. There are some people who might be interested in ancestry of thousands of years ago. And there were other people who were interested in understanding about near relatives. People who family relationships have been disrupted in some way and are looking for connections. I don't know if you have any other comments before we do the reveal. No, I mean people, no, go ahead. I was gonna say, people do go into this for various reasons in terms of what they're looking for. As someone said, it may not provide her with what she's looking for. But for other people, it's very informative and they really rely on the information. And we'll talk a bit more about that kind of reliance on genetics. One of the things, I'm a genetic genealogist and I was at the conference and I'm the president of a large genealogy convention or association with 2,200 members. There's a lot of confusion. Ancestry is the broad term. Genealogy is looking for specific individuals. And oftentimes we're using ancestry when we're meaning genealogy. And so there's a relationship, certainly, but there are some differences. Yes, and you're capturing some of what we spent time talking about was all of these different ways in which ancestry could be understood. Right, and if I can add to that, one of the other things that we still started with despite the consensus statements that we've come up with is that you can identify, you can define ancestry at many different points in time. So it's very easy for us to think about ancestry when we're thinking about our parents and our grandparents. And it's perhaps easy to think about our ancestry when we talk about modern human origins emanating from somewhere in East Africa. But remember, anything in between those two points is also ancestry and we arbitrarily decide where to define what we're looking at back in terms of time and space. And that's where we have much more difficulty when we talk about ancestry because often we're talking about different points in time and both space. Yeah, I would like to deal with the question of admixture because now that's a big part of the sort of cutting edge that you can get more refined information with the admixtured tests. And for my particular admixtured tests, the first set of results I had indicated that I had in the 70s, African, 17 or so to 19% you're American, you know, white, and then something like three or so percent Native American. Now I had grown up with a story in the Caribbean that my grandmother actually was Caribbean. So when my kids were growing up, I actually told them the story about their Caribbean ancestor at Native American that would be in America. And as I got the test and my younger daughter who's now a doctor, she has a fellowship in infectious diseases, grew up with that. So when she was at Harvard as an undergraduate, she actually did a course on Caribbean history and with Orlando Patterson and in fact decided to do her paper on Native Americans in the Caribbean. Of course she had grown up with a story from her mother about this Native American ancestry. I had to sort of divest her of that story when I found out that it was more the European mixture and the Fulani mixture in my ancestry that may have been responsible for the non-African and just of every time, it would seem to me that the Native American sort of presence seemed to be shifting a lot and I don't know whether it's because of enough data, but that's where the big problem is I think in the Native American, because a lot of even in America, a lot of Afro-Americans have stories of their Native American ancestry and then when we get the results, that's not it. Can you sort of explain some of the problems with admixture testing? Problems, so let me try to put that in the context of the comment that I just made in the sense that to a large extent and particularly in the United States, we're all admixtures, but whether you're admixt or not and to the extent to which you're admixt and the populations that served as the source for that admixture are highly dependent on assumptions you make about the type of DNA test that you're doing, your reference populations and that goes to where you're making that line back in time and in space and deciding essentially where to look. So there are a lot of assumptions that are made in virtually all the tests that influence whether or not you get a particular percentage of admixture from one population or another or are considered admixt at all. And you've heard some of those. I mean, one of the consistent themes through this day has been that your ancestry estimations are highly dependent upon the reference populations that are used and right now we have only a very limited sampling of worldwide populations. So if the population from which you have admixtures simply is represented in that sampling, then you're gonna get an estimate from the next closest population and that next closest population could be quite different than the real population from once your admixture rose. But there are a whole host of assumptions and different data sets that are used that go into these ancestor admixture estimates. And just for a moment, that kind of gets to something that was brought up by the last set of speakers and that they were surprised that science is gray. You know, no bad pun intended, but science is virtually never black and white. It's always gray. And not only do we not always have the answers, if we had all the answers, we wouldn't be doing science any longer. Good science means that you try to answer a question in the process of doing so, you raise 10 other questions that you move on to answer. In fact, often you prove initially the question that you asked was the wrong question to ask. So... Yeah, I think that the conception or, yeah, or the idea that science is black and white or that science is always right, in part has to do with how science is presented, how scientists present their science, how journals present science. And so I think there has to be a lot is done with the interpretation of the information that leads people to believe that science is supposed to be a particular way or a finding means a particular thing. I think a lot of it has to do with how it's translated from the findings to the public or to other scientists. Yeah, and you know, and I think also in this domain in particular, not only do we sometimes think that science is black and white, but we often, which is why it was so wonderful that we just had the panel before, we often think of science as being locked away in the lab and separate from us out here in the rest of the world. But particularly, I think in this area of ancestry testing, I mean, it was just abundantly clear in our discussions the people who are engaging in this testing, who are interacting with one another in social media, who are coming back to the laboratories and saying, but you gave me this result last week and now you say the result is this, that they are actively co-producing information about what ancestry is and what ancestry means together with scientists. That this isn't about the scientists in the lab saying what ancestry is, but it's all of us collectively together. And I was watching that going on in this round table was really remarkable. Yeah, I know you have a question, so I just wanted to add that science is very much a social process. It's not done in isolation. The questions that we ask are often questions that we think are gonna be important, are gonna be fundable. And right now, I go so far as to say that the African-American community is certainly driving a lot of the most interesting questions that are being asked about not only ancestry testing, but population genetics and human genetics in general. No, that's a great point. Karen. So this isn't really a question, but maybe an insight from the day. First of all, you asked the question about ancestry. So maybe I'm a product of Alex Healy's series when I was growing up, but to me it was roots. And of course that's contextual, how you look at your roots. But I wanted to pick up on what, just pick up on where you left off. The probably the greatest insight from the day is that ancestry testing, I think we see as objectifying or sort of validating a story. So you had this story from your family and then the ancestry testing is either gonna validate it or raise new questions. And why have we privileged one over the other? Because maybe the story is right and the test is wrong. Or maybe it's a little bit of both. And what the insight from the last panel with art was I thought, boy, the art's there to objectify some of this stuff that didn't have a context. I mean, looking at the picture, like a picture's worth a thousand words kind of thing. So I thought the day was, there was a level of humility among the scientists and a level of humility among the rest, perhaps as well to realize you can't have one without the other. I mean, in order to give this context, you need to integrate it with what you know about the stories, what you know about what they look like, what you know about the interactions, what you know about the social context. And, but you can't look at any of them in isolation. So I don't know. I don't know what, I wasn't that your reveal, you're making that up. Well, but I mean, I think that was a big take home. But I said it even more explicitly in the sense that, you know, you saw that there was a plot that showed kind of what individual sample from across Europe where they, how different they were from one another and the plot looked very similar to where they were sampled from Europe. Remember that if we didn't know where those individuals came from, so if we didn't know something about their history, we wouldn't know how to interpret that plot. They'd just be dots. So in fact, without history, without anthropology, without the social sciences, we couldn't interpret these genetic data the way that we do. And so they're very much a process that are intertwined with the other sciences. Yeah, very true. Yes, please. I have a question about one of the bullets that you presented early on that said something to the effect population genetics needs improved quote enforced standards unquote. And I, part of my pre, my background has to do with, is in the forensic sciences community. As you may know, that community has faced and is facing this question about, and I mean the scientific societies, about how to establish and enforce and quotation marks standards among their members. I would really like to hear from your folks about what sort of discussions touched on that aspect of this problem. Well, we did have a small group, and large group session devoted to this issue. And we actually were able to achieve some consensus. That consensus being that it would be helpful to have some standards against which ancestry testing could be assessed. That is making certain that the data, the methods, the models that are used are described to people who are using ancestry testing. And this is true for researchers doing ancestry testing as well as direct to consumer ancestry testing companies. And that this information is transparent, at least as transparent as can be. Ideally, all of this information would be publicly available. But for example, some of the information that a researcher or company might use in terms of what are the, technically what are some of the information about the populations of these reference populations, that could be considered proprietary. So we actually did agree that some standards would be helpful, not only to consumers and participants and researchers in research, but also to the individuals who are doing the work. In other words, the researchers and the companies themselves, because one of the concerns that we had is that the credibility of the research or the credibility of the product coming out of a company could be underbind if people weren't confident that the results that they were getting met a certain set of standards. I guess I was more interested in the enforcement part because that's something, I don't know if your society has already had experience with various means of enforcement, such as accreditation, or whether that was something that you discussed during your meeting. Charmine, what? Now I was just going to say, we didn't get into the nitty gritty of what enforcement meant or what it would look like. So our plan, we developed these consensus statements, we completed them yesterday, we're gonna continue working on them and refine them and likely we'll publish them at some point. And those statements will lead to the guidelines that we talk about developing. And when we get to that point, we will really come to decisions about what enforcement will look like. And those decisions will be made in concert with researchers and companies because it doesn't make sense for us to lay down the law about what enforcement should be if it's not gonna happen. So we need those stakeholders at the table too in terms of deciding how we will enforce these things. So we hope to get to that point. So I was gonna say, one of the things that I heard discussed was actually some of the users of the Ancestry Testing Companies are also very interested in standards because they want to know that the information that they're receiving is reliable and doing something like a seal of approval. So such a seal might motivate a company to, they might realize that it's to their benefit to have such a seal because then their product might look more attractive to a potential buyer. Yes, please. Hi. I wanted to know if you could elaborate on the bullet point about federal regulation, possibly not being needed. When I read that what immediately came to mind was a bill that recently died in a legislation in California where the bill was basically proposing that donor consent was needed for the genetic testing and analysis of, I guess, body, any hair parts or skin that is obtained by chance. And so along those lines, it made me think of genetic surveillance. And so if we don't have any regulation on a federal level, what are the possibilities of a day and age of hacker spaces and biohacker spaces where people can have easy access to kits that will allow them to extract DNA from random hair fibers that they've come across and use any sort of online database to make any sort of reference. Yeah, well, either if you'd like to. We didn't talk about that explicitly as part of the roundtable, but I mean, thoughts. And there are some people who have recommended or suggested that some entity, whether it be the FDA or the Federal Trade Commission, needs to regulate ancestor testing. Well, there's been a lot of discussion ongoing about the regulation of direct to consumer genetic testing more broadly and really focusing a lot on health-related genetic testing. And there are questions about what's gonna happen in that arena. And so the likelihood that the FDA or the FTC or some other organization will take ancestor testing on and regulate it is pretty slim, I think, at this point. And one of the things that we thought is, well, let's see if there are alternatives to federal regulation, considering that it may not happen, but alternatives in terms of encouraging the kind of behavior that we would like to see. And then if that doesn't work, then maybe we need to think about federal regulation. But I think in the white paper, we thought of it as a stepwise process in terms of let's start here and see what we can come up with in terms of guidelines that the stakeholders agree on will be feasible and practical and that they will adhere to before thinking about going further. And just to be clear, that we were specifically talking about federal regulation of genetic ancestry testing. So there is federal regulation for clinical genetic testing. There is federal regulation about consent for use of samples. There's federal regulation about storage of healthcare-related data. So there is, for many of the issues that you brought up, there is federal regulation that provides oversight. We were narrowly focused on ancestry testing. Yeah, so I see that we're getting close to running out of time. What we wanted to do was kind of open this up and see what you all thought and then to kind of just give you an example of one of the 24, 25 consensus statements that we came up with. And so, and we probably, we had a few others back pocket, but we're probably just gonna give you this one. So when we had discussion, and we recall we did this by breaking into small groups and having discussion in our small groups and then coming back together as a whole to have further discussion, we agreed ultimately as a group and then voted anonymously to ratify this particular statement of our understanding in the round table of what genetic ancestry inference means. And we said genetic ancestry inference uses regions of the genome that inform us about individual, genealogical, population and or geographic ancestry by comparison of similarities to a reference sample or samples. There are many different types of ancestry tests that use Y DNA, mitochondrial DNA, autosomal or the X chromosome or X chromosome markers, information about parentage, kinship and identification that can be captured by ancestry tests and vice versa. And importantly, and this was something we spent a fair amount of time talking about, this information can also be used for forensic applications. And I know this has come up obliquely a couple of ways today, but I think it's important for us to realize as we kept kind of pointing out the very same technologies, the very same information can be used in these very diverse ways, all of which can tell us about ancestry and can tell us about other things, including possibly identify samples at the scene of a crime, for example. So, there you go. I don't know if people have any other final thoughts or Vences, you're coming up because you are a participant in the round table. If you have any reflections or thoughts on the round table in this relation to the discussion we've been having here today. I'm looking forward to seeing the publication and to hear the conversation with the industry and with the different constituencies. And just like today, it's just a start of a conversation and exploration. And I think from the perspective of the National Human Genome Research Institute, we are particularly interested in it. And both from the perspective of how it helps to communicate information and enhance the literacy of the public, but also the broader issues of how we understand genetics and genomics and what it means about our identity and who we are. So, I think we're all just beginning today. Yes. But I know it's six o'clock. Yes. And we're actually gonna stop on time. And I wanna just thank everyone for today. And again, on behalf of the planning committee, I wanna thank you for your commitment to be here all day, for those that are here and for the conversations we're having. There is the event this evening that starts at 7.30, where Ms. Gwen Ifo and Mr. Lonnie Bunch will have revealed by Skip Gates some information about their history, their genealogical history, as well as information shared about their genomic history. And then we'll continue the conversation about what that means and what it doesn't mean and how do we think about it. I invite you all, if you don't have a ticket, you can get a ticket from the registration desk for this evening. It is wet out for those who haven't seen the weather. But, and the building is closed. So it's now a secure building. So it's only out after you leave the auditorium. But I just wanna thank everyone and a round of applause for all of our panels today. Thank you.