Genius of Genus

Where did we come from? Many families can trace their family tree to the Mayflower and beyond. But this Mississippi expatriate isn’t satisfied with one family tree or even a few trees—he’s tracking down the entire forest. Meet Spencer Wells, National Geographic’s population geneticist who is tracing the world—one DNA sample at a time

By Mark H. Stowers

The 38-year-old population geneticist, grandson of Kate Scott Roberts of Rosedale and the late Dr. Patterson Wells, is working to find out basically how we are all related. Everyone. That’s the whole world. Beginning to, well, now.

Wells’ ties to Mississippi also include living in Oxford the first two years of his life while his dad, Rush Wells III, attended law school. A career with the IRS called the family to Texas where Spencer’s zeal for history and biology quickly took him through school and to the University of Texas at 16. Then it was on to Harvard University for his Ph.D. and later post-doctoral training at Stanford University’s School of Medicine under famed geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the ‘father of anthropological genetics.’

I’ve Been Everywhere Man
“In early 1998, I took off for six months and drove across Asia,” Spencer explains. “This was a follow-up trip when I went to survey the population of the “Stans,” Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kirkestan—all those places which had never been studied before genetically. And because we were going to so many places, we said ‘what the hell,’ let’s get Land Rover to sponsor us and we’ll actually drive.”

The team’s land roving took them through Italy, Bavaria over to Greece then Istanbul across Turkey and finally entered the former Soviet Union in the Republic of Georgia. “We went to Armenia, then Azerbaijan and we were hoping to drive into Iran,” he says. “But they wouldn’t let us cross the border, so basically I had to take the car across the Caspian Sea. We met up in Uzbekistan and up to Kazakhstan to the four corners of Asia where China, Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia all meet. This is where a lot of the world’s major expansions have come from, in particular the expansion into the Americas.”

Wells brought home nearly 1,000 samples to add to his earlier ones for nearly 2,500 total. He then spent some time in England at Oxford University where the next chapter of his population geneticist life was to begin. “I was initially contacted to be interviewed about racial differences in the UK,” he adds. “They said ‘this stuff is fascinating, you should be doing a film just on the people of the world, it’s never been told before,’ and I said okay, but I want to make sure it’s done right.”

Six months later, filming began on “The Journey of Man” and finished in 2003. During that time, Wells hooked up with National Geographic and they were excited about his project. “They basically asked me if I could do anything in the world, what would it be? And I said, ‘Sample the world’s DNA,’” he says. “We don’t have enough samples to say definitively what the actual roots of migration were.”

That discussion became The Genographic Project, a five-year research project that seeks to chart new knowledge about the migratory history of the human species and answer the age-old questions surrounding the genetic diversity of humanity. The group is working to collect and analyze more than 100,000 DNA samples from people all over the world. So far they’ve sold 240,000 DNA sampling kits and have collected more than 270,000 DNA samples for the project.

A Place to Call Home
Even though he travels the world, Wells gets ‘home’ to Rosedale about every six months. “Rosedale feels very much like home for me,” he says. “It’s the place where we kind of came from. I love it there.”

Wells’ love for tracking roots probably came from his great-grandfather. “He was a country doctor, the first board certified cardiologist in Mississippi, and he basically delivered everyone there.”

In working to essentially find ‘Adam and Eve,’ Wells says that he hasn’t come across any criticism of his work. “If you take the reading of Genesis as a metaphor, we’re telling effectively the same story the Bible tells,” he says. “We all came from a relatively small population. In the Bible it’s literally two people, Adam and Eve. And everybody in the world is a descendant from that small group, and they lived in a particular place, the Garden of Eden. It’s really not that different that we’re all part of an extended human family.”

Not Your Average Travel Problems
And while Spencer has traveled around the world, he’s had his share of travel woes. “When we made the film (Journey of Man) we were working with a group of reindeer herders up in Siberia,” he says. “They are this final ‘jumping off’ spot for this settlement in the Americas. We sampled them in warmer times but wanted to shoot the film during the cold and it was minus 70. That’s incredibly, incredibly cold. It’s one of those things that unless you’ve experienced it, you don’t understand it.”

Spencer has worked in war zones and their dangers also. “We were in Chad in 2005 and in the north of the country that is essentially one big mine field,” he says. “You’re driving where there are no roads, across sand dunes, but in tracks where people have determined that there are no mines.”

Spencer did learn later that one of his native guides died stepping on a mine. “You take a lot on faith, you trust people and you cross your fingers,” Spencer says. “We rely on GPS devices, the best maps we can find and local guides.”

And while circumventing the globe, Spencer’s specialized training to accomplish his tasks was no more than Boy Scouts training and a special three-day driving school set up by Land Rover. “We spent three days driving through muddy fields,” he says.

While collecting DNA samples, how does Spencer convince indigenous people about his mission? “It’s actually pretty easy,” he says. “Most indigenous people, probably more so than those of us living in the Western world who are disconnected from our ancestry, have a very clear sense of who their ancestors were. They often have a sense of a piece of that ancestor living on inside of them. So I’m carrying a piece of my grandfather inside of me. And they get it almost immediately, that’s DNA, that thing that gets transmitted.”

While growing up, Spencer enjoyed several hobbies to keep his overactive mind connected to something worthwhile in order to stay out of trouble. “I taught myself how to play guitar and I taught my younger brother how to play,” Spencer says. “But my brother is much better than I am. He’s an accomplished guitarist, plays the blues and has a band. He’s also a great photographer.” His brother, Arnold Constable Patterson Wells lives in Austin.

And when he’s not traveling the world collecting DNA samples and braving the elements, you can find Spencer experimenting with his “wet” and “dry” fly fishing flies. “I enjoy fly fishing in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, Colorado and Pennsylvania. The biggest fish I caught has been a seven-pound rainbow trout,” he says. “I certainly like hiking, camping, photography, playing the guitar but nothing amazing—just kind of normal hobbies that get me away from all these highly intelligent things I do for a living.”

Spencer’s biggest inspiration for his work? His grandmother. “She’s always been an inspiration. She’s visited more countries that I have and I’ve been in at least five dozen or so,” he says. “She was in Cobble in 1978 just before the soviets rolled into Afghanistan. She’s always traveled and sent back postcards and that’s how I got the travel bug.”

Delta connections connecting the world’s population, one DNA sample at a time.
For information on the Genographic Project, go to www.nationalgeographic.com/genographic or call 1-800-647-5463.