Inside Your DNA

[Music] this week we're all about genetics should your dna decide your dinner how does it shape your personality and can it be used to track down a murderer [Music] [Music] it's the most personal data that you own it literally defines you it is your dna ever since the human genome was decoded researchers have been peering deeper into what makes us us and more and more companies have been able to build services around what they've found so far here's what lara has to say on the subject excuse me it's not disgusting it's science hmm i think it's both actually look forward to finding out what's got lara spitting feathers later but first here we go again a story that will make your blood run cold i'm in iceland revisiting the freezers at d code genetics in reykjavik where robots working in temperatures of minus 26 celsius look after the blood of iceland over the last quarter of a century icelanders have donated nearly 2 million samples all in the name of genetic research if you want to know what -26 celsius feels like it's very painful on the ears you really don't feel like breathing very hard at all and weirdly my nostril hairs are freezing up every time i do that they're cracking iceland has been scrupulously recording ancestry records for hundreds of years so it kind of makes sense that it's also now at the forefront of research to try and identify the specific genes responsible for particular genetic diseases and what's amazing is the foresights they gathered a lot of these blood samples before the science became possible to do the things they're now doing so by gathering it and keeping it for 20 years they can call back they can go back to the older blood samples if they have new research techniques available by doing this they've been able to identify genetic variations associated with many kinds of cancers and they're now even able to estimate how long you have left to live based on levels of particular proteins in your blood the other fun thing about coming out of this temperature into normal temperature is what happens on cold glass condensation lots and lots of condensation [Laughter] and it doesn't stop forming so that's it camera's written off for about an hour now and a bit later once we've dried off and warmed up i am going to blow your mind with the discovery researchers here have made that links your body shape to the way your mind works in the meantime in the us james clayton has been uncovering a different way in which ancestry data and dna is now being combined to solve murders the suburbs of fort worth in texas are quiet sleepy i'm here to visit the brother of carla walker a teenager who was abducted and brutally murdered in 1974 over four decades ago i have memories especially of carla sitting out here talking to girlfriends and my sister cindy shared this large room on the second floor and that's where she lived when she was abducted that is correct her younger brother jim remembers the day clearly carla had her pretty dress on and rodney was looking quite nice in a suit and we took pictures in front of the fireplace and off they went we searched for the three days we searched and searched hundreds and hundreds of law enforcement probably near a thousand volunteers were searching everywhere and i remember a news reporter coming to the house and um saying well uh mr mr walker what are your feelings now that they found your daughter did that was the first we heard about it carla was severely beaten in the face brutally raped and her she was choked to death [Music] for over 40 years carla's case remained unsolved one of an estimated 200 000 cold case murders in the u.s murders that up until now we thought would never be solved we had a lot of really wonderful detectives working on it trying to move it forward but you know four decades 40 44 years before it really got moving again the breakthrough came not in carla's case but in a case in 2018 on the west coast of america a stunning investigation that threatens to revolutionize cold case murders across america using ancestry websites the golden state killer wore a ski the golden state killer was a serial murderer and rapist that terrorized california in the late 70s and early 80s [Music] the police had plenty of dna of the killer however it didn't match to any dna profiles in the fbi's database one enterprising officer decided to run the dna found at the murder scenes against dna collected by an ancestry website these sites are usually designed for people to find genetic relatives through dna links but the police realized that if they put the killer's dna into the database they might be able to find the murderer's relatives a crucial clue most ancestry websites don't allow law enforcement checks but a few do the website the police chose to use was a company called jed match so effectively what they're doing is building family trees so you have to build back far enough to reach what they call a most recent common ancestor and then figure out where the trees came together and then and then built forward from there so by doing that you're able to zero in on who the potential suspect is the capture of the golden state killer was a proof of concept moment the technique worked so could it be used to solve carla's case you want to find hits that are within third cousins to make the case tractable so we definitely had some that were in the third cousin range othram was founded shortly after the golden state killer was identified with a mission to solve unsolvable cases the company's ceo david mittelman says the first step in the process is to clean up the dna which is often degraded in carla's case it was more than 40 years old the company then sequences that dna looking at thousands of distinctive markers on the genome and in the traditional forensic dna testing framework like for codas there's about 20 of these positions in the dna that you're measuring and that information can be used to confirm that you were at a crime scene or that someone closely related to you as a sibling parent or child was at a crime scene and that's the extent of what you can do with 20 markers what we do at authrom is we look at tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of markers and and with that information we can detect more distant relationships every time you test for dna you lose a bit of the sample in the process in carla's case there was little of the killer's dna left it was likely this was the last roll of the dice we had to ask ourselves have we seen enough dna that is of this kind of quality and property to where we feel confident that there's a good chance we'll have a positive outcome otherwise we don't want to do it because when you test dna you're you're consuming it and so you're destroying evidence one state sequenced the killer's dna they ran it through several genealogy websites from there they created a family tree of the killer and then began to look for possible suspects the right age male who lived in texas at the time of the murder they developed a theory that the dna found at the scene belonged to a man called glenn mcgirley a man who lived close to carla a man who would previously been a suspect i know that he had had to drive up and down the road in front of this house thousands of times probably had even stopped here they knew who it was but they had to do their due diligence as law enforcement to confirm and that's what they did and about two weeks later i got a phone call we know exactly who it is we're going to be arresting him last month mcgirlie pleaded guilty to the murder of carla walker some people however simply don't believe that ethically this technique should be used worried that opening up people's dna to law enforcement people who aren't known criminals could have worrying consequences genetics isn't just any old tool for law enforcement it's a particular and a potent tool because it's not like a phone number that you just change when you get too many spam calls or even a social security number that you might have reissued if somebody you know takes yours it's a technology that's in its infancy we don't know yet what it will tell us how well it will tell us things about people the big criticism of this technology is around consent so after i get my dna tested i can go on to jed match and i can upload my raw dna files to the website but here's the problem with that i share dna with my relatives and critics argue that once i've uploaded my dna and agree to law enforcement checks i am by association also opting in my entire extended family and using my dna the police can link hundreds perhaps even thousands of my genetic relatives to a crime potentially none of whom have consented to be on a database used by the police i think the the thing about people have to make the mind up in you have two competing priorities here the first priority is you have an absolute right to privacy but on the same token you have a competing priority which is we have a right to not get murdered and raped what amount of privacy are you willing to give up versus getting you know the increased safety in society we hear about serial rape we hear about serial murderers but less prominent are going to be cases that there might be more controversy about whether it's using an immigration context or using it in a less serious crime context we structured our society with suspicion based reasons to intrude on people's privacy because we felt as a community that that was the right thing to do even when it means that occasionally some crimes go unsolved i think it is incredibly hard to say this i don't mean to minimize or be dismissive of the claim but we don't make policies about the civil liberties of our whole society based on the personal feelings of single victims or the needs of single victims [Music] after the arrest apprehension arrest was made i started to feel peace p-e-a-c-e you know i didn't realize for four almost four and a half decades i had been uh geared up for a fight we're not going to go away we're going to find you we're not going away and thank god that day came hello it's time for your weekly tech news roundup it was the week google claimed it's bing's most popular search term while appealing against anti-trust fines from the european union youtube is now removing videos containing vaccine misinformation for all currently approved vaccines not just kovid19 and california has passed a new law to stop workers being fired if they are not meeting productivity targets set by algorithms it's had ears for a long time now it has eyes it's amazon's new robot astro the family-themed robot can be controlled remotely and features a periscope to see in high places however some critics have raised privacy concerns facebook has delayed releasing a version of instagram for children after parents and experts raised safety concerns this comes as recent research has increasingly shown how use of social media can affect the mental health of young people with many under 13s already using instagram and finally as china announces a complete ban on cryptocurrency one hamster is busy raking in profits from its cage mr cox is currently outperforming the s p 500 with a portfolio up by nearly 24 since june the german rodent's crypto rigged office lets him perform exercises that execute trades gives a whole new meaning to wheeling and dealing we've seen the power dna can have in solving crime and the ethical dilemmas around that yet many are willing to give up a little saliva to get to know themselves better dna nudge assesses customers propensity for certain conditions guiding them away from the foods that would also increase their risk if you've got the genes for hypertension then salt is something you should be careful of if you've got the genes for type 2 diabetes saturated fat and sugar are your problem so what we do is we relate to those conditions or those genetic risks to those macronutrients in food time to hand over my dna which i've been assured will be destroyed straight after it's been analyzed then we load that into the cartridge and then we load the cartridge into one of the nudge boxes it looks like a coffee machine an hour later i have my results it looks like i really shouldn't be having salt or much saturated fat danger from fat medium calories medium these aren't actually the results that i expected chris i'm glad you're to hand obviously you don't have the obesity risk but saturated fat and salt are indicators much more of cardiovascular so obviously these are things that you can't see on the surface my data's then loaded onto a pod that can be worn to help track my exercise and shape my shopping habits you can scan the food to see if you can eat them okay i shouldn't have that i can also try it on here which are also salted peanuts but it says that it's fine to have 0.39 grams per serving there 0.6 grams per serving in that so it's almost double as much salt well i wouldn't have expected that here you've got the same brand of peanut butter and just changing from one to the other could apparently save you this much saturated fat over the course of the year although of course this does all depend on how much you're consuming so obviously lifestyle does have a big effect on this what's the percentage balance then do you think between dna and lifestyle i would say it's roughly 30 70 dna is around 30 lifestyles around 70. dna nudge is not the only company in the dna nutrition and fitness space and many post kits home neda garani tried one after reacting to dairy and bread once i did the the test i saw that i am actually lactose intolerant which made sense um and also i i am at a slight increased risk to for celiac disease just that knowledge that there is an increased risk for me uh really helped me push me to that step of reducing the amount of wheat that i eat but neda who's also a research scientist raised red flags about simplified genetic reports it's understandable for the general population but maybe someone in who doesn't really understand genetics may take the results as being having a greater effect than they actually do i took the test myself as well but the diet recommendations contradicted those of dna nudge so a little confused i took a trip to a nutrition genetics lab what do you keep in the fridge it's full of it it's full of saliva dr yanis mavromatis specializes in nutrition genomics here and instead of offering me a coffee decided to test my jeans as to whether i should have one or not you can deposit your sample and just return it back to me [Music] it takes longer than you would think to fill a container with saliva i've already got to get it up to there god the problem is not this part we can do we can do this part quite well the challenge is to find an area that is meaningful and we have a lot of science behind it so there is no consensus as to which dna areas we need to analyze so company a may have their own genes that they believe are the most important ones and company b may have a different set of genes we need to be able to communicate possibilities and probabilities with to the public and that's not always an easy thing to do even when scientists do agree on genes and their impact more data is needed for a full picture genetics can actually be quite meaningful if you combine it with other parameters of the person their individual dietary intake lifestyle physical activity sleep patterns and whatnot if you just use genetics it's not going to work but whilst our dna can't offer every answer at least dr yanis later confirmed that i'm free to drink coffee whilst i'm mull over my need for any diet change or not [Music] i tell you she'd never have given up anyway now back at decode genetics in iceland founder kari steffensen has been looking at a similar and possibly controversial topic how our genes shape our bodies our minds and our personalities i can tell you how we can use genetics to explore and obey the nature of mind his most recent scientific paper has been looking at how that relates to one of the developed world's biggest health problems if there is one condition that the predisposes to more diseases than anything else it is obesity obesity predisposes to heart failure to liver diseases to osteoarthritis to type 2 diabetes it predisposes to an incredible number of all cancer diseases now some people are genetically predisposed to become obese their genetic makeup means that they're just more likely to overeat not all of these people do become obese it's just more likely and of the people who don't have those genes well some of those will also become obese for other reasons so decode set about trying to answer the question which is it that makes these diseases more likely is it obesity itself or is it the genetic tendency for obesity and it turns out that you are not simply cursed by your genes to get ill and that genetic tendency has no impact on these diseases so it is purely the obesity itself like predisposes to a disease and then we ask the question what is it then that is genetic tendency has an impact on which part of our biology is part of our being is being influenced by by this genetic score for obesity and indeed we showed that the greater your genetic tendency to become obesity's the worse you perform on all kinds of tests of cognitive function you verbalize you is less your performance iq is less your trail making test is worse your education is less obesity itself has no impact or cognitive function so you don't become stupid by becoming obese but the genetic aberration that makes you lose control of eating behavior has an impact on many other function of your brain so obesity makes you susceptible to other diseases regardless of your genes but the gene which makes obesity more likely does affect your intelligence the researchers then looked at the data from the other direction and asked does your personality and specifically your ability to solve problems tell you anything about how your physical body might develop and here they found that the better your visual and spatial ability the more likely you are to have the genetic tendency for obesity and all those obesity related diseases you're also less likely to be curious and creative but also less likely to suffer from psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia however if you score higher on verbal ability you'll have less risk of obesity and related diseases you are more likely to be curious and creative but also you'll have a greater risk of schizophrenia and and what fascinates me about this is that the vein in which you're genetically hard-wired to solve problems has an impact on the composition of your body just give me a minute i'm working it out for myself at the moment i hope we all are i know where i am on that or at least i think oh my god wow amazing the secrets that our bodies can hold and that's it for this week's show as ever you can keep up with the team throughout the week on social media find us on youtube instagram facebook and twitter at bbclick and of course we'll be back next week thanks for watching bye [Music] you

Channel: BBC Click

Views: 19,169

Keywords: BBC, BBC Click, BBC News, Click, Technology, Tech, click;, DNA, GENETICS, iceland, decode, murder, cold case, gedmatch, usa, robot, amazon

Id: MJRlkBCwR9s

Length: 24min 30sec (1470 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021