Our Common Humanity in the Information Age. Principles and Values for Development

EQUALITY IN GENETIC TERMS
Allan Bradley, President, Welcome Trust Sanger Institute
I am going actually to talk about equality from a perspective of a geneticist and I am 
going to really focus on our heritage, in other words, the genetic information that we 
inherit from our parents and our grandparents indeed a long way back in time from our 
ancestors, and explain how we really have a common humanity. There are no distinct 
races and this, of course, is based on a lot of current information we have been able to 
gather about the human genome.
United Nations is a great place to talk about different peoples, different populations 
around the world. In many cases, it is not so easy to know whether an individual is from 
Africa, Kalahari, or from India.

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72 | Our Common Humanity in the Information Age 
What I really want to communicate is that when we look at individuals, we look at their 
hair colour or skin colour or eye colour, but these are just a very few markers, very few 
indicators of variations that occur in our genome, that we inherit from our ancestors. 
There is a text in Latin that was published about 250 years ago, that had tried to 
categorize humans into different racial groups: Americans, Europeans, Asians and 
Africans, and there are some interesting discriminators. And this is really all non-sense.
Now the scientists have more data: the human genome project has generated a lot of data. 
There is one reference genome that is publicly available and you can look at it. This 
information has been used quite recently to engage in a project that is a half-map project - 
that is the map of differences between individuals in different populations across the 
globe.
This has actually generated a view that actually we have descended from one common 
group of primates and it illustrated that we are much less diverse as individuals than other 
species. Humans have much less variability from one individual to the next, even tough 
we look quite distinct from one another. In fact, if you look at the primates, you can see 
that humans in fact are the least diverse, and as little diverse as gorillas in terms as the 
variability between one individual and the next.
Looking at the variations in different populations across the globe, the key message is 
that the variation with individuals is actually common across people from very, very 
diverse regions separated by tens of thousands of miles from one another. The variations 
within different populations that are particular to one or other geographic region are 
slight. Most of the differences between us are found in all the people, in different 
geographic regions.
Only one gene of the 20,000 or so genes in our genome is very diverse - the most diverse 
gene. One of the genes is represented in most of the people in Africa but as you move 
across into the Far East, into Mongolia for example, another formative gene is found to 
be present. But the thing is that there is a very, very gentle variation across the planet, 
illustrating really that there are no individual genes that define racial groups. So we are 
all descended from one ancestor, we just have a little bit less or more of those particular 
slight variations.
You see more variations in the parts of the globe where people have been living longer, 
while in the regions where people have moved in more recently, because it is more 
difficult to live there, there is less variation than in other parts of the world.

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Chapter IV – Equality and Opportunity | 73 
To sum up, humans actually show very little variations from one to another, although it is 
clear that there is some clear variation from the genome. That variation is distributed 
evenly around the world in different populations, in different geographic regions and 
there are no such things as distinct human races. From a modern genetics point of view, 
knowing about the genome, knowing about the variations between individuals and using 
that information, we can see that individual humans are not distinct from each other no 
matter how they look.