a message for everybody,

It’s time to co-ordinate and take action to build important infrastructure for equity in our shared tomorrow.

Right now, the human genome is primarily the European human genome. I’ll explain why this is a big problem.

Today, there exists a heavy ethnic bias in genomes that have been sequenced to date. According to a 2016 study, 81% of 35 million DNA samples were submitted by people of European descent, but the world’s population is only about 15% European.

Although 99.8% of the genome is identical across all members of our species, small differences that define an individual can also drastically impact individual health outcomes. We use genomes to understand history, ancestry, dietary health, genetic illness, mental illness, and in the near future we will use them to generate precision medicine.
We are fortunate to have sequenced such a large amount of human DNA and the benefits for people of European descent that are a direct result of our understanding of the genome are a remarkable human feat that we are thrilled to see accomplished. However, these benefits do not always extend to everyone and threaten to drastically intensify already staggering differences in health outcomes between ethnic groups.

Human population geneticists are vastly underpowered to be able to analyze any non-European population at the depth at which we can and have analyzed the European human genome, simply because we lack equitable representation in available genomic data.

We want to uncover something that reflects the natural bouquet of human complexity. This has potential to lead to good in human genetics, anthropology, history and nutrition. If accomplished, it will have an immense impact on medicine in our near future.

I believe that both the general lack of awareness of the impending problem, as well as the cultural skepticism around genome privacy contribute to our current situation. The lack of trust that exists between underrepresented communities and government institutions further exacerbates the problem. There is a painful and storied history of non-ethical biomedical research and a shocking scarcity of geneticists who are from the underrepresented communities who might be able to bridge the gap.

We want to do what we can to fix this problem before it balloons and/or metastasizes. If we don't diversify the human genome soon, ethnicity-determined differences in health outcomes will drastically expand in the near future.

We don’t need to wait for anyone to do this for us. We can build this from the ground up. We have the ability to pool our resources and do this for ourselves. This is a very ambitious goal. It is not impossible, and we are ready to work.

With love,

Jason Ikpatt
Ph.D Candidate
University of Texas at Austin