Archbishop Tutu's DNA Project Reveals Exciting News

GlobalFutures| Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a leader in the Anglican (Episcopal Church in America) and member of The Elders is involved in a scientific research project that indexes his DNA. Archbishop Tutu has shed some blood for a good cause, a project that will hopefully extend a medical benefit to the southern African population, says Stephan C. Schuster of The Pennsylvania State University, one of the leaders of the sequencing project.

The results from Archbishop Tutu and four Bushmen who also part of the project are published in the Feb 18 issue of Nature. The results are exciting and perhaps amazing.

Previous studies have shown that Africa, from where humans set out to populate the rest of the world tens of thousands of years ago, harbors populations with the most genetic diversity, and this sequencing project supplies additional evidence for this consensus. “If you take two Bushmen groups that might live in walking distance to one another, they might have dramatically different languages, and we found them to be as genetically different as a European to a Chinese,” Schuster notes. Read on at Scientific American: Archbishop Tutu Gets Sequenced — And Finds a Surprise in His Ancestry.