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Hey everybody, it's Doug Collins.
Welcome back to the podcast.
Glad you're here.
Just a minute after the break, we're going to have David Middleman from Othram.
You might remember that name.
He was one of the first podcast guests we had on here talking about DNA evidence and how it can actually identify not just cases you're seeing on the headlines, but cases Going back 40, 50, 60, 70, even 100 years.
Some new updates, some new legislation coming on how we can get some of this stuff funded.
We also get into the 23 and me and ancestry and say, hey, where are you from?
Why do you have 4% coming from the Mediterranean and 40% from Germany?
Well, we're going to talk about that as well.
David's always a great guest.
Fascinating, the stuff that they can determine simply by DNA, the hidden elements in your body that can connect you into solved cases.
A lot of great stuff on this one.
So, be prepared.
Right after the break, it's time to put your thinking hats on.
We got David Middleman from Othram ready to go.
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Well, number one, David, just a lot going on right now, and I'm glad to have you back on the podcast.
David's been with us before.
It's one of the most interesting episodes we ever did early on in our podcast about DNA testing and cold cases, and it's been, I mean, I've had some people follow up, David, on, you know, some TV and also some others from law enforcement wanting to know about this, and we forwarded those along, but I'm glad to have you back on.
How's things been in the last couple years, y'all?
How's the business so far?
Things have been going well.
We early on tried to demonstrate that there was new DNA technology that could be used to generate leads in cases that have gone cold and kind of escaped traditional methods.
And we've moved from just showing case-by-case examples to now scaling this to entire backlogs.
And we're now working throughout the United States at the local, state, and federal level.
That's a great way to be in looking at that.
And I know one of the things that we talked about with Othram is the simple fact that y'all are sort of the cutting edge of this.
I had it described as the Tesla sort of of the world here.
Y'all are the out front.
Y'all putting the infrastructure down.
Everybody's sort of in many ways catching up with you.
But how has it been...
In looking at it, because I want you to be able to share some cases.
I also got a new Carla Walker Act, which just got introduced, John Cornyn did in the Senate.
We want to talk about that in just a little bit.
But go back and just remind people that we're not talking simply about, and if there's any cases you want to bring up here or can bring up, I'd love for you to do that.
We're not talking about just cases that are immediate.
We're talking cases that could be 30, 40 years old, and that DNA can actually exonerate or prove guilt in these cases.
That's right.
So there are countless cases where, and, you know, we've worked cases.
There was a case we recently worked with the Australian Federal Police, skeletal remains that they found off the coast of Australia that had been in the ocean for 95 years.
And we're still able to identify the person.
So there are these cases that involve unidentified victims of violent crimes or cases that involve DNA evidence for people that have perpetrated, you know, sexually violent crimes or homicides.
And these cases have languished because all the leads have been exhausted.
And in spite of the great efforts of law enforcement, there's been no new break in the case.
And you can go back now with newer DNA testing and reevaluate the evidence and look for additional leads.
And what we do at Authorum Is that we're able to work with evidence that otherwise is considered unsuitable.
So we can take evidence that has very little DNA, the quality is not great.
As you noted, it could be very old DNA and still generate really great information that can guide an investigation.
And so that's what we've been doing for all of these cases over the last couple of years.
Well, that's pretty interesting to look at because one of the things that I think when people see this, and you and I talked about this when you were on last time, is everybody has gotten used to the CSIs of the world, the law and order shows where everything's solved in 30 minutes in the courtroom drama.
They have this dramatic 3D imaging coming up.
But it's really just getting back down to the basics of information.
I mean, you don't look at a piece of DNA and all of a sudden it flashes a name there.
It says, no, here's the characteristics.
Here's what we know about this person that you can then give to law enforcement to put them either on a trite or off of a trite that they've been on.
That's right.
The standard way testing is done right now, it's a system called CODIS. It's run by the FBI, and it's based on 20 data points in your DNA. And so that's enough information to index, essentially, folks that have been convicted of a crime.
And if they were to reoffend maybe somewhere else in another state, if those 20 markers are picked up, those 20 data points are picked up at another crime scene, then the CODIS system, which has been in effect since 1994, It can say, hey, the same person essentially was at both crime scenes.
And so that's kind of the state of the art.
What we do is, instead of 20 markers, we're looking at hundreds of thousands of markers, so a lot of data points.
And even if you're not in the CODIS database, perhaps you've committed some crimes, but you've never been caught, or you're the victim of a violent crime, and then why would you be in CODIS? Why would you be in one of these law enforcement databases?
Then we can use the huge number of markers that we get to learn something additional, distant relatives and connections.
And you're right, it doesn't flash a name, but we can essentially work with the data points that we collect and public records And trace back someone's identity and say this person was or was not a contributor to this crime scene.
And it works just as well in finding who committed a crime, who was a victim of a crime, or who should be exonerated or excluded from consideration in a crime.
Yeah, and I think that's an interesting one.
And I want to go back over this because we always get into this.
It is amazing.
And I have talked to some people on what I would have thought would have just loved the idea of your technology.
But yet some of the folks that even work to prove innocence, there's attorneys out there trying to get people off.
They're sort of hesitant because they know that if this DNA gets there, even though right now maybe the police don't have enough to charge or convict, that all of a sudden, You know, there's always that possibility that, you know, look, that was the, you know, that person actually did it and that DNA would actually show up.
So I'm sure you've gotten some pushback in some areas about that.
Well, here's kind of my kind of evolving thought on all this.
You know, I have a strong background in DNA science.
I was new to the forensic community when we started Authram.
And we just wanted to build technology that could kind of help reduce the uncertainty In these investigations, get answers and bring cases to conclusions so they don't take decades to clear.
And here's what I've basically learned from forensics is that the real enemy to criminal justice is uncertainty.
And it doesn't matter if you're a defense attorney or you're a prosecutor.
The problem is this.
Uncertain and sometimes incomplete knowledge of what happened.
You can't ever know for sure what happened, right?
So you've got these pieces of information, facts, and other kinds of observations, and the scientific tools get you some degree of certainty, but nothing's ever certain.
And then you've got to take all that, and whether you're a prosecutor or a defense attorney, you've got to go to court and argue it as if it is a certainty, right?
The prosecutor has to say, beyond a reasonable doubt, this was a person.
And the defense team has to come up with a very clear and confident, certain argument that they're not the person that's responsible.
And so this is where the disconnect happens, is that the information you're collecting from the crime scene is inherently uncertain.
And yet in court, you've got to condense this into a discussion that is based on certainty.
And so what do you do?
And so where this technology benefits everyone, and it's not just the prosecutors or the defense or anyone else, is that We're fighting the uncertainty.
We're trying to get more information so you can be more certain on what evidence actually is probative.
What evidence reveals relationships or contributors that are relevant to the case versus not relevant?
Who would then be exonerated?
Who is likely to be a person of interest?
And that's really important.
We have multiple cases.
I'll tell you one really fast story just to illustrate this.
We had a case of a double homicide in Las Vegas, and this happened at a bar.
And these two folks were, I believe there was two folks that were murdered.
And they don't know who's responsible for the crime.
And when they were processing the crime scene, they found some blood outside on the ground, outside of the bar.
And so they took that evidence.
And they entered it into CODIS, and it didn't match anybody.
But it's remained in CODIS for years as they were looking to see if that person could be a contributor.
Maybe it was someone bleeding after they had committed the crime.
Who knows?
But there was never any certainty on it.
And when we did the DNA testing on this piece of evidence, what we found is that it eventually tied back to an individual who was unrelated to the crime.
They had had their own accident days prior that was documented, and they had bled out on the ground, unrelated and before the homicide happened.
And so here's a scenario where there's evidence that was suggested to be possibly tied to this crime scene that really wasn't relevant.
And it's the certainty that comes with this technology that allows you to say, you know what?
This is the wrong thing to look at.
Let's look elsewhere.
I told you last time about the Carla Walker case in which, you know, Carla, she was a 17-year-old girl in 1974 coming back from a high school dance, and she was pulled out of her car while sitting with her boyfriend.
By a stranger.
This was a story they told.
And later on, assaulted and murdered.
And getting that clear DNA information allowed them to exonerate the boyfriend.
And then more importantly, find the person responsible.
So getting this information is not about trying to tie someone to a crime or anything like that.
It's about Getting certainty so that the investigators don't have to go through so much pain and expense and time to kind of figure out what happened.
They can get to an answer quicker.
And then they can deliver to the prosecutors and then eventually to the defense attorneys a more certain picture of what happened.
And that's only a benefit to criminal justice.
I agree.
Well, speaking of Carla Walker, I know Brendan Belair, who works with you and does government, and I've known him for a long time, and he's a great guy, especially when it comes to the bill side of this.
He's working with a new bill that just got dropped with Carla's name on it, the Carla Walker Act, John Cornyn, Senator from Texas, others.
I know this is gaining some traction also in the House as well.
Some great folks over at Kelly Armstrong and some others that are working on it.
And this provides funding.
Explain right now why that is so important.
It seems like to me in this environment where you're wanting to give the police every tool possible, it seems to always come back to money, doesn't it?
And we're not funding areas like this that could actually help.
Although here in my home state of Georgia, we've seen, I think y'all have helped down here many times, we've seen it in other places across the country, that you're actually able to solve the crimes instead of letting them be out there.
So how is an act like the Carla Walker Act and others that we're seeing across the country helping Yeah, and I'll just point out, we've had a lot of traction in Georgia and love working with all the folks there.
There's been announcement after announcement.
But to answer your question, if you look at the traditional budgets in law enforcement, a lot of the money that's committed in law enforcement is committed to labor, to getting enough officers In a market, I think, that sometimes has a finite amount of labor, but basically funding for labor to increase the workforce, to have more investigators, to get more done.
And I think that that's an important use of funding for law enforcement, but you also need technology.
Technology can make any individual laboring investigator a lot more productive.
And technology usually develops and advances at a speed that's faster than it's funded.
So there is money set aside, for example, through the Debbie Smith Act for conventional STR testing.
But there isn't a lot of funding out there for some of these newer methods.
And so what ends up happening is The methods remain elusive and inaccessible to the agencies, or they've got to try to find creative ways to fund it through other programs that they have that find it appropriate to use those funds, but also understanding those funds have already been mostly allocated to other things.
And so a good example is It's, you know, funding for the Sex Assault Kit Initiative.
There's excellent money there being deployed in an exceptionally great way to work through cases that have an element of sexual violence.
But there may not be funding, whether they allow it or not, at the end of those grants to fund some of this newer stuff if the traditional methods do not work.
And so what I think is revolutionary about The Carla Walker Act and why it has me personally so excited is that this is funding that's being, you know, set aside for the first time, I think, at the federal level for this kind of testing, for what people refer to as forensic genetic genealogy, this kind of testing that can be utilized when CODIS is unsuccessful in identifying someone.
And there's three parts to this act.
And, you know, honestly, it'd be better to have Kristen on our team explain it.
She spends a lot of time interfacing with Brendan and all the folks in the community.
But there are three parts to this act.
One part is funding to enable the use of the new technology, because when the traditional methods do not work and they should be tried first, but when they don't work, you can't leave the case to just sit.
You've got to figure out how to solve it.
And new technology that we've already talked about has already been demonstrated to be effective.
Clearing these cases at pennies on the dollar and in a fraction of the time.
The second part of it is that we have to collect metrics, and so we have to understand the efficacy.
If you're going to try new stuff, we need to understand, is it really cheaper?
Is it more cost-effective?
Is it also quicker?
Are there different variations of this technology?
Are some methods better than others?
Do some have higher success rates?
And so that's the second part is if you're going to spend money to try new things, collect the metrics so you can educate the rest of the community and they can learn from that and adopt the right methods.
And the third part of it is that, you know, We can't, as I said earlier on, you can't just scale the criminal justice system through manual labor.
You need technology.
The third part of the Carla Walker Act allocates funding to modernize and upgrade the infrastructure and equipment at public crime labs.
You don't want one company Or even one public lab to have to service the entire country.
It's not efficient.
And so you want to make sure that as we try this new method, collect metrics on it and learn what the best way to do things are, that you'd want to see that deployed.
And I think that has an appeal to Senator Cornyn.
I think he's definitely been an advocate for DNA science.
And I think for also getting these tools in the hands of all We're good to go.
That's great.
And I think you just hit on something there at the end.
People, we always think of, I think there's this general assumption around the country and everything, that all law enforcements have all these resources, they have all these people, they have all these things.
And frankly, a lot of them don't.
Even state agencies don't have the resources To do the things that we're talking about.
And especially when you get into some counties and like sheriff's departments and things like that, they just a lot of times barely have enough money to buy new cars, much less, you know, trying to do expensive lab equipment that they have to send off.
And having an ability with companies like yours, and especially with y'all leading the way and others in this act, to have that ability to send something in is really an interesting point.
I have a question, and I don't know if we touched on this last time, but I want to, because it came to mind as a question that had came after somebody listened to it.
Taking the technology that you have, and I've been in the military now most of my adult life, 20 plus years, but thinking about things like missing persons, missing in action that have been gone if they find those remains, or take it even up to modern right now.
The tragic situation in Maui, the tragic situation in, you know, even Monica, where you have the earthquakes.
How would, is your technology something that could help identify people like that?
Yeah, I mean- Or confirm, either way?
No, absolutely.
And look, you know, when you have, I'll touch on both topics, but we'll start with the one that's contemporary.
You know, in Maui, when you have a mass disaster event, You know, whether malicious, due to terrorism, or just natural disaster, you're going to have a lot of folks all at once that are unidentified.
And we just talked about how there's limited resources and law enforcement stretched thin.
So a single mass disaster event can just really tip the scales and overload.
The capabilities that are currently available.
And so, again, this is where new technology can shine.
And in a lot of the cases, what's going to happen is there's going to be reference DNA samples.
Someone might say, I'm missing my brother.
And so they'll contribute a DNA swab.
And if they find remains, they can match them back.
But the truth is, there's not always a reference for everyone, and there's not always a close relative.
The way standard DNA testing works is if you don't have a parent, child, or sibling relationship, then you can't even detect the relationship.
If you were my half-brother and you were lost in the Maui disaster, then my reference wouldn't be valuable in finding you.
You've got to be a really close relative.
And so you need these other kinds of technology.
And again, this goes back to reducing uncertainty.
It's not about whether you can eventually figure it out with, you know, countless man hours and years and decades.
There was an article in the BBC that I saw that said it could take years to figure out who all the folks are in Maui.
It shouldn't be that way.
Technology should be deployed right now and it should be used to sort out the situation in weeks.
I think the biggest challenge right now, I think, is they're going to that recovery period in which they're trying to recover the actual forensic evidence and remains.
But once that's done, the technology shouldn't be the long part.
The technology should be the part that brings that certainty quickly, especially to families that are waiting for answers.
So I think this is something, again, as we talk about modernizing and upgrading the capabilities In our country to do DNA analysis, this is one of the reasons is so that we have a readiness plan and we can be prepared the next time there is a mass casualty event.
But pivoting back to the military, as you noted, my understanding is that there's more than 70,000 unidentified still and missing service members from World War II.
And there's more than 10,000 that are missing from the Korean War, Vietnam.
And so there is quite a backlog of folks that are unaccounted for and quite a backlog of remains that have not been associated with a family yet.
And it's also important to make sure those folks find a home.
And so, you know, I can't talk a lot about it now.
So it's one of the things that has been hardest about being at Othram is, you know, in my past life as a DNA scientist, you uncover something interesting and you report it to the world.
As you know, when you work with the Department of Defense or other agencies, you have to roll at their speed.
But suffice to say, we already are working on technology, and I think we have some pretty exciting things in the works that we'll announce maybe in part three of our podcast one day that would be very timely and relevant to naming the unidentified in the war dead.
And so that's something we're actually working on actively.
It's on our radar.
We want to help with And so, yeah, I think both to have the technology to assist the military in kind of reuniting American servicemen to their families and then also being ready in case there is another mass disaster event.
You know, I'll tell you one other quick story.
You know, in Louisiana, And in Mississippi, after hurricane after hurricane, there are a number of scenarios in which even graves have been displaced and remains that belong to people that were known then get surfaced elsewhere.
And they're now, once again, unidentified.
And so we worked on projects there as well.
We have a large project in Mississippi where we have been identifying skeletal remains that have been found.
And one of the remains that we identified actually ended up being someone that was already known.
And she was buried in a cemetery, and a hurricane upended the remains, and some of these remains were not accounted for, and we found them.
And so there's, you know, there's a focus that we talk about when we're introducing the topic, which is, you know, sex assault, homicide, unidentified victims of some kind of violent crime, but you can see that there's a much broader application.
And that's why, in my mind, it justifies federal investment and federal leadership on not just working a case or another case, but on developing the infrastructure.
Another analogy I always use for folks is like, you can power a flashlight with a battery, but how do you power millions of homes?
You need a power grid.
You need infrastructure.
And so what we need is to make sure that we are constantly exploring the best tools and methods and science that can be used to build the most robust power grid for justice.
It's a perfect analogy, and I like the way you look at that.
One of the questions, you brought mention of the hurricanes in Louisiana, Mississippi.
In Georgia, about 30, it's been about 25 years ago now, almost 30 years ago, we had massive flooding in South Georgia.
It came after a hurricane came through, and the rivers in South Georgia in particular flooded, and we had coffins floating.
I mean, they went through, and these were floating Miles from where they were put into bed.
And so actually one of the things Georgia did was actually pass a law after that, that every casket had to have a little tube that had the identification information was who was in the actual casket because they went through that same process.
Where did this casket come from?
Nobody knew where it was from.
But now with technologies like yours, that can help out tremendously.
Let's turn real quickly to the other aspect of this, and that is, and I want to touch on this every time because people always bring it up, privacy aspects.
Where do you get your data?
Because you're not allowed to test to code this, correct?
No, we don't connect to CODIS. We generate an incompatible profile that would not be in any way at all connected to CODIS. So, like, for people, and this is something, when you say public databases, and I think, you know, just for everybody to be out there, where this would be, you're talking more like the commercialized, you know, where people take data, 23andMe, all these kind of things.
You're not talking about, like, military DNA, CODIS records, those kinds, which are private records that are not available to...
The public, correct?
It would help to kind of break this down.
So you've got law enforcement resources, and that could be, you know, these military records and CODIS. Those are operated, you know, CODIS is operated through the Bureau, and there's a process at which you can access, and you can't be a private company to access CODIS. That's done through law enforcement.
And through a bunch of regulatory processes.
The second bucket you mentioned is like consumer databases, like 23andMe and Ancestry.
And these are consumer companies that do not work with any law enforcement or author or anyone for that matter.
For example, if you tested at Ancestry and I tested at 23andMe, we can't compare if we're related.
And maybe you're my half-brother, like we talked about earlier.
Earlier, but we'll never know because the databases don't even talk to each other.
So they don't work with each other.
They don't work with law enforcement.
They don't work with anyone.
If you want to know about something related to yourself in 23andMe, you need to test to 23andMe.
That very fact that the databases don't talk together is actually what spawned about, I guess, maybe a little over 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago.
These third party databases.
And so what happened is, you know, I may be a genealogist learning about my history on 23andMe.
You're learning about your history on Ancestry.
And we really want to know if we're connected because it might allow us to join our research together.
So people started creating third party resources.
And these third-party resources allow you to download your data that you got from one of these consumer companies and then upload them to this new database.
And the new database allows you to do direct comparisons.
And then for the first time, I can see how related I am to you.
Now, what's happened since the advent and usage of this data in law enforcement is that people have the option now to opt in.
There's multiple models.
There's a model for opt-in, there's a model for opt-out, but the bottom line is There are ways that you can choose to include or exclude your data in a law enforcement search.
So you might say, I'm okay with having my data in this database because I want to find extra relatives, but I don't want to work with law enforcement.
Or you might say, I am happy to work with law enforcement And it'd be great if it could be used to help catch a criminal or identify a victim of a crime.
And so it is neither the military or law enforcement databases or commercial databases like 23andMe or Ancestry that are being utilized in these investigations.
It's databases that have the capacity to consent end users.
And some people are excited about doing it.
They want to do it.
Some people are not excited about it.
Some people are missing a loved one and they want to put their data in in hopes that they'll find that loved one.
And they're okay with also assisting others in their cases.
So everyone's got their own reason for why they want to or not want to use it.
But when we do an investigation at Author, we're working with a subset of profiles that have been consented for law enforcement use.
So, and I understand exactly what you're saying and going to do, but so, and it's not going to happen, but if just per se, to let people understand this, if all of a sudden you had access, either through contract or however you want to do it, through to all of the 23andMe, all of Ancestry, Your work could probably get even better.
Is that a good interpretation?
Or would it matter?
No, of course it matters.
A good way to think about this is that you've got one of those puzzles that you buy for your kids with the 1,000 pieces.
Or if you want to keep them really busy, you buy the 10,000 pieces.
And so you can think of...
I'm not good at puzzles.
But you can imagine that the family tree, and we're all connected in some way, right?
We're all human.
And then beyond that, we descend from Groups of ancestral families.
And so, you know, you and I are probably not half brothers, like I've been joking, but we're probably cousins of some sort, maybe a very distant cousin, but we're all related to each other.
So you could imagine...
In the South, we're related.
So, you know, that's the way it goes.
In the South, we're all related.
So you can imagine in one of these puzzles, each one of these pieces in the puzzle is somebody.
And if you've got all the puzzle pieces, you can put together a good idea of how everyone's connected and who's who.
And so the best way to think about this is when you work with a small number of opted-in profiles, then it's like having just a few of the puzzle pieces known and the rest is just kind of sitting in a pile.
If you have something like 23andMe, or let's say tomorrow they decided they wanted to pursue law enforcement investigations, then yeah, you'd have a lot more information.
So the starting point for building the puzzle would be a lot more on certain pieces.
And so it definitely helps.
And so we don't want anyone to kind of go out of their comfort zone, but we definitely advocate for folks that take an interest in this kind of work.
If they feel comfortable, then yeah, we definitely recommend them to include their data because including the data is what makes the process more inclusive of more folks, you know, from more areas and more backgrounds.
And so the more clues we have when we start, the more likely we can get to an answer.
And, you know, I told you earlier also interesting is, you know, a lot of folks are wanting, we noticed, want to help just because they're missing someone in their family.
I think I told you last time on the podcast about a girl.
She was murdered by her boyfriend, and I chopped her up and stuck her in some suitcases.
This was in Pennsylvania and dumped her off.
When we were able to build a profile, there was really no investigative work that had to be done.
There was a perfect match to a nephew.
And it turns out the nephew grew up with his dad telling him stories about how he had a sister that vanished.
And he put his DNA into the database because he wanted to find his missing aunt.
And so this is a very simple example of how one person that wanted to find their loved one, they were able to get an answer because they put their data in.
He consented.
And when we did our search, he popped up immediately.
And when you've got the nephew of unidentified remains, then there's not a lot of investigative work.
It was law enforcement giving him a call, hearing the story about his dad who was missing a sister, and then a few more conversations.
The next thing you know, they identified the girl, and amazingly enough, they shortly after figured out who killed her.
I believe they suspect her boyfriend at the time did, and he's making his way through the court system now.
Oh, wow.
Real quick, because you got me interested in something, and again, Othram does a great job, folks.
You're listening to the podcast today.
Second time we've had David on, we'll have him on again, because this is just a growing field in what's happening.
But in my sort of fun question, but serious question at the same time, because we talked about these other Ancestry products, and I mentioned that name, not specifically the name, but the others that we've talked about today.
But they'll send you back this generic kind of, you got 40% Well,
if you're asking, you know, what all those numbers mean, um, What happens is that, you know, maybe it's easier to tell you how those numbers are created.
And I'll try to...
Yeah, that'd be great.
I mean, I think it's just interesting for people to know how you, you know, because that's the first input for people to understand DNA testing.
And then if we got them to understand what this means, we can now have them to understand how you work.
Well, the best way to think about it is kind of the non-boring explanation is that when they started building these tools, and it's called biogeographical ancestry, so biogeographical ancestry analysis, and so you're trying to figure out the biogeographical origins, bio because there's DNA, geography because there's location, the biogeographical origins of somebody, where are their ancestors from?
The way people accomplish this is they've, over the years, done systematic DNA testing of many, many people, as you know.
And they ask people to self-report if they're multi-generationally from the same place.
So someone might say, you know, I was born in Germany.
And my mom and dad were born in Germany and their parents were born in Germany and so on.
And so there are some folks that have like a long family lineage of having been from one place.
And so those become what people call reference data points.
And if you take a bunch of those people that self-report the same thing over and over again, then that becomes a reference population.
So what these companies have done is over the years, and they refine these tools, and that's why you always see those updates and your percentages change every now and then.
They're building larger and larger panels composed of people that self-report that their family ancestry is all from one place or all one kind of ancestry.
So now we have a bunch of people that are from Germany and a bunch of people that are from England and a bunch of people that are from somewhere else.
The next thing that happens is they take a new DNA profile.
Maybe they take yours.
And what they do is they use a technique.
It's called principle component analysis.
And what they basically do is it's like a clustering method.
They take all of your DNA data points and they basically say, can you subdivide all of Doug's DNA data points and cluster them such that they most closely pair with the data points of reference populations?
And maybe 50% of your markers cluster really well with people that report German ancestry for generation after generation.
And so the algorithm will say, I think Doug is 50% German.
And then, you know, 20% of your markers cluster with people that self-report that they're from, you know, from England.
And so then it'll say, well, 20% of your ancestry is perhaps British.
And that's kind of how they develop those percentages.
And the percentages depend a little bit on the method.
I kind of oversimplified.
There's different methods people use and variations of methods to make those percentages.
And it also depends on the populations.
So you'll see a company like Ancestry.com, they have so many reference populations, and they can tell you if you're American, but multi-generational from South Carolina, that kind of area.
I mean, they get really specific.
I don't know how specific you can get.
I've never seen the underlying data.
But there are crude methods that'll say, here's the quadrants of the world that you're from.
And then there's things like what I saw the last time I looked at my personal DNA profile and it really tries to tie you to all sorts of different areas.
And so those are based on the ability to develop these reference populations of folks that have self-reported ancestry of one type.
And so anyways, long story short, when you see the percentage breakdown, the large percentages basically reflect The chunks of DNA information that you may have inherited from ancestors that came from a certain geographical location in history.
The smaller percentages become less certain.
You'll see that you might be 2% something.
It could be just statistical noise.
I mean, these algorithms are designed to cluster and associate all your markers somewhere.
And so if you're looking for somewhere to put a marker, you may stick it somewhere.
But that's kind of broad strokes of how the method works.
And if you're asking how that might pertain In an investigation, you could imagine, let's say you have these, you know, skeletal remains that are found.
Right now, people use anthropological methods.
You know, there's these methods that have been developed.
They use tens of markers on the skull and other bones, and they're like, this looks like it was a male, you know, that has, you know, Northern European ancestry and probably was, you know, 20 to 40 years old.
So those estimations are based on analysis of the skeleton.
But genetics, I think, brings a really powerful insight here, unrelated to what we do, in that genetics can give you a lot more precise measures because of the hundreds of thousands of markers that are utilized.
They give you a more precise measure of someone's historical origins.
So I think that it's largely kind of Personal value to you if you want to learn about your ancestry, maybe you're looking to see where your family's from, but it can be really instrumental in unidentified remains cases.
Any clue can be very valuable in helping figure out who someone is.
The truth is, sometimes these more basic methods based on anthropological analysis, they don't work as well.
We had a case out of Virginia It was a girl.
I believe she was shot in the head.
So her skull was not even intact.
It was damaged to the skull, making the assessment of ancestry very hard.
And her remains were found in 2001. The anthropologist noted that this was likely an African-American girl from 2001 or recent time.
And once we did the DNA testing and then actually worked the case with law enforcement, we discovered that it was a girl that was murdered in 1975 and she was from France.
She had no African ancestry at all.
So these measures are kind of fun to play with in your family, but they can be really informative in trying to take a victim and reconnect them to an identity and to their family.
That's why all this is so fascinating, Dave Middleman, Othram.
You're amazing.
The work you're doing is amazing.
All you got to do is look at the front page of the headlines.
You're probably behind it somewhere, especially if you're solving these kind of cases and getting these things out there.
Glad to always have you on Carla Walker Act coming through Congress.
Hopefully we'll see some good results on that.
Also in your states, Folks, if you're in a state that you want to encourage maybe your state lawmakers to help your police, help their identification, help their forensics, look, there's a lot of ways to do this.
Othram's out there at the front of working with this, but this is things that actually help us solve cases.