How your family tree can dig up genetic secrets

Tracing back family trees and genetic histories can be quite an experience. Some of us have probably fantasized about being related to some ancient royalty or well-known personality. Or maybe you wondered where you got that blazing red hair but not your cousin’s true-blue eyes.

I had quite a small discovery when my mother drew our family tree some years back. We found distant relations to the wife of a national hero, and though it sounds shallow, that’s become a source of family pride. Ha-ha, indulge me. But other than this, and a possibility that we may have come from some Portuguese immigrant, nothing really pops up about my past.

At least nothing quite like the family history of Sir Paul Maxime Nurse, the noted biochemist, Nobel Laureate, Knight Bachelor and president of Rockefeller University in NYC.

In this humorous storytelling, Paul Nurse recounts how he discovered the source of his exceptional talents. Nurse begins by saying he’s always felt like the oddball of the family. He was the only one to pursue academic excellence while the rest of his family had left school at 15.

The mystery started to unravel with his daughter’s school project – tracing the family tree and his mother’s ashen-face confession that she and Nurse’s father were born out of wedlock. So there was no way to trace back Nurse’s lineage.

But the shock of his life came when Nurse was 58 years old, at the height of his career, and rejected for a US Green Card. He dug up a secret that his family has kept from him for half a century.

Here is the full story as told by Paul Nurse at the World Science Festival on June 12.

Image: Newscom/ HT: The Scientist