off the beaten path an interview with spencer wells不走寻常路的一次采访中斯宾塞井.pdfVIP

Interview Off the Beaten Path: An Interview with Spencer Wells Jane Gitschier pencer Wells has this geneticist’s Spencer Wells: Well, it was kind of Sdream job. He transits the globe, roundabout. I had done my PhD at collecting DNA samples, Harvard, and like many geneticists in building collaborations, and the late ’80s and early ’90s, I was orchestrating what may be the most working on a model organism, and in extensive and fascinating project on this case, because my advisor was human origins yet, sponsored by one of [Richard] Lewontin, it was Drosophila . the most respected institutions in the I did basic molecular evolution stuff, US—The National Geographic Society. trying to detect selection in protein There, Wells holds the oxymoronically coding regions for an enzyme that was named post of ‘‘Explorer-in- important for flight. I looked at Residence’’ and runs the Genographic variation across species and within Project (/ species and did detailed statistical genographic), whose mission is to analysis. I found no evidence of collect and genotype the Y and selection, but lots of evidence of mitochondrial chromosomes from population structure. And at the end of people the world over in order to track the day I wasn’t terribly interested in male and female lineages, respectively, the population structure of fruit flies, and thereby infer migratory patterns but I had always been interested in throughout human history. human history. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0030044.g001 I was curious to learn how someone So I wanted to apply those methods