July 21, 2022 • 49 mins
What makes you... well, you? It's a question humanity has wrestled with since the dawn of recorded history all the way to the modern day. In today's special episode in partnership with 23andMe, Ben, Noel and Max dive into the history of genetic research from its ancient predecessors to great breakthroughs of the recent past, as well as learning a bit about their own genetic history along the way.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Uh. Let's give a shout
out to our one and only the man the myth
Legend super producer, Mr Max Williams, and they called me
ben joined as always with Mr Noel Brown. Uh Noel.
We like like most people, we like to think of
(00:49):
ourselves as fairly distinct here in the in the mass
of humanity. Right. Oh yeah, we're special boys. Here we go,
there we go. We uh. We, like many other people
throughout ancient history to the modern day, have spent a
lot of time wondering where we came from, wondering about
(01:10):
our origins as individuals. And like many people, you know,
we we know a little bit about our ancestry. We
don't know everything, however, and that's why we were interested
to team up with twenty three and me. Nowadays, you know,
it's easier than ever to learn about your past through
(01:32):
the power of genetic testing, and Nola have to ask
and Max you as well. Growing up, did you, guys
ever have a member of your family who was like
obsessed with their genealogy? I didn't really personally, and in fact,
it wasn't until uh no spoilers yet, but um that
I took the twenty three and me a test that
I really had much sense of my heritage at all.
(01:54):
So this was super eye opening and fascinating process for me. Um.
But no, I definitely am aware of folks that take
that very seriously and kind of consider themselves like armchair
you know, genealogists or anthropologists or what have you. But
there was really nobody in my family that that much
mentioned that when I was growing up. How about you, guys. Yeah,
I actually have a pretty extensive story about this one.
(02:15):
It's uh so my paternal grandfather, so my great grandfather
and my dad's side of the family, he was adopted
in the early nineteen hundreds and they lost all his
adoption papers. So there was really like no idea where
that's tide of my family came from. It's just been
kind of things. So my aunt has been spending with
the last no joke, like thirty plus years just trying
to dig up stuff, and like she recently did a
(02:37):
test like this and it's got like some more answers,
but it's been up it's been like a kind of
like a lifelong pursuit of hers right there. Wow, yeah,
I had I had something similar because of the controversy
surrounding my paternal line, the Malungeon side of my family.
Uh So there were times where people were actively hiding there. Um,
(02:57):
I guess they're perceived membership of that group and as
a result, they're hiding some of their genealogy. But of course,
as time went on, people became less hesitant, you know
about acknowledging the past and the truth, and now here
in it is easier than ever for people to, as
(03:18):
we said, learn more about what led to you being
here a fellow ridiculous historian listening to this show today.
But today's question, how did the world changing science of
genetic testing and our concepts of DNA? How did they
evolve from the work of ancient philosophers and Augustinian friars
(03:39):
all the way to these cutting edge innovations. In today's show,
we're going to unravel some of the history of genetic research,
and along the way we might share some of our
own personal experiences. Because spoiler, folks, Noel and I each
took some tests with twenty three and me. Uh and
Noel I believe that this was your second test with
(04:02):
the group. Yeah, it was, uh, and let me tell
you a lot of things have changed for the better.
It was probably a couple of years ago that I
took the test previously and the one that we took
for this episode. This partnership just had way more granular information,
including stuff about potential health risks, markers that are contained
you know, within my genetic code or genetic code, your
(04:25):
genetic code um, that can give you indications as to
whether you're predisposed to certain medical conditions. So it was
very very illuminating me. The last one was great too,
but it really feels like they've added a lot more
bang for the buck and a lot more features, a
lot more results that are very meaningful, not to mention, um,
I believe Ben, you and I have some interesting kind
of shared results that we will also say for the end. Yes, yes,
(04:48):
you might be surprised by how this sort of technology
can connect you with people you never imagined yourself connected with.
But let's let's start there, right What makes you? Okay,
So here's the lay of the last People were asking
what makes me me? What makes you you? Well? Before
(05:09):
the concept of microscopes well before DNA was even a thing.
The history of this, like the the ancestry of ancestry
research and d NA starts all the way back in
like five thousand b c e which I think might
surprise a lot of people, Oh for sure. And I mean,
(05:29):
you know, it was really more of a philosophical question
for a long long time. I mean, there was certainly
observations made towards various traits and things that family members possessed,
but the whole idea of like who who am I,
where do I connect in the universe, and you know,
life and all of that was much more of a
of a philosophical question. But you're right then as early
(05:52):
as five thousand b c. E UM, humans were practicing
something called selective breeding. So there was an acknowledgment of, Okay,
how do we isolate these traits and figure out how
to express them, whether it be livestock or or crops
or what have you, or even you know, humans. There
was a certain amount of selective breeding that came with,
(06:14):
like in reading, uh, and you know the idea of
maintaining a bloodline. And as we know that, there were
some pretty catastrophic consequences to those um activities, but you know,
their head was kind of in the right place. They
just really didn't quite know what they were doing, but
they definitely did when it came to the livestock and
the crops to make more robust crops and more hearty livestock. Yeah, yeah,
(06:39):
a k A. The reason you have things like corn,
you know what I mean, the reason you have domesticated
crops as they're called. And there's something really interesting about that.
I can't remember who I was speaking to, but we
were talking about the old question what is the most
successful form of life on the planet. And you know
(06:59):
a lot of people would just say humans. But if
you think about it, the idea of wheat being domesticated
or corn being domesticated, it sounds like humans won that game.
But if you look at it from the perspective of
the plant, they kind of won because now they're spread
across the planet. I thought that was kind of trippy. Yeah, totally.
(07:21):
I actually heard an interview with an entomologist who specifically
um focuses on flies. UM and flies. He believes we're
one of the most successful species in the history of
the world because of their you know, ability to kind
of bob and weave and and and dodge things and
just you know, they're one of the most successful aerialists
(07:42):
on the planet. And also they essentially feed on dead stuff,
which there's always gonna be plenty of. Also, I believe
they've been around, uh much longer than humans. So while
we may be successful and good at, like, you know,
making stuff and figuring things out, it's all kind of
self serving and at the end of the day, we're
only really a blip in the historical record. Oh yeah,
(08:04):
we're like a fad to crocodiles, you know what I mean,
We're like POGs to crocodiles and alligators. But but you
were you a pug guy? Were you a pargman? No?
I had some POGs, but I wouldn't say I was
a parkman. I just I had enough to play the game.
And then I didn't get super into the game. I
actually like the art more. That's right. I barely understood
(08:27):
how the game was playing. I just know there were
slammers and they were the POGs, and I mean it
was kind of like Tiddley winks you want other people's
POGs by slamming them in a stack. I don't know
it doesn't matter. We're not here to talk about pole.
We are here to talk about is pan genesis. Yes,
let's talk about a little bit about the great philosophers
you mentioned earlier, So let's go to Aristotle. Aristotle is
(08:51):
one of the first people on record who said, you
know what, I wonder if traits acquired throughout an organism
lifetime can be transmitted to their offspring. Essentially, and not
to be too to gruesome here, folks, but essentially, the
question is if I took five people and I cut
(09:14):
off a different finger on each one of their right hands,
would their children also be missing the same finger when
they were born because that trait was acquired during that
person's unfortunate lifetime. He's kind of added to this guessing
game with this theory, the one you just mentioned pan genesis,
(09:34):
which sort of describes how these traits could be passed
on through particles called gimus, which sort of encapsulated the
traits and then allowed them to be transmitted to reproductive cells.
And then he also thought about what he called the
form giving principle, and a lot of the stuff you're
(09:56):
gonna hear from these ancient thinkers, by the way, is
in principle, powle not super duper far off. Yeah, he
believed in something called the form giving principle that was
a property of an organism that was able to be
transmitted through bodily fluid, specifically semen, which he believed was
kind of like blood, but a more pure form of
(10:19):
the stuff. And also we believed that the mother's minstrel
blood was another one of these uh, form giving fluids.
He believed that this interacted in the womb to direct
uh the early development of an organism. M hmmm. So
again you can you can see where uh, someone working
(10:39):
with the technology at the time could have reasonably started
making these suppositions. But Pythagoras, Aristotle, they weren't the only
folks who were thinking through this. Hippocrates and Epicurus also
had their own takes on the idea of heredity. Heredity
is just the passing on of traits from parents to offspring,
(11:01):
whether that's through sexual reproduction or through a sexual reproduction.
And it's weird because hippocrates theory is sort of is
kind of similar to Darwin's later ideas that involved hereditary
material collecting from throughout the body. But again, one thing
(11:21):
we wanna be careful of here is we want to
avoid just focusing on the ancient Western philosophers, because people
in India and China we're thinking about this too. That's right.
And the Sharaka Samita that was written or at least
a distributed around the three ancient Indian medical writers observe
(11:44):
the characteristics of the child were determined by what they
saw is four distinct factors, the first being those from
the mother's reproductive material, second from the father's sperm, and
the third from the diet of the pregnant mother. Uh,
and the fourth being the accompanying the soul. So while
there were some of these do feel pretty connected to
(12:05):
modern scientific understanding of reproduction, that fourth one kind of
imparts a more religious characteristic as well. Yeah. Yeah, one
through three you cannot along home going, okay, uh huh sure.
And then number four is where we see just how
how inextricably intertwined, Uh, the ideas of religion were with
(12:27):
the ideas of medicine. You know, it's funny, but the
idea of things becoming attached to the soul as it
enters the fetus, what does that reminds you of? Uh?
Anybody scientology? I was thinking cloud Atlas forincarnation and but yeah,
well those are all kind of in the same wheelhouse.
But I mean, that's the idea of like negative things
(12:50):
becoming attached to the soul from birth to carry the
follow you along for the rest of your life and
cause you to you to develop all kinds of problems.
That that just reminds me of that that concept within psychology,
not that l Ron Hubbard was anything but original, you know. Anyhow,
I walked around the corner for that for that slight
(13:10):
this But let's jump around in time. No, like when
you hear this, when you thought about this episode right
as you tuned in, you were probably thinking of Charles
Darwin and his famous eighteen fifty nine banger on the
Origin of Species full title on the Origin of Species
by means of natural selection or the preservation of favorite
(13:30):
races and the Struggle for life. We'll get to that
in a second. Darwin is a recurring guest on our show.
But if we're talking about genetic research and we're talking
about the full scope of this, you can kind of
divide it into two broad eras. All the stuff before
a guy named Gregor, Johann Mendel and all this stuff
(13:53):
after this Friar. Yeah, that's right. Modern genetics really started
with the work of this man who was an Augustinian Friar.
He was really into the idea of propagating pea plants,
like you know, like English little green peas. When he
published his work specifically on the reproductive qualities of these
(14:16):
little fellas in eighteen sixty six, he established the theory
of Mandelian inheritance um. He became the first person to
lay out a scientific and mathematically founded uh science of genetics,
even before it was even called that. And this is legit.
You can find it in his Encyclopedia Britannica Entrigue, which
(14:40):
personally I thought did a good job of breaking it
down in an understandable way. So let's get in the
nuts and bolts. Strap in for some math. Don't worry,
we're gonna, We're gonna. We'll be right there with you.
Try to make it easy, okay, Matt, mass me up. Ben,
let's math up. So the reason Mindel wants to study
(15:01):
the p plant, the edible p or Pissum sativum, is
because it had a lot of distinct varieties. It was
easy to control, you know, like easy to grow, but
then also easy to control how the plants pollinate. And
there was a high proportion of successful seed germin nations,
(15:22):
which means, you know, it was UH. If you were
making something new or trying to attract something, you had
a higher than average likelihood of that plant actually growing
to pass the seed stage. So he tested UH for
for about two years, from eighteen fifty four to fifty six.
He tested thirty four different varieties for what he called
(15:42):
the constancy of their traits. And when he wanted to
see how these things transmitted, he chose seven traits that
he thought were expressed in a distinctive manner. And it's
stuff that's like a lot of it's stuff that's visually
apparent to him. So like tall plants and short plants.
What colors are their seeds? Green or yellow? So he
(16:06):
referred to these kind of alternate versions UM as contrasted characters. UH.
He also referred to them as character pairs UM. And
you know, this is very similar to what we talked
about in ancient times, the idea of kind of crossbreeding
different things to create a strengthened single trait. He would
(16:30):
cross varieties that were the same except for one trait.
So for example, tall might be crossed with short um
and then there would become a generation of hybrids, which
he referred to as F one. That generation would display
the character of one variety but not that of the other. Uh.
And he believed, or at least using terms that he developed,
(16:52):
one of the characters was dominant and the other one
was recessive. Just this, this checks out what we know
today right in terms of like eye color and all stuff.
We get more into that in a bit, but he
was definitely barking up the right genetic tree. So in
the offspring that he raised from all of these crossed hybrids,
(17:12):
which he referred to as second generation or F two,
he would see the recessive trade appearing. And then he
noted that entirely third of them had the original heritable traits,
while two thirds were of that hybrid arrangements you know,
or rather you know, presented the more of the hybrid
kind of qualities. So he yeah, maybe, man, why don't
(17:35):
you you you kind of did the research on the
math here, So why don't you take us home here
with like kind of the the solution. Oh for sure.
So this goes to uh, Gregor's major discovery. He says, Look,
after I've read these successive generations of plants, just as
you described, Noel, I'm seeing by the time I get
(17:56):
to the descendants of the dominant group, I can rewrite
that three to one ratio, you know, that kind of
dominant to recessive appearance ratio. I can rewrite it to
one to two to one. And by this we mean
fifty of that second generation we're true breeding. Fifty percent
we're still hybrid in a in a way, he was.
(18:18):
He finally he was arriving at an understanding what we
call dominant and recessive genes today. This major discovery probably
wouldn't have been made by his predecessors because they didn't
grow statistically significant populations of testing material, which is a
very cold way to say living things. And they didn't
(18:39):
follow the individual characters or characteristics separately to establish their
relationships to each other overall. So this is big, big stuff, right,
This is world changing stuff. He publishes it, and everyone
ignores him. Everyone sort of ignores him. It comes out
in like not very well known scientific journal. Most of
(19:02):
the scientific community at large isn't aware of it. And
if you were talking about heredity at this time, you
are much more likely to be in a slaughter or
a cafe talking about Darwin's hot button theory of evolution
by natural selection. And uh. He also Darwin, we should say,
wasn't super perfect aside from his culinary taste, which we're ambitious.
(19:25):
Check out weird historical flexes uh to learn more. He
uh he had a theory that not all his theories
widely accepted his own theory of heredity, which she had
called pangenesis as well, and just didn't really didn't really fly. Uh.
So to find the next part of the story, we
have to fast forward to eighteen three. Let's just remember that,
(19:47):
I mean, reading through this now and talking about this
now with so many echoes of what we know to
have been determined to be true and accurate. So it's
just like, well, why wouldn't people play attention to this?
But at the time it was like very out there right,
like it would not have been connecting with like the
sort of traditional scientific thought of the time. And it's
(20:07):
just one guy kind of like breeding pea plants and
and espousing these kind of like whackado notions of traits
and qualities in offspring, So would not have been like
an easy cell necessarily which you write them if we
pressed the fast forward butt into eight three, who got
a man named August Weissman who was an evolutionary biologist
(20:30):
from Germany who was making waves by breeding mice after
chopping off their tails like three blind mice style. But
presumably you know, for science, for science a little yeah, yeah,
he uh. He did this for reasons, as he assured
them mice police. Mainly, even though this sounds ghoulish, there
(20:54):
there was something important to it. He wanted to disprove
this popular idea of lamark ism, the concept, like we said,
similar to the ancient philosophy concept that physical characteristics of
apparent organism can be carried through to the offspring. So
(21:15):
when mice with amputated tales gave birth to mice with
absolutely normal tales, they proved a crucial point. So we
don't the names of those mice are lost to history,
but thank you now we we do know a very
interesting field that's more in the realm of psychology today. Epigenetics,
the idea that trauma can be um you know, carried
(21:36):
or passed down through generations. So in theory, the trauma
of having their tails chopped off could have been you know,
carried to their offspring. Yeah. That's a great point, man,
because epigenetics is the study of the way gene expression
has changed, Like what is more active in your genetic
code instead of like your actual genes getting altered. There's
(22:00):
a great study about starvation and World War Two that
goes to this epic. Genetics is like still very much
the forefront of genetic science today. Yeah, that is a
good point. Maybe the mice were traumatized, certainly possible. Um,
but let's get into some more breakthroughs. Here's some names
that might ring a bell. Watson and Crick. I think
there's like a biopic about these guys. Think Jeff Goldblum
(22:22):
played Watson or Creg. I can't remember which, Gil played
both of them. Maybe certainly possible. Yeah, we're like, yeah,
Daniel de Lewis played every character in the whole movie. Um,
but yeah, they are you know those names like, leave
it if you don't know exactly what they did, because
they are, uh, the American biologists that are largely created well,
(22:43):
they are credited with discovering DNA in the nineteen fifties,
but you know, as is off of the case, with science,
though timing is everything. Who's first to market with something
is not necessarily the same as like who actually discovered
the things. So DNA was in fact first identified in
late eighteen sixties eighteen sixty nine to be precise, by
a Swiss chemist named Friedrich Mascher. But again, Watson and
(23:08):
Crick are the names that you probably think of when
you think of of d N A and and DNA
sequencing and all of that. Also, to jump in here
real quick, the name of it is the Race for
the Double Helix, who aired on September four seven aired
So it was a TV movie. Yeah, and it had
Jeff Goldbloom as Jim Wasson, Tim Pickett Smith as France Crick,
(23:32):
Alan Howard as Maurice Wilkins, and Juliet Stevenson as Rosalind Franklin.
Some names pop up here in a little yes hit
the sound of cue right now? Awesome, Thanks Max, and
(23:57):
thanks Matt Frederick. So here's the thing. Those guys are
super famous, and rightly so, but there's more to their story.
A lot of people, probably ourselves included, at some point,
have made the mistake and thought those guys discovered DNA
by themselves in the nineteen fifties. This is not the
(24:18):
case in reality. Instead, DNA was first identified all the
way back in the late eighteen sixties and eighteen sixty
nine by a Swiss chemist named Friedrich Meischer. He wanted
to figure out what made white blood cells. White blood cells,
so you know, those that are part of the body
immune system, and his main source of those cells was
(24:43):
kind of kind of growdy, kind of gnarly. He got
most of these white blood cells for his research from
pus coded bandages that he took from a clinic. So, um,
you can't do that today. That is wild plus coded
bandages as a metal band if I ever heard one,
or at the very least a song, Yeah, that's pretty
(25:07):
pretty gross. Uh So, he noticed that when you added
acid to a solution of those cells, that a substance
separated out from the solution, and that substance was able
to be dissolved again in an alkali solution. So in
investigating that solution, he discovered that it had some pretty
unusual properties. It was different from other proteins that he'd
(25:30):
looked into before that he was you know, much more
familiar with through his past research. And my share called
this substance nucleon because he believed that it had like
you know, leached out from the nucleus of the cell um,
which you know, at this point that was something that
people understood, the nucleus of the seller, just the makeup
(25:53):
of the atom and the cell, etcetera. So Masha had
discovered essentially the basis for or for all of life,
the molecular basis DNA. And then he decided, how how
am I going to figure out how to pull this
out in its purest form? Yeah, and he you know,
he didn't know that exactly what he had discovered, but
(26:15):
he discovered it. And then in the decades after his discovery,
we see this cavalcade of breakthroughs by many other researchers,
other scientists, people like Phoebus Levine and Irwin Chargeth carry
out these research efforts to learn more about the DNA molecule,
including its primary chemical components and the ways those components
(26:39):
work together. We actually get Philouette amalogy nerds the name
DNA from a biochemist named Albrick Coastal In one good
old Albrick, who i'll call Al, identified nucleon as a
nuclear Yeah. Yeah, if he'll be my bodyguard. So he
(27:00):
provided the present chemical name dexo ribo nucleic acid DNA,
and then he also went on for extra credit to
isolate the five nucleotide bases that are the building blocks
of DNA and are in a First we have at anine,
then we have a sias scene, then we have guanine, finemine,
(27:25):
and your a scill Yeah, not to do much too
much p humor, but your a sill feels like you
get ripped off, like, uh, you know, a diuretic of
some kind. Yes, with a bunch of fine prints at
the very end of the commercial. Right, So there's a
little bit of a a bitter sweet note to greg
(27:45):
Or Mendel's story. It wasn't until nine sixteen years after
his death in four that he finally got his due.
Three separate botanist Hugo Devrace, Carl Corren's Eric vonche r Buck,
all of them independently rediscovered the work of this obscure
Augustinian Friar, and with the new breakthroughs in the understanding
(28:09):
of cells and chromosomes, they were able to kind of
ground his weird p plant experiments, and so people were
able to say, again, the guy never lived to see it,
but people were able to say, Wow, he was really
onto something. And then in nineteen o two, just a
few years later, things kick up another notch. A scientist
(28:30):
in Walter Sutton says, Hey, the segregation of chromosomes during
the process of neosis are pretty much exactly like the
segregation pattern that this friar predicted. Oh and people weren't
calling them jeans yet. That still hasn't happened. No, no,
it definitely wasn't. That didn't happen until nineteen o nine,
(28:52):
when a guy by the name of Wilhelm Johansen came
up with it. He coined it. He used it to
describe the men Elian unit of of of reproduction. He
also used the terms genotype and phenotype to separate the
genetic traits of an individual um and the way it
(29:13):
ultimately came to look. So, as a matter of fact,
here is a list, a kind of a quick hit
list of other notable breakthroughs of the time when only
just the round robin these ben yes. So in nineteen eleven,
a guy named Thomas Hunt Morgan, along with his students,
used fruit flies to show the chromosomes carry jeans. They
(29:34):
also discover what we call genetic linkage. George Beatle and
Edward Tatum's experiments on the red bread mold um known
as Neurospora crassa also be a good name for a
metal band um show that genes act by regulating distinct
(29:55):
chemical events. They actually proposed the two fellows that each
gene directs the formation of a single enzyme. And then
in ninety three, again, just a few years later, William Askedbury,
who is a scientist from Britain, gets the first X
ray diffraction pattern of DNA and it shows that DNA
(30:16):
must have a regular periodic structure. This leads him to
say that, hey, maybe nucleotide bases are stacked on top
of each other, but what's DNA actually made of? H
In nineteen fifty to Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase attempt
to answer this question, showing that only the DNA of
a virus needs to enter a bacterium to infect it,
(30:38):
which gave a strong bit of support for the idea
that janes are in fact made of the stuff the
stuff DNA. Yeah, and so those are just a few
of the scientists and just a few examples of the
research that all went into, leading to Watson and Crick.
Watson Cricks discover read. Without the foundation provided by those folks,
(31:03):
James D. Watson Frances H. Crick may have never reached
their groundbreaking conclusion nineteen fifty three that the DNA molecule
exists in the form of a three dimensional double helix.
But before we go there, let's hold up max record scratch. Look, look, look.
The Crick Watson story is told pretty often in schools,
(31:24):
but there is another very important side to it. Enter
Rosalind Franklin. Rosalind Franklin has entered the chat or the
ring or whatever. Franklin was born in July twenty in London, um.
(31:47):
She was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family who
valued education and public service. Yeah, she was a scientist
when there was a lot of discrimination against women who
wanted to enter stem science, technology, engineering math. When she
was just eighteen, she matriculated in the Newnham Women's College
(32:08):
at Cambridge University, studying physics and chemistry. After Cambridge, she
went to work for the British Coal Utilization Research Association,
and her work on the porosity of coal became her
PhD thesis. As anybody who's working on a PhD or
has obtained. One knows the thesis tends to be pretty
(32:30):
specific once you get to that rarefied air. And this
work allows her to travel the world as a guest speaker.
She's an orator, a lecturer in n she moves to
Paris where she masters X ray crystallography. This becomes her
life work, and this is what leads her to make
(32:51):
a crucial contribution to the discovery of the double helix
structure of d a day. So some people think she
got a raw deal out of it, a woman getting
a raw deal in favor of men history. I don't
know about that man that that seems incredulous now it
happened all the time, and I would agree, I would,
(33:11):
I would argue she definitely got a raw deal. Biographer
Brenda Maddox called her the quote dark Lady of DNA,
based on a pretty negative, uh sexist nickname given to
her by one of her male co workers. But you know,
her friends and and other colleagues believe considered her to
be very kind, um and brilliant scientists. So this, this reputation,
(33:34):
this idea, I don't know, this sort of like strikes
me as sort of the character assassination. Character is that? Yes,
character assassination almost? Is this the idea that like women
in business or somehow like mean or like you know,
not the docile creatures that men would have them be,
you know what I mean? Like it's absurd and it's
(33:54):
based in the generations of of patriarchal uh bull ish
if you will. Yeah. So a lot of scientists thought
it was challenging to work with her because she wouldn't
just roll over. She was thought to be short tempered
and stubborn by those dudes. So there was a lot
(34:17):
of friction between her and a co worker named Maurice Wilkins,
in particular, while she was working at King's College. They
were supposed to work together to find the structure of DNA,
but because they really really did not get along, they
ended up working kind of in isolation. And this was
just fine with Franklin. She didn't need these dudes to
(34:38):
help her. H Wilkins instead went looking for company at
the Cavendish Library in Cambridge, and that's where his friend
Francis Crick was working with James Watson on building a
model of the DNA molecule, and that's where Wilkins showed
Watson and Crick some of Rosalind's were work. Yeah, so
(35:01):
waited Mante, I've seen this before, Okay, Yeah, So, unknown
to Franklin, Watson and Crick actually kind of potentially took
the stuff and ran with it. In particular, there was
an artifact known as Photo of fifty one that was
shown to Watson by Wilkins, an X ray diffraction image
(35:22):
of a DNA molecule, and it was in fact Watson's inspiration, um,
you know, to uh coined the idea of the double helix,
you know, because the pattern was clearly a helix, and um,
using Franklin's photo along with you know, the Admittedly, they
did do some of their own work. H Watson and
Crick created their now famous model. And when I say model,
(35:44):
we literally mean like the you know, the way it
looked like a thing you could do you see hanging
in like classrooms to this day. However, until more recent times,
Franklin's contribution was not acknowledged. UM. After her death, however,
Krick did uh say that her contribution had indeed been critical.
But it's sort of like after her death, too little,
(36:06):
too late, buddy, you know, now that she's gone let
me say, good job, but that's a you know, this
is all a true story. Luckily, Rosalind Franklin has finally
gotten her well deserved do and the modern world has
acknowledged just how much society owes her for her research.
And that's a bit maybe of a diversion for some
(36:28):
folks or a tangent, but we felt it was an
incredibly crucial one, uh And we wanted to thank the
good folks over at Nature dot com for providing a
lot of this information in the Rosalind Franklin biography. So
in any case, that story aside, which is important. What
(36:49):
you need to know is that Watson Crick were not
the quote unquote discoverers of d N A. They were
the first scientists to make an accurate description of that
complex double helix structure, and their work was directly dependent
on the research of numerous scientists we've named who came
before them. Thanks to all this, humanity now is capable
(37:10):
of making even greater strides and understanding the human genome
and the many ways in which DNA affects you and
your loved ones. This leads us to the modern age.
How crazy is it? How astonishing is it? That we
can just spit into tube and learn so much about
not just our past, but our present and our future.
(37:32):
Like you said, no, it's come a long way since
the last time you took a test. To answer your question, Ben,
how crazy, how amazing, how insane, I would say, quite,
it's it's it's remarkable and and we're going to get
into very shortly, just how remarkable it was for the
two of us, you know, as as human beings finding
things out about ourselves that we never possibly could have
(37:54):
without decades of detective work, you know, literally digging through
family heirlooms and traveling record is how far medical records
and all of that stuff. So in fact, this is
pretty cool, man, I believe. As of today, we found
out that the human genome has finally been fully sequenced. Yes, yeah,
(38:14):
this news came out pretty recently. It was June seventeenth.
You can find the full story on the cybverse dot com.
The human genome is finally fully sequenced. It's been announced. Uh,
we've figured it out, folks, We got them. As John
Oliver would say, the first human genome was mapped back
(38:35):
in two thousand one, is part of the Human Genome Project.
But researchers knew it wasn't fully accurate what we've done
now we not just being your host, but you know,
we as society. The boffins went back through and filled
in all those gaps and fixed all the errors that
were in the first attempt at mapping the genome. Yeah,
(38:58):
there are parts of it that had previously been kind
of disregarded and referred to as junk DNA because they
were seen as being comparable to copying errors, repeating sequences
in fact that ultimately have been discovered to play a
more important role in the development of some human disorders.
There's a really great quote from one of the researchers.
(39:21):
Just because something is repetitive doesn't imply its garbage. Evan Eichler. Yeah,
he was a senior author of of one of the
publications there, and this sequence is the most comprehensive reference
mammalian reference genome ever. There are six new genome related
publications that are coming out in the journal Science that
(39:43):
will lead to an even better understanding of human evolution
and the discovery of ways to treat disorders or targets
that should be uh isolated to treat a variety of disorders.
We're we're on the bleeding edge now. And Michael shots,
a Johns Hopkins University professor of Computer science and biology,
(40:04):
another senior author of some of this research, says, quote,
we always knew pieces were missing, but I don't believe
any of us realized how extensive they were or how
interesting they were. And segue, uh No, I think that's
something we can say about our own results. So we
completed a twenty three and me test. I found out
(40:25):
that some things were pretty normal. Other things were pretty surprising,
Like I am genetically likely to be of average weight.
That seems like a pretty normal thing. You can also
see that I am not likely to be lactose intolerant.
One of the big things for me was the Malungian
stuff is true. My paternal line is a pretty crazy
(40:47):
mix of genetic spaghetti Ashkenazi, Congolese, French, British, Irish, and
then like two percent other. So don't know if that's
Native American or it's just what they call on a side.
At this point, well, before I get into that breakdown
of mind, I just found out. I just found a
really amazing new little section on the twenty three and
me interface, which you get you know, log in when
(41:09):
you send in your tests, and then using this whole
like dashboard, and it's like the stuff that I keep
finding that I didn't even notice that when I first looked.
One of them is a button that says Neanderthal. I
apparently have more Neanderthal DNA than thirty five percent of
other customers. Neanderthals, of course, being prehistoric humans who interbred
with modern humans before vanishing around forty thousand years ago.
(41:32):
And this is, uh, you know, pretty amazing to me
because one of the traits that I may have inherited
from my Neanderthal ancestors is having a worse sense of direction.
H I have an awful, awful sense of direction. If
I did not have my Google Maps, I would never
find my way anywhere. Uh. And that is just the fact.
So now I can at least blame you know, my
(41:53):
my my Neanderthal brethren on that I got more I
think more. Uh then then just again, this is all
rated to the average. Part of the reason these tests
are more specific now is because there are more people
have participated exactly. And that's the thing. Once you you know,
become a part of the twenty three and me kind
(42:14):
of community, you are, you know, and and you you
are able to there's boxes you can check to keep
all your data private and all of that, you know,
at least in terms of, like, you know, having your
identity associated with it. That's an important thing to consider,
and that is absolutely a thing that they can do,
and then they do do. But my breakdown is a
little bit dull, but still a lot more detailed than
it was when I took it previously. When I say dull,
(42:37):
I just mean um, ninety eight point six percent Northwestern
European and that breaks down to sixty point three percent
British and Irish. Uh. And then they go into a
little more specifics with Glasgow City the UK and County
Dublin plus eighteen other regions and I've got thirty point
five percent French and German and two point eight percent
(42:57):
broadly Northwestern European, with the dash of Ashkenazi jew uh
ancestry thrown in their point. Welcome, welcome. Yeah, the this
stuff is fascinating. One one thing that we really enjoyed
that uh, we just learned before recording this. I found
a really interesting thing in the paternal Haplow group that
(43:18):
uh lad us to one last short story. We want
to tell a man named Neal of the Nine Hostages.
We don't speak this language, so maybe mispronouncing it. Uh.
Here's what we found in twenty three and me quote
perhaps more myth in man. Noil of the Nine Hostages
is said to have been a king of Tara, northwestern
(43:40):
Ireland in the late fourth century CE. His name comes
from the tale of nine hostages that he held from
the regions he ruled over, though the legendary stories of
his life may have been invented hundreds of years after
he died. Genetic evidence suggests that the we Kneil dynasty
again apologies to Native speakers whose name means descendants of Neil,
(44:00):
did in fact trace back to just one man who
bore a branch of hap blue group r M two
six nine. These descendants ruled to various degrees as kings
of Ireland from the seventh to the eleventh century CE.
I am descended from them, and just before we started
to rule, we found out, Noel, you're descended from the
(44:21):
same dude brother. That's Cheered, right, and that's Um again.
That's that common ancestor for us goes to ten thousand
years ago. I think that must be why we haven't
seen each other at the reunions. Must be. It's pretty interesting. Um.
(44:43):
There is also a lot of health data that you
can clean from this twenty three and me test various
variants that show up in your your you know, your
genome that can point to certain risk factors, you know,
for diseases. Mine was pretty solid. Didn't have anything that
was outlying that should be like a watch out. I
(45:04):
think I I am a little bit more than averagely
predisposed to age related macular degeneration, which is the most
common cause of irreversible vision laws among older adults. Which
is funny considering that I have really, really good vision. Um,
maybe it's just as I get older, it's gonna it's
gonna wane on me. But everything else was pretty solid.
(45:25):
I uh, you know, that's that's funny because I have
a couple of things that stood out to me as
only one seemed woefully incorrect. My caffeine consumptional I am
likely to consume less and no, Max, you guys know
that is fundamentally untrue. I beat the odds on that
(45:46):
one because I drink way too much coffee. But overall,
this stuff was really exciting for us and and nol
I'd love for you to talk a little bit about
just how were you surprised by how much more as
you said, granular, this became in just how many years
has it been? What's our time interval here? At least
(46:08):
four years? Um? Yes, I was, Oh my gosh, there's
even a thing with an asparagus p detection was as
we know that you did the thing for for I
believe the stuff of Jus. No, maybe that was Josh,
but it was one of the shows that you wrote
for and worked on. All people's pa smell like asparagus
when they eat it, only some people can't smell it. Uh,
(46:29):
and and under traits here there's a section for asparagus
odor detection and I am listed as likely can't smell
and boy can I ever? That is so interesting. So yeah,
it's incredibly granular. Um like things like cleft chin or
having dan driff. I've got a chance of getting dan
drift early hair loss likely no hair lost, baby, I
(46:49):
can tell you that I've got a good head of hair.
Very excited. I've got a slightly higher than average odds
of disliking cilantro. I know there are a lot of
people who are probably one rain about that I don't
flush when I drink alcohol. I have the red face
that happens. Uh. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff here,
and I think we're both surprised by it. Uh. And
(47:12):
I'm also interested in seeing where the technology goes in
the future. One of the big takeaways I learned from
this is that if you take a if you take
this test again, you might find even more information. Would
you say that's fair? I think so. Yeah. And so
that's where we end today's story. We went from the
(47:34):
ancient past all the way to two where people are
still asking what makes me me? What makes you you?
What can I learn about myself and apply It's not
just the past but the president and the future, And
with companies like twenty three and me, it's easier than
ever before. So thanks thanks to the good folks, to
three and me, Thanks all I felt ridiculous historians for
(47:56):
tuning in, And thanks of course to Mr Max Williams. Max,
are you gonna? Have you ever taken a DNA test?
I have not taken a DNA test for mostly because
I'm just kind of paranoid about it. But Noelso that
part about it. He's your identity, like like secret stuff.
So maybe I will you know, and find out that
maybe I'm related to that same guy that y'all are
all related to. And Hey, if you like this episode,
(48:20):
why not check out some of our other fellow podcasters
on the iHeart podcast network, like Many Questions with Many Driver,
or Prodigy with our buddy loll Berlanti, or a Hundred
Words with Andrew cannon Um, where they these hosts share
their journeys to health discovery or you know, finding out
what makes them them or we we are you you
(48:41):
all the same stuff that we talked about from a
completely different angle. You can find their episodes in the
spit feed Um, which is another show hosted by a
dear friend of ours, Barrattunda Thurston on the I Heart
Radio app or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Yes
Sam of course, our good pals Annie and Sam over
its Stuff, Mom Never Told You and Waiting on Reparations
(49:04):
with our pals, Dope Knife and Link with Franco. Thanks
also to Jonathan Strickland Dak the Quister, Thanks of course
to Alex Williams, Christopher Hasiotis and E's Jeff Got Absolutely
and you know what, We'll see you next time, folks.
(49:25):
For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Uh. Let's give a shout
out to our one and only the man the myth
Legend super producer, Mr Max Williams, and they called me
ben joined as always with Mr Noel Brown. Uh Noel.
We like like most people, we like to think of
(00:49):
ourselves as fairly distinct here in the in the mass
of humanity. Right. Oh yeah, we're special boys. Here we go,
there we go. We uh. We, like many other people
throughout ancient history to the modern day, have spent a
lot of time wondering where we came from, wondering about
(01:10):
our origins as individuals. And like many people, you know,
we we know a little bit about our ancestry. We
don't know everything, however, and that's why we were interested
to team up with twenty three and me. Nowadays, you know,
it's easier than ever to learn about your past through
(01:32):
the power of genetic testing, and Nola have to ask
and Max you as well. Growing up, did you, guys
ever have a member of your family who was like
obsessed with their genealogy? I didn't really personally, and in fact,
it wasn't until uh no spoilers yet, but um that
I took the twenty three and me a test that
I really had much sense of my heritage at all.
(01:54):
So this was super eye opening and fascinating process for me. Um.
But no, I definitely am aware of folks that take
that very seriously and kind of consider themselves like armchair
you know, genealogists or anthropologists or what have you. But
there was really nobody in my family that that much
mentioned that when I was growing up. How about you, guys. Yeah,
I actually have a pretty extensive story about this one.
(02:15):
It's uh so my paternal grandfather, so my great grandfather
and my dad's side of the family, he was adopted
in the early nineteen hundreds and they lost all his
adoption papers. So there was really like no idea where
that's tide of my family came from. It's just been
kind of things. So my aunt has been spending with
the last no joke, like thirty plus years just trying
to dig up stuff, and like she recently did a
(02:37):
test like this and it's got like some more answers,
but it's been up it's been like a kind of
like a lifelong pursuit of hers right there. Wow, yeah,
I had I had something similar because of the controversy
surrounding my paternal line, the Malungeon side of my family.
Uh So there were times where people were actively hiding there. Um,
(02:57):
I guess they're perceived membership of that group and as
a result, they're hiding some of their genealogy. But of course,
as time went on, people became less hesitant, you know
about acknowledging the past and the truth, and now here
in it is easier than ever for people to, as
(03:18):
we said, learn more about what led to you being
here a fellow ridiculous historian listening to this show today.
But today's question, how did the world changing science of
genetic testing and our concepts of DNA? How did they
evolve from the work of ancient philosophers and Augustinian friars
(03:39):
all the way to these cutting edge innovations. In today's show,
we're going to unravel some of the history of genetic research,
and along the way we might share some of our
own personal experiences. Because spoiler, folks, Noel and I each
took some tests with twenty three and me. Uh and
Noel I believe that this was your second test with
(04:02):
the group. Yeah, it was, uh, and let me tell
you a lot of things have changed for the better.
It was probably a couple of years ago that I
took the test previously and the one that we took
for this episode. This partnership just had way more granular information,
including stuff about potential health risks, markers that are contained
you know, within my genetic code or genetic code, your
(04:25):
genetic code um, that can give you indications as to
whether you're predisposed to certain medical conditions. So it was
very very illuminating me. The last one was great too,
but it really feels like they've added a lot more
bang for the buck and a lot more features, a
lot more results that are very meaningful, not to mention, um,
I believe Ben, you and I have some interesting kind
of shared results that we will also say for the end. Yes, yes,
(04:48):
you might be surprised by how this sort of technology
can connect you with people you never imagined yourself connected with.
But let's let's start there, right What makes you? Okay,
So here's the lay of the last People were asking
what makes me me? What makes you you? Well? Before
(05:09):
the concept of microscopes well before DNA was even a thing.
The history of this, like the the ancestry of ancestry
research and d NA starts all the way back in
like five thousand b c e which I think might
surprise a lot of people, Oh for sure. And I mean,
(05:29):
you know, it was really more of a philosophical question
for a long long time. I mean, there was certainly
observations made towards various traits and things that family members possessed,
but the whole idea of like who who am I,
where do I connect in the universe, and you know,
life and all of that was much more of a
of a philosophical question. But you're right then as early
(05:52):
as five thousand b c. E UM, humans were practicing
something called selective breeding. So there was an acknowledgment of, Okay,
how do we isolate these traits and figure out how
to express them, whether it be livestock or or crops
or what have you, or even you know, humans. There
was a certain amount of selective breeding that came with,
(06:14):
like in reading, uh, and you know the idea of
maintaining a bloodline. And as we know that, there were
some pretty catastrophic consequences to those um activities, but you know,
their head was kind of in the right place. They
just really didn't quite know what they were doing, but
they definitely did when it came to the livestock and
the crops to make more robust crops and more hearty livestock. Yeah, yeah,
(06:39):
a k A. The reason you have things like corn,
you know what I mean, the reason you have domesticated
crops as they're called. And there's something really interesting about that.
I can't remember who I was speaking to, but we
were talking about the old question what is the most
successful form of life on the planet. And you know
(06:59):
a lot of people would just say humans. But if
you think about it, the idea of wheat being domesticated
or corn being domesticated, it sounds like humans won that game.
But if you look at it from the perspective of
the plant, they kind of won because now they're spread
across the planet. I thought that was kind of trippy. Yeah, totally.
(07:21):
I actually heard an interview with an entomologist who specifically
um focuses on flies. UM and flies. He believes we're
one of the most successful species in the history of
the world because of their you know, ability to kind
of bob and weave and and and dodge things and
just you know, they're one of the most successful aerialists
(07:42):
on the planet. And also they essentially feed on dead stuff,
which there's always gonna be plenty of. Also, I believe
they've been around, uh much longer than humans. So while
we may be successful and good at, like, you know,
making stuff and figuring things out, it's all kind of
self serving and at the end of the day, we're
only really a blip in the historical record. Oh yeah,
(08:04):
we're like a fad to crocodiles, you know what I mean,
We're like POGs to crocodiles and alligators. But but you
were you a pug guy? Were you a pargman? No?
I had some POGs, but I wouldn't say I was
a parkman. I just I had enough to play the game.
And then I didn't get super into the game. I
actually like the art more. That's right. I barely understood
(08:27):
how the game was playing. I just know there were
slammers and they were the POGs, and I mean it
was kind of like Tiddley winks you want other people's
POGs by slamming them in a stack. I don't know
it doesn't matter. We're not here to talk about pole.
We are here to talk about is pan genesis. Yes,
let's talk about a little bit about the great philosophers
you mentioned earlier, So let's go to Aristotle. Aristotle is
(08:51):
one of the first people on record who said, you
know what, I wonder if traits acquired throughout an organism
lifetime can be transmitted to their offspring. Essentially, and not
to be too to gruesome here, folks, but essentially, the
question is if I took five people and I cut
(09:14):
off a different finger on each one of their right hands,
would their children also be missing the same finger when
they were born because that trait was acquired during that
person's unfortunate lifetime. He's kind of added to this guessing
game with this theory, the one you just mentioned pan genesis,
(09:34):
which sort of describes how these traits could be passed
on through particles called gimus, which sort of encapsulated the
traits and then allowed them to be transmitted to reproductive cells.
And then he also thought about what he called the
form giving principle, and a lot of the stuff you're
(09:56):
gonna hear from these ancient thinkers, by the way, is
in principle, powle not super duper far off. Yeah, he
believed in something called the form giving principle that was
a property of an organism that was able to be
transmitted through bodily fluid, specifically semen, which he believed was
kind of like blood, but a more pure form of
(10:19):
the stuff. And also we believed that the mother's minstrel
blood was another one of these uh, form giving fluids.
He believed that this interacted in the womb to direct
uh the early development of an organism. M hmmm. So
again you can you can see where uh, someone working
(10:39):
with the technology at the time could have reasonably started
making these suppositions. But Pythagoras, Aristotle, they weren't the only
folks who were thinking through this. Hippocrates and Epicurus also
had their own takes on the idea of heredity. Heredity
is just the passing on of traits from parents to offspring,
(11:01):
whether that's through sexual reproduction or through a sexual reproduction.
And it's weird because hippocrates theory is sort of is
kind of similar to Darwin's later ideas that involved hereditary
material collecting from throughout the body. But again, one thing
(11:21):
we wanna be careful of here is we want to
avoid just focusing on the ancient Western philosophers, because people
in India and China we're thinking about this too. That's right.
And the Sharaka Samita that was written or at least
a distributed around the three ancient Indian medical writers observe
(11:44):
the characteristics of the child were determined by what they
saw is four distinct factors, the first being those from
the mother's reproductive material, second from the father's sperm, and
the third from the diet of the pregnant mother. Uh,
and the fourth being the accompanying the soul. So while
there were some of these do feel pretty connected to
(12:05):
modern scientific understanding of reproduction, that fourth one kind of
imparts a more religious characteristic as well. Yeah. Yeah, one
through three you cannot along home going, okay, uh huh sure.
And then number four is where we see just how
how inextricably intertwined, Uh, the ideas of religion were with
(12:27):
the ideas of medicine. You know, it's funny, but the
idea of things becoming attached to the soul as it
enters the fetus, what does that reminds you of? Uh?
Anybody scientology? I was thinking cloud Atlas forincarnation and but yeah,
well those are all kind of in the same wheelhouse.
But I mean, that's the idea of like negative things
(12:50):
becoming attached to the soul from birth to carry the
follow you along for the rest of your life and
cause you to you to develop all kinds of problems.
That that just reminds me of that that concept within psychology,
not that l Ron Hubbard was anything but original, you know. Anyhow,
I walked around the corner for that for that slight
(13:10):
this But let's jump around in time. No, like when
you hear this, when you thought about this episode right
as you tuned in, you were probably thinking of Charles
Darwin and his famous eighteen fifty nine banger on the
Origin of Species full title on the Origin of Species
by means of natural selection or the preservation of favorite
(13:30):
races and the Struggle for life. We'll get to that
in a second. Darwin is a recurring guest on our show.
But if we're talking about genetic research and we're talking
about the full scope of this, you can kind of
divide it into two broad eras. All the stuff before
a guy named Gregor, Johann Mendel and all this stuff
(13:53):
after this Friar. Yeah, that's right. Modern genetics really started
with the work of this man who was an Augustinian Friar.
He was really into the idea of propagating pea plants,
like you know, like English little green peas. When he
published his work specifically on the reproductive qualities of these
(14:16):
little fellas in eighteen sixty six, he established the theory
of Mandelian inheritance um. He became the first person to
lay out a scientific and mathematically founded uh science of genetics,
even before it was even called that. And this is legit.
You can find it in his Encyclopedia Britannica Entrigue, which
(14:40):
personally I thought did a good job of breaking it
down in an understandable way. So let's get in the
nuts and bolts. Strap in for some math. Don't worry,
we're gonna, We're gonna. We'll be right there with you.
Try to make it easy, okay, Matt, mass me up. Ben,
let's math up. So the reason Mindel wants to study
(15:01):
the p plant, the edible p or Pissum sativum, is
because it had a lot of distinct varieties. It was
easy to control, you know, like easy to grow, but
then also easy to control how the plants pollinate. And
there was a high proportion of successful seed germin nations,
(15:22):
which means, you know, it was UH. If you were
making something new or trying to attract something, you had
a higher than average likelihood of that plant actually growing
to pass the seed stage. So he tested UH for
for about two years, from eighteen fifty four to fifty six.
He tested thirty four different varieties for what he called
(15:42):
the constancy of their traits. And when he wanted to
see how these things transmitted, he chose seven traits that
he thought were expressed in a distinctive manner. And it's
stuff that's like a lot of it's stuff that's visually
apparent to him. So like tall plants and short plants.
What colors are their seeds? Green or yellow? So he
(16:06):
referred to these kind of alternate versions UM as contrasted characters. UH.
He also referred to them as character pairs UM. And
you know, this is very similar to what we talked
about in ancient times, the idea of kind of crossbreeding
different things to create a strengthened single trait. He would
(16:30):
cross varieties that were the same except for one trait.
So for example, tall might be crossed with short um
and then there would become a generation of hybrids, which
he referred to as F one. That generation would display
the character of one variety but not that of the other. Uh.
And he believed, or at least using terms that he developed,
(16:52):
one of the characters was dominant and the other one
was recessive. Just this, this checks out what we know
today right in terms of like eye color and all stuff.
We get more into that in a bit, but he
was definitely barking up the right genetic tree. So in
the offspring that he raised from all of these crossed hybrids,
(17:12):
which he referred to as second generation or F two,
he would see the recessive trade appearing. And then he
noted that entirely third of them had the original heritable traits,
while two thirds were of that hybrid arrangements you know,
or rather you know, presented the more of the hybrid
kind of qualities. So he yeah, maybe, man, why don't
(17:35):
you you you kind of did the research on the
math here, So why don't you take us home here
with like kind of the the solution. Oh for sure.
So this goes to uh, Gregor's major discovery. He says, Look,
after I've read these successive generations of plants, just as
you described, Noel, I'm seeing by the time I get
(17:56):
to the descendants of the dominant group, I can rewrite
that three to one ratio, you know, that kind of
dominant to recessive appearance ratio. I can rewrite it to
one to two to one. And by this we mean
fifty of that second generation we're true breeding. Fifty percent
we're still hybrid in a in a way, he was.
(18:18):
He finally he was arriving at an understanding what we
call dominant and recessive genes today. This major discovery probably
wouldn't have been made by his predecessors because they didn't
grow statistically significant populations of testing material, which is a
very cold way to say living things. And they didn't
(18:39):
follow the individual characters or characteristics separately to establish their
relationships to each other overall. So this is big, big stuff, right,
This is world changing stuff. He publishes it, and everyone
ignores him. Everyone sort of ignores him. It comes out
in like not very well known scientific journal. Most of
(19:02):
the scientific community at large isn't aware of it. And
if you were talking about heredity at this time, you
are much more likely to be in a slaughter or
a cafe talking about Darwin's hot button theory of evolution
by natural selection. And uh. He also Darwin, we should say,
wasn't super perfect aside from his culinary taste, which we're ambitious.
(19:25):
Check out weird historical flexes uh to learn more. He
uh he had a theory that not all his theories
widely accepted his own theory of heredity, which she had
called pangenesis as well, and just didn't really didn't really fly. Uh.
So to find the next part of the story, we
have to fast forward to eighteen three. Let's just remember that,
(19:47):
I mean, reading through this now and talking about this
now with so many echoes of what we know to
have been determined to be true and accurate. So it's
just like, well, why wouldn't people play attention to this?
But at the time it was like very out there right,
like it would not have been connecting with like the
sort of traditional scientific thought of the time. And it's
(20:07):
just one guy kind of like breeding pea plants and
and espousing these kind of like whackado notions of traits
and qualities in offspring, So would not have been like
an easy cell necessarily which you write them if we
pressed the fast forward butt into eight three, who got
a man named August Weissman who was an evolutionary biologist
(20:30):
from Germany who was making waves by breeding mice after
chopping off their tails like three blind mice style. But
presumably you know, for science, for science a little yeah, yeah,
he uh. He did this for reasons, as he assured
them mice police. Mainly, even though this sounds ghoulish, there
(20:54):
there was something important to it. He wanted to disprove
this popular idea of lamark ism, the concept, like we said,
similar to the ancient philosophy concept that physical characteristics of
apparent organism can be carried through to the offspring. So
(21:15):
when mice with amputated tales gave birth to mice with
absolutely normal tales, they proved a crucial point. So we
don't the names of those mice are lost to history,
but thank you now we we do know a very
interesting field that's more in the realm of psychology today. Epigenetics,
the idea that trauma can be um you know, carried
(21:36):
or passed down through generations. So in theory, the trauma
of having their tails chopped off could have been you know,
carried to their offspring. Yeah. That's a great point, man,
because epigenetics is the study of the way gene expression
has changed, Like what is more active in your genetic
code instead of like your actual genes getting altered. There's
(22:00):
a great study about starvation and World War Two that
goes to this epic. Genetics is like still very much
the forefront of genetic science today. Yeah, that is a
good point. Maybe the mice were traumatized, certainly possible. Um,
but let's get into some more breakthroughs. Here's some names
that might ring a bell. Watson and Crick. I think
there's like a biopic about these guys. Think Jeff Goldblum
(22:22):
played Watson or Creg. I can't remember which, Gil played
both of them. Maybe certainly possible. Yeah, we're like, yeah,
Daniel de Lewis played every character in the whole movie. Um,
but yeah, they are you know those names like, leave
it if you don't know exactly what they did, because
they are, uh, the American biologists that are largely created well,
(22:43):
they are credited with discovering DNA in the nineteen fifties,
but you know, as is off of the case, with science,
though timing is everything. Who's first to market with something
is not necessarily the same as like who actually discovered
the things. So DNA was in fact first identified in
late eighteen sixties eighteen sixty nine to be precise, by
a Swiss chemist named Friedrich Mascher. But again, Watson and
(23:08):
Crick are the names that you probably think of when
you think of of d N A and and DNA
sequencing and all of that. Also, to jump in here
real quick, the name of it is the Race for
the Double Helix, who aired on September four seven aired
So it was a TV movie. Yeah, and it had
Jeff Goldbloom as Jim Wasson, Tim Pickett Smith as France Crick,
(23:32):
Alan Howard as Maurice Wilkins, and Juliet Stevenson as Rosalind Franklin.
Some names pop up here in a little yes hit
the sound of cue right now? Awesome, Thanks Max, and
(23:57):
thanks Matt Frederick. So here's the thing. Those guys are
super famous, and rightly so, but there's more to their story.
A lot of people, probably ourselves included, at some point,
have made the mistake and thought those guys discovered DNA
by themselves in the nineteen fifties. This is not the
(24:18):
case in reality. Instead, DNA was first identified all the
way back in the late eighteen sixties and eighteen sixty
nine by a Swiss chemist named Friedrich Meischer. He wanted
to figure out what made white blood cells. White blood cells,
so you know, those that are part of the body
immune system, and his main source of those cells was
(24:43):
kind of kind of growdy, kind of gnarly. He got
most of these white blood cells for his research from
pus coded bandages that he took from a clinic. So, um,
you can't do that today. That is wild plus coded
bandages as a metal band if I ever heard one,
or at the very least a song, Yeah, that's pretty
(25:07):
pretty gross. Uh So, he noticed that when you added
acid to a solution of those cells, that a substance
separated out from the solution, and that substance was able
to be dissolved again in an alkali solution. So in
investigating that solution, he discovered that it had some pretty
unusual properties. It was different from other proteins that he'd
(25:30):
looked into before that he was you know, much more
familiar with through his past research. And my share called
this substance nucleon because he believed that it had like
you know, leached out from the nucleus of the cell um,
which you know, at this point that was something that
people understood, the nucleus of the seller, just the makeup
(25:53):
of the atom and the cell, etcetera. So Masha had
discovered essentially the basis for or for all of life,
the molecular basis DNA. And then he decided, how how
am I going to figure out how to pull this
out in its purest form? Yeah, and he you know,
he didn't know that exactly what he had discovered, but
(26:15):
he discovered it. And then in the decades after his discovery,
we see this cavalcade of breakthroughs by many other researchers,
other scientists, people like Phoebus Levine and Irwin Chargeth carry
out these research efforts to learn more about the DNA molecule,
including its primary chemical components and the ways those components
(26:39):
work together. We actually get Philouette amalogy nerds the name
DNA from a biochemist named Albrick Coastal In one good
old Albrick, who i'll call Al, identified nucleon as a
nuclear Yeah. Yeah, if he'll be my bodyguard. So he
(27:00):
provided the present chemical name dexo ribo nucleic acid DNA,
and then he also went on for extra credit to
isolate the five nucleotide bases that are the building blocks
of DNA and are in a First we have at anine,
then we have a sias scene, then we have guanine, finemine,
(27:25):
and your a scill Yeah, not to do much too
much p humor, but your a sill feels like you
get ripped off, like, uh, you know, a diuretic of
some kind. Yes, with a bunch of fine prints at
the very end of the commercial. Right, So there's a
little bit of a a bitter sweet note to greg
(27:45):
Or Mendel's story. It wasn't until nine sixteen years after
his death in four that he finally got his due.
Three separate botanist Hugo Devrace, Carl Corren's Eric vonche r Buck,
all of them independently rediscovered the work of this obscure
Augustinian Friar, and with the new breakthroughs in the understanding
(28:09):
of cells and chromosomes, they were able to kind of
ground his weird p plant experiments, and so people were
able to say, again, the guy never lived to see it,
but people were able to say, Wow, he was really
onto something. And then in nineteen o two, just a
few years later, things kick up another notch. A scientist
(28:30):
in Walter Sutton says, Hey, the segregation of chromosomes during
the process of neosis are pretty much exactly like the
segregation pattern that this friar predicted. Oh and people weren't
calling them jeans yet. That still hasn't happened. No, no,
it definitely wasn't. That didn't happen until nineteen o nine,
(28:52):
when a guy by the name of Wilhelm Johansen came
up with it. He coined it. He used it to
describe the men Elian unit of of of reproduction. He
also used the terms genotype and phenotype to separate the
genetic traits of an individual um and the way it
(29:13):
ultimately came to look. So, as a matter of fact,
here is a list, a kind of a quick hit
list of other notable breakthroughs of the time when only
just the round robin these ben yes. So in nineteen eleven,
a guy named Thomas Hunt Morgan, along with his students,
used fruit flies to show the chromosomes carry jeans. They
(29:34):
also discover what we call genetic linkage. George Beatle and
Edward Tatum's experiments on the red bread mold um known
as Neurospora crassa also be a good name for a
metal band um show that genes act by regulating distinct
(29:55):
chemical events. They actually proposed the two fellows that each
gene directs the formation of a single enzyme. And then
in ninety three, again, just a few years later, William Askedbury,
who is a scientist from Britain, gets the first X
ray diffraction pattern of DNA and it shows that DNA
(30:16):
must have a regular periodic structure. This leads him to
say that, hey, maybe nucleotide bases are stacked on top
of each other, but what's DNA actually made of? H
In nineteen fifty to Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase attempt
to answer this question, showing that only the DNA of
a virus needs to enter a bacterium to infect it,
(30:38):
which gave a strong bit of support for the idea
that janes are in fact made of the stuff the
stuff DNA. Yeah, and so those are just a few
of the scientists and just a few examples of the
research that all went into, leading to Watson and Crick.
Watson Cricks discover read. Without the foundation provided by those folks,
(31:03):
James D. Watson Frances H. Crick may have never reached
their groundbreaking conclusion nineteen fifty three that the DNA molecule
exists in the form of a three dimensional double helix.
But before we go there, let's hold up max record scratch. Look, look, look.
The Crick Watson story is told pretty often in schools,
(31:24):
but there is another very important side to it. Enter
Rosalind Franklin. Rosalind Franklin has entered the chat or the
ring or whatever. Franklin was born in July twenty in London, um.
(31:47):
She was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family who
valued education and public service. Yeah, she was a scientist
when there was a lot of discrimination against women who
wanted to enter stem science, technology, engineering math. When she
was just eighteen, she matriculated in the Newnham Women's College
(32:08):
at Cambridge University, studying physics and chemistry. After Cambridge, she
went to work for the British Coal Utilization Research Association,
and her work on the porosity of coal became her
PhD thesis. As anybody who's working on a PhD or
has obtained. One knows the thesis tends to be pretty
(32:30):
specific once you get to that rarefied air. And this
work allows her to travel the world as a guest speaker.
She's an orator, a lecturer in n she moves to
Paris where she masters X ray crystallography. This becomes her
life work, and this is what leads her to make
(32:51):
a crucial contribution to the discovery of the double helix
structure of d a day. So some people think she
got a raw deal out of it, a woman getting
a raw deal in favor of men history. I don't
know about that man that that seems incredulous now it
happened all the time, and I would agree, I would,
(33:11):
I would argue she definitely got a raw deal. Biographer
Brenda Maddox called her the quote dark Lady of DNA,
based on a pretty negative, uh sexist nickname given to
her by one of her male co workers. But you know,
her friends and and other colleagues believe considered her to
be very kind, um and brilliant scientists. So this, this reputation,
(33:34):
this idea, I don't know, this sort of like strikes
me as sort of the character assassination. Character is that? Yes,
character assassination almost? Is this the idea that like women
in business or somehow like mean or like you know,
not the docile creatures that men would have them be,
you know what I mean? Like it's absurd and it's
(33:54):
based in the generations of of patriarchal uh bull ish
if you will. Yeah. So a lot of scientists thought
it was challenging to work with her because she wouldn't
just roll over. She was thought to be short tempered
and stubborn by those dudes. So there was a lot
(34:17):
of friction between her and a co worker named Maurice Wilkins,
in particular, while she was working at King's College. They
were supposed to work together to find the structure of DNA,
but because they really really did not get along, they
ended up working kind of in isolation. And this was
just fine with Franklin. She didn't need these dudes to
(34:38):
help her. H Wilkins instead went looking for company at
the Cavendish Library in Cambridge, and that's where his friend
Francis Crick was working with James Watson on building a
model of the DNA molecule, and that's where Wilkins showed
Watson and Crick some of Rosalind's were work. Yeah, so
(35:01):
waited Mante, I've seen this before, Okay, Yeah, So, unknown
to Franklin, Watson and Crick actually kind of potentially took
the stuff and ran with it. In particular, there was
an artifact known as Photo of fifty one that was
shown to Watson by Wilkins, an X ray diffraction image
(35:22):
of a DNA molecule, and it was in fact Watson's inspiration, um,
you know, to uh coined the idea of the double helix,
you know, because the pattern was clearly a helix, and um,
using Franklin's photo along with you know, the Admittedly, they
did do some of their own work. H Watson and
Crick created their now famous model. And when I say model,
(35:44):
we literally mean like the you know, the way it
looked like a thing you could do you see hanging
in like classrooms to this day. However, until more recent times,
Franklin's contribution was not acknowledged. UM. After her death, however,
Krick did uh say that her contribution had indeed been critical.
But it's sort of like after her death, too little,
(36:06):
too late, buddy, you know, now that she's gone let
me say, good job, but that's a you know, this
is all a true story. Luckily, Rosalind Franklin has finally
gotten her well deserved do and the modern world has
acknowledged just how much society owes her for her research.
And that's a bit maybe of a diversion for some
(36:28):
folks or a tangent, but we felt it was an
incredibly crucial one, uh And we wanted to thank the
good folks over at Nature dot com for providing a
lot of this information in the Rosalind Franklin biography. So
in any case, that story aside, which is important. What
(36:49):
you need to know is that Watson Crick were not
the quote unquote discoverers of d N A. They were
the first scientists to make an accurate description of that
complex double helix structure, and their work was directly dependent
on the research of numerous scientists we've named who came
before them. Thanks to all this, humanity now is capable
(37:10):
of making even greater strides and understanding the human genome
and the many ways in which DNA affects you and
your loved ones. This leads us to the modern age.
How crazy is it? How astonishing is it? That we
can just spit into tube and learn so much about
not just our past, but our present and our future.
(37:32):
Like you said, no, it's come a long way since
the last time you took a test. To answer your question, Ben,
how crazy, how amazing, how insane, I would say, quite,
it's it's it's remarkable and and we're going to get
into very shortly, just how remarkable it was for the
two of us, you know, as as human beings finding
things out about ourselves that we never possibly could have
(37:54):
without decades of detective work, you know, literally digging through
family heirlooms and traveling record is how far medical records
and all of that stuff. So in fact, this is
pretty cool, man, I believe. As of today, we found
out that the human genome has finally been fully sequenced. Yes, yeah,
(38:14):
this news came out pretty recently. It was June seventeenth.
You can find the full story on the cybverse dot com.
The human genome is finally fully sequenced. It's been announced. Uh,
we've figured it out, folks, We got them. As John
Oliver would say, the first human genome was mapped back
(38:35):
in two thousand one, is part of the Human Genome Project.
But researchers knew it wasn't fully accurate what we've done
now we not just being your host, but you know,
we as society. The boffins went back through and filled
in all those gaps and fixed all the errors that
were in the first attempt at mapping the genome. Yeah,
(38:58):
there are parts of it that had previously been kind
of disregarded and referred to as junk DNA because they
were seen as being comparable to copying errors, repeating sequences
in fact that ultimately have been discovered to play a
more important role in the development of some human disorders.
There's a really great quote from one of the researchers.
(39:21):
Just because something is repetitive doesn't imply its garbage. Evan Eichler. Yeah,
he was a senior author of of one of the
publications there, and this sequence is the most comprehensive reference
mammalian reference genome ever. There are six new genome related
publications that are coming out in the journal Science that
(39:43):
will lead to an even better understanding of human evolution
and the discovery of ways to treat disorders or targets
that should be uh isolated to treat a variety of disorders.
We're we're on the bleeding edge now. And Michael shots,
a Johns Hopkins University professor of Computer science and biology,
(40:04):
another senior author of some of this research, says, quote,
we always knew pieces were missing, but I don't believe
any of us realized how extensive they were or how
interesting they were. And segue, uh No, I think that's
something we can say about our own results. So we
completed a twenty three and me test. I found out
(40:25):
that some things were pretty normal. Other things were pretty surprising,
Like I am genetically likely to be of average weight.
That seems like a pretty normal thing. You can also
see that I am not likely to be lactose intolerant.
One of the big things for me was the Malungian
stuff is true. My paternal line is a pretty crazy
(40:47):
mix of genetic spaghetti Ashkenazi, Congolese, French, British, Irish, and
then like two percent other. So don't know if that's
Native American or it's just what they call on a side.
At this point, well, before I get into that breakdown
of mind, I just found out. I just found a
really amazing new little section on the twenty three and
me interface, which you get you know, log in when
(41:09):
you send in your tests, and then using this whole
like dashboard, and it's like the stuff that I keep
finding that I didn't even notice that when I first looked.
One of them is a button that says Neanderthal. I
apparently have more Neanderthal DNA than thirty five percent of
other customers. Neanderthals, of course, being prehistoric humans who interbred
with modern humans before vanishing around forty thousand years ago.
(41:32):
And this is, uh, you know, pretty amazing to me
because one of the traits that I may have inherited
from my Neanderthal ancestors is having a worse sense of direction.
H I have an awful, awful sense of direction. If
I did not have my Google Maps, I would never
find my way anywhere. Uh. And that is just the fact.
So now I can at least blame you know, my
(41:53):
my my Neanderthal brethren on that I got more I
think more. Uh then then just again, this is all
rated to the average. Part of the reason these tests
are more specific now is because there are more people
have participated exactly. And that's the thing. Once you you know,
become a part of the twenty three and me kind
(42:14):
of community, you are, you know, and and you you
are able to there's boxes you can check to keep
all your data private and all of that, you know,
at least in terms of, like, you know, having your
identity associated with it. That's an important thing to consider,
and that is absolutely a thing that they can do,
and then they do do. But my breakdown is a
little bit dull, but still a lot more detailed than
it was when I took it previously. When I say dull,
(42:37):
I just mean um, ninety eight point six percent Northwestern
European and that breaks down to sixty point three percent
British and Irish. Uh. And then they go into a
little more specifics with Glasgow City the UK and County
Dublin plus eighteen other regions and I've got thirty point
five percent French and German and two point eight percent
(42:57):
broadly Northwestern European, with the dash of Ashkenazi jew uh
ancestry thrown in their point. Welcome, welcome. Yeah, the this
stuff is fascinating. One one thing that we really enjoyed
that uh, we just learned before recording this. I found
a really interesting thing in the paternal Haplow group that
(43:18):
uh lad us to one last short story. We want
to tell a man named Neal of the Nine Hostages.
We don't speak this language, so maybe mispronouncing it. Uh.
Here's what we found in twenty three and me quote
perhaps more myth in man. Noil of the Nine Hostages
is said to have been a king of Tara, northwestern
(43:40):
Ireland in the late fourth century CE. His name comes
from the tale of nine hostages that he held from
the regions he ruled over, though the legendary stories of
his life may have been invented hundreds of years after
he died. Genetic evidence suggests that the we Kneil dynasty
again apologies to Native speakers whose name means descendants of Neil,
(44:00):
did in fact trace back to just one man who
bore a branch of hap blue group r M two
six nine. These descendants ruled to various degrees as kings
of Ireland from the seventh to the eleventh century CE.
I am descended from them, and just before we started
to rule, we found out, Noel, you're descended from the
(44:21):
same dude brother. That's Cheered, right, and that's Um again.
That's that common ancestor for us goes to ten thousand
years ago. I think that must be why we haven't
seen each other at the reunions. Must be. It's pretty interesting. Um.
(44:43):
There is also a lot of health data that you
can clean from this twenty three and me test various
variants that show up in your your you know, your
genome that can point to certain risk factors, you know,
for diseases. Mine was pretty solid. Didn't have anything that
was outlying that should be like a watch out. I
(45:04):
think I I am a little bit more than averagely
predisposed to age related macular degeneration, which is the most
common cause of irreversible vision laws among older adults. Which
is funny considering that I have really, really good vision. Um,
maybe it's just as I get older, it's gonna it's
gonna wane on me. But everything else was pretty solid.
(45:25):
I uh, you know, that's that's funny because I have
a couple of things that stood out to me as
only one seemed woefully incorrect. My caffeine consumptional I am
likely to consume less and no, Max, you guys know
that is fundamentally untrue. I beat the odds on that
(45:46):
one because I drink way too much coffee. But overall,
this stuff was really exciting for us and and nol
I'd love for you to talk a little bit about
just how were you surprised by how much more as
you said, granular, this became in just how many years
has it been? What's our time interval here? At least
(46:08):
four years? Um? Yes, I was, Oh my gosh, there's
even a thing with an asparagus p detection was as
we know that you did the thing for for I
believe the stuff of Jus. No, maybe that was Josh,
but it was one of the shows that you wrote
for and worked on. All people's pa smell like asparagus
when they eat it, only some people can't smell it. Uh,
(46:29):
and and under traits here there's a section for asparagus
odor detection and I am listed as likely can't smell
and boy can I ever? That is so interesting. So yeah,
it's incredibly granular. Um like things like cleft chin or
having dan driff. I've got a chance of getting dan
drift early hair loss likely no hair lost, baby, I
(46:49):
can tell you that I've got a good head of hair.
Very excited. I've got a slightly higher than average odds
of disliking cilantro. I know there are a lot of
people who are probably one rain about that I don't
flush when I drink alcohol. I have the red face
that happens. Uh. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff here,
and I think we're both surprised by it. Uh. And
(47:12):
I'm also interested in seeing where the technology goes in
the future. One of the big takeaways I learned from
this is that if you take a if you take
this test again, you might find even more information. Would
you say that's fair? I think so. Yeah. And so
that's where we end today's story. We went from the
(47:34):
ancient past all the way to two where people are
still asking what makes me me? What makes you you?
What can I learn about myself and apply It's not
just the past but the president and the future, And
with companies like twenty three and me, it's easier than
ever before. So thanks thanks to the good folks, to
three and me, Thanks all I felt ridiculous historians for
(47:56):
tuning in, And thanks of course to Mr Max Williams. Max,
are you gonna? Have you ever taken a DNA test?
I have not taken a DNA test for mostly because
I'm just kind of paranoid about it. But Noelso that
part about it. He's your identity, like like secret stuff.
So maybe I will you know, and find out that
maybe I'm related to that same guy that y'all are
all related to. And Hey, if you like this episode,
(48:20):
why not check out some of our other fellow podcasters
on the iHeart podcast network, like Many Questions with Many Driver,
or Prodigy with our buddy loll Berlanti, or a Hundred
Words with Andrew cannon Um, where they these hosts share
their journeys to health discovery or you know, finding out
what makes them them or we we are you you
(48:41):
all the same stuff that we talked about from a
completely different angle. You can find their episodes in the
spit feed Um, which is another show hosted by a
dear friend of ours, Barrattunda Thurston on the I Heart
Radio app or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Yes
Sam of course, our good pals Annie and Sam over
its Stuff, Mom Never Told You and Waiting on Reparations
(49:04):
with our pals, Dope Knife and Link with Franco. Thanks
also to Jonathan Strickland Dak the Quister, Thanks of course
to Alex Williams, Christopher Hasiotis and E's Jeff Got Absolutely
and you know what, We'll see you next time, folks.
(49:25):
For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!