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Essay about Human Genome Project: We Are All One Race

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Whether you’re at basketball game or in the mall, you can see that people vary in size, skin color, and appearances. But did you know that no matter how different we all are as humans; we are just a single race. The variations that we see in everyday life are just physical differences but genetically humans are the same and “race” is term that has been used to distinguish human because of those physical differences. You may be wondering how one person from Canada and one person from Africa the same race, but it has been proven through the HGP (Human Genome Project). This project was led by scientist from all walks of the earth in order to try to understand and map the genetic structure of humans. They found that the term “race” is a false…show more content…
So in order to distinguish between groups they need a polymorphism that is located in all members of a group but missing in all members of another group. But humans have mixed too much for the differences to be present. Some polymorphisms have different frequencies and that is how they can roughly determine in which group a person belongs. They use a specific class of polymorphism that contains the Alus. Alus are pieces of DNA that are identical to one another. When an Alu infuses itself it will continue to stay there for generations, and it keeps getting transferred from one person to their offspring. So if they find two people with the Alu in the same location of each of their genome than it is certain that they have to be descendents from a common ancestor who also has the Alu in that same location in their DNA. There was an experiment held at the University of Utah, with a group of scientist, which used the 565 people and extracted 100 different Alus from each person. Their experiment concluded that they had 4 different groups of people. With this they discovered their country of origin and realized that to determine these they only needed about 60 Alus to have 90 percent accuracy. Some test concluded that some populations have experienced so much genetic influences that they cannot be placed into a specific group because of their genetic makeup.
Human Genome Project The HGP was begun in 1990 this was possible through funding by different
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