Keolu Fox. TED2016 Fellows. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED

This post is part of an ongoing series of interviews with the 2017 class of National Geographic Emerging Explorers.

GeneticistKeolu Foxis one of 14 National Geographic Emerging Explorers for 2017. This group is beinghonored for the way its members explore new frontiers and find innovative ways to remedy some of the greatest challenges facing our planet. The 2017 class of Emerging Explorers will be honored at the National Geographic Explorers Festival in Washington, D.C. in June.

Keolugrew up in Hawaii, immersed in thestrong cultural traditions and worldview of his native Hawaiian mother. His father grew up all over Israel and North Africa, and is of general European heritage, and had what Keolu describes as an untraditional education. He passed on that world-wide perspective and exposed the family to a lot of broad ideas early on. Those ideastook an interesting shape as Keolu studied archaeology and genome sciences, and began to formulate a new way of looking at human genetics.

Indigenous people, he realized, hold incredible stories of human adaptation to every environment and social situation on Earth. By empowering them to be more involved in genetic research and analysis, hes hoping to start a new chapter in our understanding of all the richness encoded in human DNA. And ultimately to put it to use for the better health and livelihood of everyone.

What is it that you hope to learn from studying the genomics of native people?

Its not specifically about native people in America or Yakut people in Siberia. While these are all fascinating populations of people, the thing that makes them fascinating for meis natural selection. Theres a treasure trove of information in theirDNAthat could benefit all of humanityand its the responsibility of scientific investigators to ensure that exploration of indigenous peoples genomes benefits that community as well, financially or otherwise.

We should be askingwhat makes people, human beings, extraordinary? What makes these people special? Why are these people adapted to high elevations? There are people from Greenland that have had this specific diet of marine mammals,high fat as well as omega 3. Why are we not seeing cardiovascular disease inthat population?

Why do the Sami people of Finland have protective genetic variation against heart disease? Whatever happens in terms of natural selection that results in that population having this protection could yield treatment for all humanity.

Meanwhile the rest of the field is functioning in a world where 95 percentof clinical trials are in white people. When youre looking at the percentages of genomes that have been sequenced, theyre not sequencing whatI would call the most interesting populations. Its just not happening. But there are real limitations for why its not happening.

Part of it is due to the communities we work with, and when you get a feeling for that you understand why that is.

So does it help that you have recent indigenous heritage of your own?

You are your culture, and you are your experiences. Soif youre trying to gain the trust of communities and you know the music theyre listening to, you can move the right way, you look the right way that certainly helps. You cant look like a scientist, right? You have to belike a human being. You cantbe your classic, traditional western lab-coat-wearing, glasses-wearingscientist. This is a different animal.

So there are very few people that have that skillset. It doesnt mean Im the best scientist in genomics, certainly not. And it doesnt mean Im the most authentic native but I happen to be in the right place at the right time.

Is there a way that this shift can happen more broadly?

You have elite educational institutions that are educating indigenous people and you can pass the torch that way. Thats what enables capacity building. Because then we go into our communities and we think about things in novel ways. We dont think about science the same way because were culturally different. The way we approach science is different.

Science is a cultural thing. As much as we like to imagine it as objective,its like a musical idea. The same central note patterns will take on entirely new colors and dimensions when being exploredby a different culture. Maybe that perspective is becoming more common.

I think weve known that for a long time. This indoctrination-by-academy way of approaching sciencehas been effective, but what is it really yielding? Its certainly not yielding innovation that is powerful for indigenous people. it doesnt enable us to recombine indigenous and western knowledge in novel approaches, solutions, treatments, etc.

As an example, the biggest thing that doctors should do is make people feel comfortable. Why do you need to look at the top of a chart to know your patients name?

So to me, thats a huge problem that science needs to overcome. But you are looking at the next generation of people that are going to occupy those spaces. We have met all the qualifications.

Is it difficult to move comfortably in both the western scienceand indigenous worlds?

One thing thats important here is how connected we are with social media and all that. Did you follow what happened in Hawaii with the whole construction of this giant telescopeon Mauna Kea? It was so interesting. For me, obviously Im a laboratory scientist, but if its at the cost of our community, and its at the cost of our aina [land],then I dont think that we should make decisions like that. Its a conservation sort of question. These are negotiations,and Im not an astrophysicist,but I have to step up on behalf of my community and get flown into this stuff.

The only thing I know how to do is speak from my heart. Keep it real.

When you think of yourself at work, what do you picture?

Its variable. One project will involve shipping resources, negotiating, engaging communities thatI havent met before. Making sure that were being respectful of indigenous peoples values and their culture. And then theres the hardcore science aspect of actually collecting information, making sure people understand what we do.The field stuff is always kind of unpredictable, but probably the most fun thing,I would say.

And then I work on other things where its just beingat work,conducting experimentsand thats just moving clear fluids around and like bro, thats not that exciting.It is exciting when you get results and theres this sort of a-ha moment were youre searching for something and you confirm your hypothesis. Thats a very western approach.Its very cool. And then you have the sort of computational aspect. The loads of frustrating time spent writing code that works. and then you have these miracle moments when it does work. HopefullyI can hire people to do that for me in the future. There are students coming up.

And what is that lab work actually like?

I have a bunch of projects that Im either collaborator on or Im the primary. One of them is leprosy based. Another were using genome editing to actually take variation thats been discovered in diverse populations and sort of copy and replace that into cell lines and then observe its function.

Lets say we find a genetic variant, and we think its involved in influencingsomething importantand its only found in Papua New Guinea or something. Well you can take that and do knock-in variations in human or mouse cells.

Ultimately we want to sequence interesting peopleoutliersbecause they have interesting genomes. And they will allow us to discover interesting things that have a bearing on the way that we understand biology.

How are new technologies helping you with this mission?

Mobile genome sequencing.A lot of times in indigenous communities what we have is what people sometimes call helicopter genomics or vampire genomics. Scientists come, get their data, go back to the lab, make discoveries, make tenure track, get in that new tax bracket, get the new BMW, put their kid in private school, and the cycle continues.

So for me its really important to de-black-box the technology to create transparency about whats going on. With mobile genome sequencing, you can actually bring the hardware to a community and with cloud computation you can actually perform your massively parallel sequence alignment and adaptation on-site, where you want, as long as you can acquire access to the internet (or sometimes you wont even need that to happen).

Its a game changer. It really is a game changer. And it think its going to have a profound bearing on the democratization of genome sequencing and genomic technologies.

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National Geographic Emerging Explorer Keolu Fox Uncovers the Hidden Treasures of Human Adaptation - National Geographic