Boston Celebrities Donate DNA for Genographic Project

by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted September 26, 2007 in DNA and Genealogy, Personalities with DNA

Twenty Boston celebrities will be participating in the Genographic Project. Of those donating their DNA:

• Actor Ben Affleck
• Mayor Thomas M. Menino
• Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart
• Soccer player Marshall Leonard
• TV meterologist Mish Michaels

Genographic Project participant radio talk show host Ramiro Torres:

I just want to give a big shoutout to haplogroup A and let anybody else know we are the best. I don’t care if you’re the mayor, or a soccer player, or Ben Affleck - unless you are in my group, you are nobody.

Funny but also not so funny. Could that be the way we’ll discriminate against each other in the future?

Back to the not so serious. If you’re interested in buying celebrity DNA for your own use, Think Geek will send you some of Bill Gates’s DNA for $0.99 and Geraldo Rivera’s for $0.01.

…what we can do is let you purchase the DNA of your favorite celebrity (geek or otherwise) and hope that at some point in the future you can put that DNA to good use! Imagine some of the future possibilities, like: Celebrity-Milkshakes(tm), Celebrity-Pets(tm) and even Celebrity-In-A-Mylar-Bag-Boardgame(tm)!

But you might want to think twice about using celebrity DNA for cloning:

A different scare scenario is a world filled with copies of famous people only. We’ll treat celebrity DNA like designer clothes, hankering for Michael Jordan’s genes the way we covet his Nike sneakers today. But even celebrity infatuation has its limits. People are not more taken with celebrities than they are with themselves. Besides, such a trend would correct itself in a generation or two, because celebrity is closely linked to rarity. The world seems amused by one Howard Stern, but give us a hundred or a million of them, and they’ll seem a lot less endearing.

For me, one Howard Stern is one too many!

HT: Genome Technology

Tags: genetics, genes, dna, celebrities, celebrity dna

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5 Comments »

Comment by Krissy Poopyhands

2007-09-26 18:41:31

And then I would have to go around with a great big knife and stab all the Howard Sterns.

I don’t have the time for that shit.

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Comment by Hsien-Hsien Lei, PhD

2007-09-26 18:46:50

I knew you were my kind of woman!

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Comment by NA

2007-09-27 03:57:34

I find the selling of genomes a bit disturbing. I don’t like the sound of that.

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Comment by Hsien-Hsien Lei, PhD

2007-09-27 16:51:53

NA, It’s very GATTACA….

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2007-09-28 08:02:06

[...] A, I can see some merit in what he says!  HT: Dana Waring at pgEd and EyeonDNA covered it here.  By the way, speaking of Dana, she and the Personal Genetics Education Project got a mention in [...]

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