Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (56 page)

Recent breakthroughs in the science of genetics have had a huge effect on the world, with applications in medicine, agriculture, law enforcement, and much more. Genetics has also dramatically changed a popular (and growing) pastime: genealogy. Relatively inexpensive DNA tests for
genetic markers
that can reveal familial and ethnic lineages are available to anyone who wants one. And the science behind it, while immensely complex in its details, is basically pretty simple.

Human DNA is alike in every person—but it’s not
exactly
alike. Individuals can acquire
mutations
along the way. This can have many different results: Some genetic mutations cause disease, some affect eye or hair color, some do nothing at all. The ones that are used for racial testing are, primarily, ones that have no known effects.

So…say a guy named Bob acquired such a mutation 1,000 years ago. Bob had 10 kids—and he passed that mutation down to them. They each had 10 kids—and they all got the mutation, too. This kept happening over many generations, and today there are tens of thousands of people with that specific “Bob” mutation. And they’re the only ones on Earth that have it. Well, that’s exactly what happened countless times in human history.

DNA and fossil evidence suggests that modern
Homo sapiens
(that’s us) first appeared in northeastern Africa roughly 200,000 years ago. Their descendants began migrating out of Africa about 60,000 years ago, spreading in different directions at different times. Travel then wasn’t as easy as it is today, so those different groups of travelers didn’t interact biologically (or in any other way) for very long periods of time. The people who would go on to become the Native Americans, for example, wouldn’t interact with the people who went on to become the Europeans for many thousands of years.

In the same way, that long genetic separation resulted in entire groups of peoples acquiring DNA mutations that were unique to them. The people who became the Native Americans acquired mutations long after they got to the Americas. That means the Europeans, naturally, didn’t have those mutations—they had unique mutations of their own. This is also true of the many different peoples who were separated for long periods of time over the millennia. When means of travel progressed and those long-separated groups of peoples
did
start interacting, and having children together, those mutations started being shared. And now—we can find them.

As we said, there are relatively inexpensive tests you can take today that look for these particular genetic markers. One kind of test shows “genetic percentages” of your ethnic heritage. The four very broad ethnic groupings determined by the tests:

African:
Peoples of sub-Saharan Africa.

European:
This group is much broader than it appears, and includes peoples from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

East Asian:
Japanese, Chinese, Mongolian, Korean, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander populations.

Native American:
Peoples that migrated from Asia to populate North, Central, and South America.

A result of such a test might say that you have 40% European, 40% African, 18% Asian, and 2% Native American heritage. Or it might say 90% Native American and 10% East Asian. It all depends on your ancestors.

Since such tests have become available and affordable to the public, they’ve been particularly popular among African Americans, whose ancestors came to America as slaves, as they usually have little or nothing in the way of written records to help track their family trees. In 2006 Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Studies, produced and hosted a PBS documentary entitled
African American Lives
with just this in mind. “If we could,” he said, “trace their family tree back, back beyond slavery, analyze their DNA and tell them where their ancestors came from in Africa, what a great contribution that would be to education.”

Gates asked several prominent African Americans, including Oprah Winfrey and actors Chris Tucker and Whoopi Goldberg, to submit to genealogical DNA testing. They all got very interesting results.

Oprah Winfrey
believed she was of Zulu descent (the Zulu people now reside in South Africa). She also believed she had no Native American or European ancestors. She was mostly wrong. The tests showed her to have 89% sub-Saharan African, 8% Native American, 3% East Asian, and 0% European heritage. Regarding her sub-Saharan ancestors, Gates told her that she descends from the Kpella tribe in what is now the West African nation of Liberia; the Bamileke people, in modern-day Cameroon; and the Nkoya people in Zambia.

Chris Tucker
guessed he was descended from a tribe in modern-day Ghana. Wrong. His test showed 83% sub-Saharan African,
10% Native American, and 7% European descent. And the African link was to the Mbundu tribe in present-day Angola. Gates said the link was so strong that it was likely that a direct ancestor of Tucker’s had been taken into slavery in Angola sometime in the 1700s. (The show featured Tucker going to Angola and meeting with his distant relatives.)

Quincy Jones
said that family stories told of Native American ancestry, and thought he had probably a little European blood, too. Result: 66% sub-Saharan African, 34% European, and 0% Native American. His father’s line, Jones was shocked to learn, showed
only
European descent, while his mother’s showed a connection to the Tikar people of modern Cameroon.

Mae Jemison
, the first black female astronaut to go into space, was told she has 84% sub-Saharan African, 13% East Asian, 3% Native American, and 0% European ancestry. She was very surprised to learn about her East Asian heritage, and said it probably stemmed from the fact that in the 1800s many Chinese workers were brought into her family’s native Mississippi.

Whoopi Goldberg
expressed her frustration at never knowing exactly where her family had come from. “You sit with white folks who say, ‘My family goes back to County Cork,’ or, ‘My family goes back to Sicily,’” she told Gates. “And you say, ‘Umm, I don’t know, I think Florida.’” Goldberg was told that she had 92% sub-Saharan African, 8% European, and 0% Native American heritage, and that she was related to the Pepel and Bayote people, who live near the Atlantic Coast in the nation of Guinea-Bissau.

The Host:
Maybe the most surprising results came for the host of the show. Gates, one of the country’s leading African-American scholars, found out that he has 50% sub-Saharan African—and 50% European ancestry. He had no idea. “I’m going to have to give up my job!” he joked. “I’m descended from that African kingdom known as Northern Europe!”

“It’s surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.”

—
Barbara Kingsolver

We tend to take our food products for granted. Turns out there are some pioneers we’ve never heard of whom we ought to thank
.

J
ULIUS MAGGI
Maggi (1846–1912) owned a flour business in Switzerland and had a lot of opinions about food. For one, he believed people should eat more legumes (such as peas, beans, lentils, chick peas), and for another, he was concerned that women who worked in factories didn’t have enough time or money to cook traditional meals for their families. He was so well known for his vociferous opinions that in 1882 the Swiss Public Welfare Society asked him to do a study of the national diet. What he learned led him to invent a convenient—and affordable—powdered pea-and-bean instant soup mix. It was such a success that a few years later he came up with a bigger idea: powdered “bouillon” concentrate (the word comes from the French word for “boil,” because that’s what you do with bouillon—mix it with boiling water to make instant broth). The bouillon concentrate came in packets or in capsules…until 1906, when Maggi figured out how to compress the concentrate into cubes. Before the invention of bouillon cubes, it took hours of boiling meat, vegetables, and other ingredients to make the broth that was the basis for soup; after the cubes were invented, making a pot of soup was a piece of cake. In fact, the cubes used to be called “pocket soup” or “portable soup.” We still use identical bouillon cubes today, and the Maggi company still makes them.

Jepson emigrated to America from Sweden in 1925 and brought his engineering and inventing skills to the Sunbeam division of the Chicago Flexible Shaft Company. In addition to redesigning toasters and other existing appliances, he came up with a countertop food mixer, dubbed the Sunbeam Mixmaster. It was marketed to the public in 1930, and was an immediate sensation. A complete departure from the few earlier single-beater mechanical mixers, Jepson’s design had a motor inside a horizontal housing that
extended out over a mixing bowl, with two detachable, interlocking beaters. Sound familiar? His design was so brilliant that it has hardly changed in more than 75 years.

For centuries, Western scientists identified four basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. In Eastern countries there was a fifth, called
umami
, often described as savory or meaty. In 1908 Professor Kikunae Ikeda, a chemist at Tokyo Imperial University, isolated (from kombu, a kind of seaweed) a white salt called monosodium glutamate, or MSG, which, he discovered, gave that meaty, savory umami flavor to other foods. He called the flavor quality “deliciousness” and named the salt
ajinomoto
—“the essence of taste.” Ikeda acquired a patent to produce MSG, and a product called Aji-No-Moto (extracted from wheat gluten instead of seaweed) was first marketed in 1909. Referred to as a “flavor enhancer,” it was first produced in the United States in 1934; by 1947 it was on the market as Ac’cent. MSG is still a common flavor enhancer in snack foods, fast foods, condiments, powdered and canned soups, canned vegetables, processed meats, and instant noodles.

Related Fact:
At one time “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome”—dizziness, headache, numbness, and other symptoms—was a condition thought to be linked to MSG. Many people were convinced that the syndrome was caused by an overuse of MSG by cooks in Chinese restaurants. However, research has failed to establish any real connection between MSG and the symptoms described by diners.

In 1858 Mason patented a new and reliable kind of canning jar and lid, known today as the Mason Jar. Until that time, farm families could only depend the limited variety of produce and meat they could store in root cellars, pickle barrels, and smokehouses to get them through the barren winter. The reusable glass Mason jar had a screw-on zinc lid that formed a hermetic seal, making it possible to preserve a much greater variety of fruits, vegetables, jams, relishes, and other foods without risk of spoilage. Unfortunately, Mason’s patent expired before he could profit from it. He died a pauper in New York City in 1902.

Who among us can honestly say that our career was never in the toilet? Here’s a look at a guy who
wants
it that way
.

A
rtiste:
Paul Walker, an Irish director and playwright
Notable Achievement:
Writing a play that takes place entirely in a restroom—and actually staging it in one.

Flushed with Success:
After writing his award-winning play
Ladies & Gents
, which portrays the dark side of Dublin life in the 1950s as seen from the inside of a restroom (based on a true story), Walker staged the drama as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival. It met with success there, and then toured the restrooms of Europe before Walker brought it to New York’s Central Park in March 2008. City Parks & Recreation bureaucrats considered his proposal for more than a year before finally giving him permission to use the facilities near Bethesda Fountain, near the center of the park.