{"id":30080,"date":"2025-09-19T02:51:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T02:51:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/30080\/"},"modified":"2025-09-19T02:51:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T02:51:06","slug":"his-labs-ancient-dna-studies-are-rewriting-human-history-harvard-gazette","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/30080\/","title":{"rendered":"His lab\u2019s ancient DNA studies are rewriting human history \u2014 Harvard Gazette"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since 2012, geneticist David Reich<\/a> and his team of researchers have been studying DNA from living and ancient people to probe mysteries surrounding the origins of human life. But the future of their work faces uncertainty after the Trump administration\u2019s mass cancellation of nearly $2.7 billion in federal funding grants to Harvard.<\/p>\n

Reich and his collaborators have published 114 scientific papers<\/a> through a National Institutes of Health grant that has been renewed three times over the past 13 years. The published papers have covered a range of subjects from the genetic origin of Indo-European languages<\/a> to the formation of the early English gene pool<\/a> to the genetic history of the pre-contact Caribbean people<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Reich\u2019s research has contributed to the discovery<\/a> that Neanderthals interbred with ancestors of both modern Europeans and Asians between 55,000 and 40,000 years ago, and that modern humans today carry genetic makeup from both Neanderthals and Denisovans<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The team is also working on reconstructing the demographic history of human population growth and on producing a new version of the world\u2019s published ancient DNA database<\/a>, which contains whole-genome data from more than 10,000 individuals.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe database has become a starting point for many papers in the field,\u201d said Reich, a professor of human evolutionary biology in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.<\/p>\n

When the news of the grant termination came, researchers were already working on hundreds of studies, mostly on people who lived in the last 10,000 years. The grant\u2019s third cycle, scheduled to end in 2026, provides support to develop new methods and tools for making ancient DNA accessible to scientists.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are not going into catastrophic\u00a0collapse,\u201d said Reich, \u201cbut\u00a0in the medium-term we won\u2019t be able to sustain this\u00a0research program without continued funding. Without NIH support, which has historically been\u00a0our largest source of support, it\u2019s hard to make even medium-term plans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reich\u2019s research at the moment continues with support from the University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled the federal cuts were illegal<\/a> and should be reinstated, but the government has vowed to appeal, and though Reich\u2019s grant has been added to a list of reinstated grants as of Sept. 12, funds appeared to still be on hold.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe patterns of variation that we observe in people today are, fundamentally, consequences of population history,\u201d said Reich. \u201cThey reflect population separations and mixtures. By analyzing variation in living and ancient people, we can understand how that variation arose.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since 2012, geneticist David Reich and his team of researchers have been studying DNA from living and ancient…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30081,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[254,2284,61,60,89,12420,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-30080","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-genetics","8":"tag-genetics","9":"tag-history","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-research","13":"tag-research-powers-progress","14":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}