Ancestry of a Geneticist
March 2021
“You know what thongs are? Flip flops. That’s an important one to know. When Australians talk about thongs, they’re things you wear on your feet. A rubber? It’s an eraser, not a condom. Australians come here and say, ‘could I borrow a rubber?’” He laughs. “One of the ones I got confused about when I came here, I told people that I was going to put on a jumper and people looked at me really weirdly. A jumper is a sweater!”
When he talks about Australia, decades leave David Haig’s face.
“Australians tend to shorten all polysyllabic words. Cozzis meaning swimming costumes. You give Chrissie prezzies. Will I see you this arvo? Afternoon.” When I Google these words after our interview, I learn that arvo is not to be confused with avo, meaning avocado, and that Australians will give you a hard time if you mess it up. “Rego is the registration for your car. They say that the reason for the Australian accent is because there’s so many flies.” He sweeps his hand back and forth in front of his face in what I learn is called the ‘Australian salute.’ I ask if the flies bite. “No, the bushflies don’t bite. But we do have mozzies.” I assume this means mosquitos, and I feel like I’m starting to understand.
I first met Professor Haig as a student in his freshman seminar, “Where are You From? Ancestry in the Age of Genomics.” The class was taught in his office, a corner room large enough for a conference table and a whiteboard. When I walked in on the first day of class, I was intimidated. The room clearly belonged to an esteemed professor. But it quickly became a welcoming place, in no small part due to a plate of cookies that appeared on the table before each class. The walls were covered by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, with additional books stacked above each row and on the corners of his desk. He has read most of them and has written two.
When we talk this time, however, he’s in his basement. These walls are adorned only with a framed map of Cambridge. I wonder how many books he was able to bring home when he left his office last March. Until this week, we had only spoken once since the pandemic began. I had called him when I was applying for a Fulbright to Australia because he is the only person I know with any connection there. Our call that was meant to compare the country’s research universities quickly became a series of stories of his childhood. A few months later, when I was looking for people to interview for a piece I am writing about Home, he’s the first person to come to mind. I call him back, and after a few more stories, I quickly began to do what every fellowship advisor warned me not to do – fall in love with a country before I have funding to go there.
Professor Haig left Australia at age 32 to go to England for a post-doctoral program. As he is quick to explain, “I had no intention not of returning home. After 2 years I was ready to move back, I had a job interview at ANU (Australia National University). It was quite organized; we were just negotiating how I would go there.” But his well-laid plans would not last long. “And then, I got a phone call saying I got a fellowship at Harvard.” A fellowship turned into a faculty position, which turned into a tenure position, and he has been at Harvard ever since. He is now a leading researcher with the department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, which includes a prime lab location next to the emu exhibit in Harvard’s Museum of Natural History. The emu is the largest bird endemic to Australia; the birds are flightless but can run over 30 mph. Of course, the emus next to his office are taxidermied. They are not going anywhere.
While Professor Haig did not know at the time that his decision to go to England would be the end of his time in Australia, leaving the country was still very difficult because it meant saying goodbye to his grandmother. She was dying, and this would be their last visit together. He told me about their final conversation.
“I knew this was the last time I was going to see her and – to give this background – she had been born in South Africa and had arrived in Australia at about four years old, and then had never left the country. And I told her, ‘I’m going to England, and I was told in the classroom that England was the mother country and things like that, but I feel no connection whatsoever to that. This is the country I know.’ And she looked at me. She was a very righteous woman through everything, and she said, ‘David, I have never considered myself to be an Australian.’ She considered herself to be British, even though she had never been there. And she perceived Britain in many senses as superior to Australia. So she in 80 years had never felt in some sense that this, Australia, was her identity. It was British. Whereas for me, and I’ve thought about this, I know all about genetics, but I feel myself much closer to the aboriginal inhabitant of Australia. I walked through that bush, I slept in the caves where they slept and knew the same countryside. Identification of home is what you have memories of, what you love and identify with, things like that.”
For a long time, genetic ancestry and lived experience of home were often one and the same. People were born, had children, and died in the same place for many generations. In graveyards throughout Europe, whole families rest in the same plot with new generations being added for hundreds of years. Professor Haig has walked through these graveyards. They give him a sense of “attachment to your ancestry of home.” For those buried here, their whole world was this town and these neighbors. He explains that this attachment has consequences for how much people are willing to invest in their surroundings. I must look slightly confused, so he gives an example.
“If you think about Geneva, all the cathedrals, when they were being built, the people who were building them had a fair chance that their children and their grandchildren would be here in this city enjoying what they were doing.” But now, that is changing. “Now, I’m born in Canberra and I’m married to a person who was born in Maria, Brazil. These immense distances, they’re a very common occurrence now. My ancestors weren’t here and my descendants won’t be.”
While it may be common to move during our lives, I cannot personally relate to the idea of not raising my kids in the same place that I was raised. On my mom’s side of the family, I am the 4th generation to live in Boston, and I plan on there being a 5th. This city is a part of me, and whatever happens to her in the future – coastal flooding, an exodus of families to the suburbs, racial tension – I plan to be here through it.
However, in many ways, disconnecting emotional ideas of home and ancestry from our daily lives may be beneficial because it frees us of feeling like we have to do certain things over others. Professor Haig describes how considering how quickly the number of ancestors we have rises shows that our genetic stories may not be as unique as we think they are, and it does not make as much sense to defend their unique merits as we think it does. “The number of ancestors you have doubles in each generation, you know. 2 parents, 4 grandparents, and soon you have more ancestors than there were people alive. We’re all related to individuals in the past by many many many different groups. They’re our great-great-great-great-whatever-grandparent a thousand different ways. You can say we’re inbred in some sense. When somebody says, ‘oh 10 generations back I was related to the King of France,’ I tend to feel that 10 generations back, 60% of the population was related to some king or other. Pride in ancestry is a curious phenomenon.” And a phenomenon that often leads to discrimination, stereotypes, and worse. I understand his desire to disconnect, at least partially, and his frustration at the prominent role we give to such a messy discipline.
But still, I cannot help asking him the impact ancestry has on his daily life. Aside from being a geneticist, of course.
“My genes don’t care about me. They’ve evolved my misery and depression; undesirable traits and desirable traits are all adaptations that move me forward. They don’t care about me personally, so I should respect them, but I don’t care about them. I care about my children, that’s one of the deepest things coming from my past. But, as a geneticist, I am not really hung up on genetic ancestry.”
But he does think about the concept of home. Next year, he will have spent more time living outside of Australia than inside. I asked where he considers home, expecting him to say Australia.
He answers, “I understand the rhythm there. Yeah, in some ways I’m more relaxed there.” He pauses, with a sad look in his eyes. “But I left 31 years ago. A lot changes in that time.”
“What you feel real affection toward are things that you knew when you were young. That’s very much home. So when I go back to Australia, it’s particularly the birds and the plants and things that I knew so well. And so for a long time, Australia was home. But now, you know, now when I go back it’s changed so much and I don’t have any family living in the city anymore so it’s ceasing to feel like home. And now when I fly into Logan Airport and catch the taxi, and I’m coming up the Charles river on Storrow drive, I feel like I’m coming home.”
But Australia remains a part of him.
“It’s the countryside around Canberra which is still my model of beauty. When I go back to Canberra, there’s a certain smell of the place, eucalyptus leaves, and things like that. People talk about the wonderful, lush greenness of the English countryside. And when I went there, you know, yeah it’s fine, but I’m used to sort of gray-green foliage and brown. My doctoral advisor’s wife was from northern California where there were pine forests. When I go into a pine forest I find that it just doesn’t grab me the way the Australian woodland does.”