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People use the internet
for various reasons.

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It turns out that one of the most
popular categories of website

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is something that people
typically consume in private.

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It involves curiosity,

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non-insignificant level
of self-indulgence,

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and centered around recording
the reproductive activities

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of other people.

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Of course I'm talking
about genealogy.

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(Laughter)

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The study of family history.

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When it comes to detailing family history,

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in every family we have this person
that is obsessed with genealogy.

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Let's call him Uncle Bernie.

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Uncle Bernie is exactly the last person
you want to sit next to

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in Thanksgiving dinner

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because he will bore you to death
with peculiar details

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about some ancient relatives.

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But as you know,

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there is a scientific side for everything,

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and we found that Uncle Bernie's stories

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have immense potential
for biomedical research.

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We let Uncle Bernie
and his fellow genealogists

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document their family trees through
a genealogy website called geni.com.

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When users upload
their trees to the website,

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it scans their relatives

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and if it finds matches to existing trees,

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it emerges the existing
and the new tree together.

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The result is that large family trees
are created beyond the individual level

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of each genealogist.

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Now, by repeating this process with
millions of people all over the world,

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we can crowdsource the construction
of a family tree of all humankind.

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Using this website,

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we were able to connect 125 million people

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into a single family tree.

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I cannot draw the tree
on the screens over here

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because they have less pixels

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than the number of people in this tree,

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but here is an example of a subset
of 6,000 individuals.

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Each green node is a person.

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The red nodes represent marriages,

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and the connections represent parenthood.

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In the middle of this tree,
you see the ancestors,

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and as we go to the periphery,
you see the descendants,

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and this tree has seven
generations approximately.

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Now, this is what happens
when we increase the number of individuals

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to 70,000 people,

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still a tiny subset
of all the data that we have.

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Despite that, you can already see
the formation of gigantic family trees

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with very many distant relatives.

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Thanks to the hard work
of our genealogists,

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we can go back in time
hundreds of years ago.

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For example, here is Alexander Hamilton

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that was born in 1755.

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Alexander was the first
US Secretary of the Treasury,

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but mostly known today
due to a popular Broadway musical.

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We found that Alexander has deeper
connections in the showbiz industry.

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In fact, he's a blood relative
of Kevin Bacon.

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(Laughter)

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Both of them are descendants
of a lady from Scotland

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who lived in the 13th century.

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So you can say that Alexander Hamilton

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is 35 degrees of Kevin Bacon genealogy.

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(Laughter)

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And our tree has millions
of stories like that.

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We invested significant effort
to validate the quality of our data.

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Using DNA, we found that .3 percent of
the mother-child connections in our data

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are wrong,

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which could match the adoption rate
in the US pre-Second World War.

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For the father's side,

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the news are not as good.

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1.9 percent of the father-child
connections in our data are wrong.

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And I see some people smirk over here.

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It is what you think.

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There are many milkmen out there.

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(Laughter)

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However, this 1.9 percent error rate
in patrilineal connections

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is not unique to our data.

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Previous studies found
a similar error rate

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using clinical-grade pedigrees.

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So the quality of our data is good,

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and that should not be a surprise.

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Our genealogists have a profound,
vested interest in correctly documenting

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the family history.

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We can leverage this data to learn
quantitative information about humanity,

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for example questions about demography.

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Here is a look of all our profiles
on the map of the world.

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Each pixel is a person
that lived at some point,

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and since we have so much data,

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you can see the contours
of many countries,

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especially in the Western world.

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In this clip, we stratified
the map that I've showed you

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basically of birth of individuals

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from 1400 to 1900

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and we compared it
to known migration events.

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The clip is going to show you
that the deepest lineages in our data

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go all the way back to the UK,

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where they had better record-keeping,

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and then they spread along
the routes of Western colonialism.

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Let's watch this.

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(Music)

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I love this movie.

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Now, since these migrations events
are giving the context of families,

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we can ask questions

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such as what is the typical distance
between the birth locations

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of husbands and wives?

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This distance plays
a pivotal role in demography,

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because the patterns on which
people migrate to form families

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determine how genes spread
in geographical areas.

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We analyzed this distance using our data,

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and we found that in the old days,

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people had it easy.

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They just married someone
in the village nearby.

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But the Industrial Revolution
really complicated our love life,

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and today with affordable flights
and online social media,

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people typically migrate
more than 100 kilometers

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from their place of birth
to find their soulmate.

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So now you might ask, OK,

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but who does the hard work
of migrating from places to places

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to form families?

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Are these the males or the females?

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We used our data to address this question,

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and at least in the last 300 years,

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we found that the ladies

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do the hard work of migrating
from places to places to form families.

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Now these results
are statistically significant,

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so you can take it as scientific fact
that males are lazy.

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(Laughter)

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We can move from questions
about demography

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and ask questions about human health.

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For example, we can ask to what extent
genetic variations account for differences

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in lifespan between individuals.

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Previous studies analyzed
the correlation of longevity

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between twins to address this question.

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They estimated that the genetic variations
account for about a quarter

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of the differences in lifespan
between individuals.

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But twins can be correlated
due to so many reasons,

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including various environmental effects

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or a shared household.

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Large family trees give us the opportunity
to analyze both close relatives,

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such as twins, all the way
to distant relatives, even fourth cousins.

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This way we can build robust models

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that can tease apart the contribution
of genetic variations

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from environmental factors.

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We conducted this analysis using our data,

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and we found that genetic variations
explain only 15 percent

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of the differences in lifespan
between individuals.

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That is five years, on average.

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So genes matter less than
what we thought before to lifespan,

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and I find it as great news,

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because it means that
our actions can matter more.

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Smoking, for example, determines
10 years of our life expectancy,

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twice as much as what genetics determines.

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We can even have more surprising findings

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as we move from family trees

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and we let our genealogists

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to document and crowdsource
DNA information.

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And the results can be amazing.

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It might be hard to imagine,
but Uncle Bernie and his friends

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can create a DNA forensic capabilities

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that even exceed
what the FBI currently has.

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When you place the DNA
on a large family tree,

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you effectively create a beacon

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that illuminates the hundreds
of distant relatives

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that are connected to the person
that originated the DNA.

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By placing multiple beacons
on a large family tree,

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you can now triangulate the DNA
of an unknown person,

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the same way that the GPS system

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uses multiple satellites
to find a location.

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The prime example
of the power of this technique

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is capturing the Golden State Killer,

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one of the most notorious criminals
in the history of the US.

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The FBI has been searching
For this person for over 40 years.

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They had his DNA,

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but he never showed up
in any police database.

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About a year ago, the FBI
consulted a genetic genealogist,

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and she suggested that they submit
his DNA to a genealogy service

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that can locate distant relatives.

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They did that,

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and they found a third cousin
of the Golden State Killer.

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They built a large family tree,

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scanned the different
branches of that tree

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until they found a profile
that exactly matched

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what they knew about
the Golden State Killer.

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They obtained DNA from this person
and found a perfect match

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to the DNA they had in hand.

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They arrested him
and brought him to justice

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after all these years.

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Since then, genetic genealogists

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have started working with
local US law enforcement agencies

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to use this technique
in order to capture criminals,

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and only in the past six months,

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they were able to solve
over 20 cold cases with this technique.

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The French Nobel Laureate André Gide
once wrote, "Families, I hate you!"

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(Laughter)

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And I think most of us
can relate to his words.

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Why dig around in the past
doing family history

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when the future is so bright and open?

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But luckily, we have people
like Uncle Bernie

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and his fellow genealogists
who love families

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and tirelessly study them.

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These are not amateurs
with a self-serving hobby,

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these are citizen scientists
with a deep passion to tell us who we are,

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and they know that the past
can hold a key to the future.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)