You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

When you think of resources on Earth, what do you think of?

Maybe you think about water or oil, timber perhaps.

What about data?

Our data, the information stored in our DNA.

Genome sequence data itself can be used and aggregated as a resource.

In that sense, it's no different than diamond mining, coal mining.

Like it is a resource, and in fact, we should start treating it as such and recognize its

value.

That's Kaleu Fox.

He's a professor at the University of California San Diego and a genome scientist.

I mean, I've been thinking about diversity and genetic variation for pretty much my whole

life as a Hawaiian person.

My Ohanna, my family, is from the big island of Hawaii, and this is a place that has just

tremendous biological diversity.

Over the years, Kaleu's worked on projects gathering and comparing DNA sequences, often

in hopes of finding a genetic cause of a disease or even developing a treatment.

But early on in his career, he noticed this research left a lot of people out.

Like the one time he realized none of the participants in a study were Polynesian.

And that made me extremely upset.

It was like the boat had left for the future of predictive and preventative medicine, and

my people weren't included on the boat.

...