This TED Talk features computational geneticist Janive Erlick, recorded live at TEDMed 2018.

People use the Internet for various reasons. It turns out that one of the most popular categories of websites,

it's something that people typically consume in private.

It involves curiosity, non-insignificant level of self-indulgence,

and center around recording the reproductive activities of other people.

Of course, I'm talking about genealogy.

The study of family history.

When it comes to detailing family history, in every family,

we have this person that is obsessed with genealogy.

Let's call him Uncle Bernie.

Uncle Bernie is exactly the last person you want to sit next to in Thanksgiving dinner because he will bore you to death with peculiar details about some ancient relatives.

But as you know, there is scientific side for everything.

And we found that Uncle Bernie's stories have immense potential for biomedical research.

We let Uncle Bernie and his fellow genealogists

to document their family trees through a genealogy website called genie.com.

When users upload their trees to the website, it scans the relatives,

and if it finds matches to existing trees,

it merges the existing and the new tree together.

The result is that large family trees are created

beyond the individual level of each genealogist.

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

we can crowds us the construction of a family tree of all humankind.

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