Let us widen the research net for ancient DNA to be of help

Human remains can reveal much but these studies are too narrow

- LISA JARVIS

In a paper published this week in Nature, part of a series of insights about ancient peoples, researchers compared thousands of ancient and modern genomes to unearth new information about multiple sclerosis (MS). The findings help scientists make the case that northern Europeans' elevated risk of MS is a 5,000-year-old relic of becoming sheep and cattle herders. Mutations that make some people more vulnerable to the neurological condition once had a useful function, protecting their ancestors from pathogens. In other words, in battling some diseases, we're up against thousands of years of evolution. No wonder finding good medicines is such a slog.

The work is an amazing tech feat, laying out a blueprint for how to use large sets of ancient genomes to probe the origins and spread of disease. And while that won't directly lead to new medicines, insights from ancient ancestors can be of treatment help. What new revelations about human health and disease might lie not in our own individual genomes, but in comparing our DNA to our ancient ancestors' or even to those of other species?