The British Council – SRM Lecture series saw yet another prominent scientist deliver the Great Talks lecture at SRM IST, on the relationship between Anthropology and Archaeology.
Taking cross-disciplinarity to a new high, Professor Turi King, Professor of Public Engagement and Reader in Genetics and Archaeology, University of Leicester, spoke about her work that connected Anthropology, the study of humans, early hominids and primates, such as chimpanzees and Archaeology, the study of the ancient and recent human past through material remains.
Her riveting talk to undergraduate students at the School of Biotechnology at SRM IST gave a fascinating oversight of the myriad applications of DNA fingerprinting.
Professor Turi King, a Geneticist of repute, started her academic career reading Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. It was here, that she became interested in how genetics could be used to answer archaeological and historical questions. She then went on to write an award-winning Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics examining the link between 'British hereditary surnames and the Y chromosome'. Since then, all of her work has combined genetics with history, archaeology, geography, forensics, and epidemiology. “DNA fingerprinting has been used as a way to trace surnames down through the generations, to prove links between families who didn’t know they were related or to show that a particular surname may have more than one origin”, she said. She spoke about how Genetic Genealogy is now a booming business and traced some famous cases she’s been involved in like on Sir David Attenborough’s family and that of Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States. She also spoke about her path-breaking work on genetic analysis which led to the identification of the skeletal remains of King Richard III.
Dr. Turi’s intrepid journey into research in two unconnected fields was an inspiration for the budding geneticists to view the field of genetics in a wider dimension. It’s not just about research in Genomics or Gene manipulation the one could hope in excel in, the boundaries are broader and interdisciplinarity offers new horizons for professional and career advancement for the genetic scientist.
