Carlos D.

Bustamante
Carlos D. Bustamante is an American population
geneticist, academic, and entrepreneur. He is currently Carlos D. Bustamante
chief executive officer of Galatea Bio, Inc., a company Alma mater Harvard University (B.A.,
he founded when a professor at Stanford University M.A., Ph.D.)
School of Medicine. Awards MacArthur Fellowship
Scientific career
Fields Biology/Population Genetics
Early life and education
Institutions Stanford University School of
Bustamante is a native of Venezuela who immigrated Medicine
to the United States at age seven.[1] He attended Cornell University
Harvard University, from which he graduated with a Thesis Maximum likelihood and
bachelor's and later a doctorate in biology,[2] along Bayesian methods for
with a M.S. in statistics. After completing his Doctoral studying selection using
studies, Bustamante went on to study at Oxford DNA sequence data (https://
University, focusing in Mathematical Genetics in 2001. hollis.harvard.edu/primo-expl
From 2002 to 2009, Bustamante was a faculty member ore/fulldisplay?docid=01HVD
at Cornell University, publishing numerous works _ALMA21219337548000394
during this time.[3] 1&context=L&vid=HVD2&lan
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He has published over 200 works in peer-reviewed Carlos%20D.%20Bustamant
journals. For his contributions to population genetics e&offset=0) (2001)
he was awarded, in 2010, a MacArthur Fellowship Doctoral Daniel L. Hartl
grant, for "mining DNA sequence data to address advisor
fundamental questions about the mechanisms of
Other academic Richard C. Lewontin
evolution, the complex origins of human genetic advisors Peter Donnelly
diversity, and patterns of population migration."[3]

Bustamante has said that he does not consider race to be a "meaningful way to characterize people",
commenting that "In a global context there is no model of three, or five, or even 10 human races. There is
a broad continuum of genetic variation that is structured, and there are pockets of isolated populations.
Three, five, or 10 human races is just not an accurate model; it is far more of a continuum model."[1] He
observed, "If I walk from Cape Horn all the way to the top of Finland, every village looks like the village
next to it, but at the extremes people are different."[1]

In 2013, Bustamante found a link between the most recent common ancestor for both males and females
in Homo sapiens. He found that there may be a link to the same time period and even the same region for
both Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve. This study rejected the idea that Mitochondrial Eve
may have lived well before Y-chromosomal Adam. The study concludes, however, that not all the genetic
material comes from these two ancestors and that the two never met and that most of the genome comes
from numerous other ancestors.[4]

In 2018, Bustamante carried out DNA testing of United States Senator Elizabeth Warren that concluded
that "the vast majority" of Warren's ancestry is European, but that "the results strongly support the
existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor six to ten generations ago."[5]

References
1. Rotman, David (October 15, 2018). "DNA databases are too white. This man aims to fix
that.: Carlos D. Bustamante's hunt for genetic variations between populations should help
us better understand and treat disease" (https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612278/dna-d
atabases-are-too-white-this-man-aims-to-fix-that/). MIT Technology Review. Retrieved
October 15, 2018.
2. "Carlos Bustamante: Professor of Biomedical Data Science, of Genetics and, by courtesy, of
Biology" (https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/Carlos_Bustamante). Stanford University.
Retrieved October 15, 2018. "Dr. Carlos D. Bustamante is an internationally recognized
leader in the application of data science and genomics technology to problems in medicine,
agriculture, and biology."
3. "Carlos D. Bustamante: Population Geneticist, Class of 2010" (http://www.macfound.org/fell
ows/844/). MacArthur Foundation. 2010. Retrieved October 15, 2018. "Carlos D.
Bustamante is a population biologist who mines DNA sequence data for insights into the
dynamics and migration of populations and the mechanisms of evolution and natural
selection. In studies of humans, Bustamante analyzes SNPs (sites of common variation in a
DNA sequence) from many individuals to infer changes in human populations and their
relationship to specific gene mutations. He compared SNPs in regions of DNA that are
translated into proteins with those in non-coding regions of the genome; from this analysis,
he inferred that between a third and a half of mutations that change protein composition are
lethal or produce weak negative selection, generating further understanding of a long-
standing question of population genetics. He has applied SNP-based methods to retrace the
history of species' domestication, both plants and animals; collaborative investigations of
Asian rice and dogs, for example, have provided clues about where and how long ago
humans domesticated these species. Bustamante has also teased out higher-resolution
reconstructions of human demographic and migration patterns using new data sets from
ethnically and geographically diverse samples. He and his colleagues have used DNA
markers to assess the impact of shared language and geographic obstacles on migration
patterns and genetic composition of human subpopulations in Europe, Africa, and Latin
America. Through his multifaceted research, Bustamante is developing a rigorous,
quantitative foundation for addressing fundamental questions about genetics and evolution
across species, about patterns of population migration, and about the complex origins of
human genetic diversity, before recorded history and since."
4. Quenqua, Douglas (2013-08-12). "New Studies Suggest an 'Adam' and 'Eve' Link" (https://w
ww.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/science/new-studies-suggest-an-adam-and-eve-link.html). The
New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 (https://search.worldcat.org/issn/0362-4331). Retrieved
2020-03-31.
 5. Linskey, Annie (October 15, 2018). "Warren releases results of DNA test" (https://www.bosto
nglobe.com/news/politics/2018/10/15/warren-addresses-native-american-issue/YEUaGzsef
B0gPBe2AbmSVO/story.html). Boston Globe. Retrieved October 15, 2018.

External links
Full Transcript: Dr. Carlos Bustamante, Professor of Biomedical Data Science and Genetics
at Stanford, on Sequenced (https://blog.color.com/full-transcript-dr-124ee12e1b1b)

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