Rewritten in Our DNA: Measurements for Genome Editing

A woman in a lab coat (Samantha Maragh) looks at liquids in small vials.

By Samantha Maragh, leader of the Genome Editing Program in NIST's Biosystems and Biomaterials Division

I didn’t understand what people were asking me when I was a kid. The question would come in several different forms. Sometimes it was “What are you?” Other times it was “Where are you from?” I would answer with things I knew to be true, like “I’m a girl” or “I’m a person” or “I’m from Maryland,” in a sincere, but failed, effort to satisfy my questioner.

I later came to understand that these people actually wanted to know my ethnicity. I grew up in a stereotypical melting pot USA kind of place, otherwise known as Howard County, Maryland, where many neighbors and classmates were of various ethnic backgrounds. Even in this melting pot, I was different. I am of mixed ethnicity: My mom’s half is Afro-Caribbean by way of Jamaica, and my dad’s half is East Indian by way of the West Indies. I couldn’t be placed in one bin, and I was keenly aware from the questions I received that I was different. This made me want to understand this “otherness,” and that is what sparked my love of human genetics.