Tapu Misa: Genetic research can only benefit us all

Far be it for me to pick a fight with a national hero, let alone a god in the eyes of all the one-eyed golfing fanatics in my family. Woe betide me if I so much as hint at disagreeing with Michael Campbell.

As if I would. Anyone who out-swings Tiger Woods on his own course is entitled to opine in one interview that "a lot of Maori people as well as Pakeha, especially Maori I think, are quite lazy", and in another that Maori are "very much a race that sometimes gets lazy".

Being a person who sometimes gets lazy, I know where Michael is coming from. Indeed, some of my best friends are of a similarly slothful disposition - which is probably why I like them so much. I'm sure I'd warm to the workaholics as well, if I could only get them to sit still long enough to have a conversation.

And who said laziness was such a bad thing anyway? I seem to recall Kiri Te Kanawa once owning to a similar propensity for shirking work - and if, as the 2005 US Open champion says, "a lot" of Maori, Pakeha, and even Michael Campbell himself have been prone to laziness, it can't be all bad.

In fact, if French writers like Corrine Maier are to be believed, embracing laziness may well be the antidote to the culture of overwork and life-work imbalance that afflicts modern society and constricts family life.

In her book Bonjour Laziness: Jumping Off The Corporate Ladder, Maier explains how to "become impervious to manipulation" and "why it is in your best interests to work as little as possible".

The French are quite relaxed about the concept of under-working, preferring to trade big salaries and slavehood for a 35-hour working week, longer holidays and sanity.

Perhaps Polynesians are distantly related to the French. My ancestors may have spread themselves across the biggest expanse of ocean in the world, an endeavour that required a fair bit of gumption and get-up-and-go, but when it came to working on the white man's plantations for slave wages they displayed a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Perhaps it was laziness. More likely it was pride.

Either way, my forebears had an infuriating lack of interest in working any longer than it took to earn money for the things they couldn't grow or catch. Which is how we in Samoa ended up importing Chinese peasant labourers, and why Tana Umaga has Chinese ancestry.

All of which is no big deal any more, given that all Polynesians appear to have come from Taiwan just a few millennia ago.

According to two teams of researchers who worked independently of each other, one at Victoria University and the other at Mackay Memorial Hospital in Taipei, the genetic trail of Polynesians leads indisputably back to indigenous Taiwanese. .

Victoria University geneticists Geoff Chambers and Adele Whyte concluded so after finding that Polynesians and Aboriginal Taiwanese share the same alcohol gene.

Their research also concluded that Maori are descended from at least 56 women - a finding that the part-Maori Whyte saw as an affirmation of Maori oral history. She once told Australia's ABC that 56 was about the right number you'd have expected to have made the original trip on those seven waka of Maori mythology.

"It's a great feeling to be able to back up oral history with science. So science is kind of confirming what we already knew as Maori."

Indeed. So why the fuss over the American-sponsored Genographic Project, which is attempting to unravel our genetic histories and reveal how closely related we all are?

The project is being stone-walled by critics who accuse its scientists of imperialism and the exploitation of indigenous peoples.

Paul Reynolds, a postdoctoral fellow at the Auckland University-based National Centre of Research Excellence for Maori Development, told the Weekend Herald that such "race-based research could be manipulated and used for political benefit".

"This could link straight into what Don Brash wants to hear; that everybody comes from the same place, that we are all common and have common ancestors."

It could also greatly advance human knowledge. In our house, we want to know. We want to fill in the blanks and solve the puzzles.

It's true that Western scientists don't have an unblemished record in their dealings with indigenous peoples, but it seems myopic in the extreme to deny the benefits that genetic research offers all of us.

Take, for example, the McLeod whanau at Kimihauora in Tauranga. Faced with large numbers of their extended family dying of stomach cancer, the McLeods approached the Health Research Council in 1995 for help in recruiting a genetic research team.

That led to a partnership with the researchers from the Cancer Genetics Laboratory at the University of Otago in Dunedin - and eventually to the discovery of a gene mutation that not only helped the whanau, but also advanced stomach cancer research generally and helped 50 families around the world with different mutations of the same gene.

The whanau drove the process, compiling their own whakapapa, collecting tissue samples, and negotiating an agreement guaranteeing them culturally appropriate management and ownership of the samples, a shared patent for the genetic test and regular reporting by the scientists.

Proving, I think, that you can have your gene research and be culturally staunch too.

The New York Times reported that genetic screening tests were turning up surprising results. Many had thought of themselves as 100 per cent black or white or something else. But only a tiny fraction actually fell into that category.

"Ostensibly 'black' subjects, for example, found that as much as half of their genetic material came from Europe, with some coming from Asia as well. One 'white' student learned that 14 per cent of his DNA came from Africa - and 6 per cent from East Asia."

Genetic research may well end up supporting the oral histories of indigenous people - as Adele Whyte suggests - but even if it doesn't, does it really matter? In the end, its more important role may be in debunking some of our most fondly held ideas about race and human identity.