When it comes to addressing the topic of Codes, Dr Keolu Fox didn’t have to reshape his research to fit the brief.
“It’s kind of cheating,” he says. “I work in genomics, and it’s the ultimate code. I want to try and honour Charles Darwin’s legacy, to the best of my ability.”
But Keolu’s approach to that code is anything but predictable. As an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, he leads a multidisciplinary research programme, bringing together anthropology, genomics and computer science. His overarching interest is in the ways in which the genome of Indigenous populations has been formed by their longstanding connection to a particular place, and in using that genetic information to respond to health challenges faced by specific communities.
“When we say ‘Indigenous culture’, we mean people that have been tethered to a place since time immemorial, and whose genomes were shaped by that place,” he explains.
“We know that the majority of genomes that we sequence are of Western European ancestry. We know that in clinical trials, 95% of them exclusively feature individuals of Western European ancestry. So in the first chapter of my career I was all about building capacity and advocating for precision medicine in minority or historically marginalised communities.”
As a senior advisor to the start-up company Variant Bio, Keolu has been at the forefront of rebalancing the relationship between Indigenous populations and global genetic data.
“As students of natural selection, as students of population genetics, you realise that geographically sequestered, geographically isolated communities like where I’m from, in Hawaii, or in Tibet and Nepal, with high elevation adaption, or Greenlandic Inuit, we are reflections of our environment, much like Darwin’s finches. And for those reasons, we are extraordinary. So we set out, with Variant Bio, to identify and exclusively recruit and sequence the genomes of, and partner with Indigenous communities.”
From the beginning, however, this goal was about more than making genetic information available. Instead, it’s about using the value of that information to the advantage of the communities themselves, both in terms of the research it enables, and in more tangible financial form. Following a $50 million investment from Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, the makers of Ozempic, Variant Bio ensued that the windfall was shared with those at the root of its success.
“We are giving back 4% of those proceeds to the Indigenous communities that participated and enabled our drug discovery process in the first place. Those communities, like in Tahiti where I work a lot, in the Pacific, they’re using those proceeds to buy back land from the French government, the exact same land that shaped their genomes in the first place. That’s a circular system, that’s Indigenous Futurism, and that’s how we make better drugs that speak to our people, and new intellectual property, and advance genomics. And it’s also a love letter to Charles Darwin and those initial thinkers in that space who prioritised natural selection.”
Ensuring that Indigenous communities are reflected and represented in the medical, intellectual and financial benefits of genomic research is only one part of the picture, however. Keolu is also outspoken in his belief that it is only by listening to Indigenous approaches that we can solve the existential problems facing humanity.
“If you’re not tethered to your culture, and your culture is domination, colonialism and capitalism, then all of your scientific questions will lead you in that direction. They’ll lead you towards optimising every technology, whether it’s genome sequencing or new forms of AI and deep learning, for profit and exponential growth. And that is not an Indigenous concept or construct. That’s not what we would optimise a knowledge system for. We would optimise things for circularity, for relationships, for harmony, for balance. And so, as we develop technologies and deploy them to answer scientific questions, optimising things for circularity and balance is essential. When we talk about an Indigenous future, that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about planning 10 generations, 100 generations in the future. Not just Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 profit earnings.”
This finds its ultimate expression in responses to the climate crisis, where Keolu sees Indigenous approaches as the only viable answer.
“As we search for ways to move forward with and promote and build climate resilience, you have to look at hyper-local solutions and Indigenous people for solutions. There’s no technologically deterministic solution. AI is not going to dig us out of this jam. But there are versions of the future and the restoration of our planet that are really beautiful and solution-oriented. There are alternative ways to do things, and Indigenous ideas and values matter more than ever in the modern world.”
