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What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes. Jonathan Marks. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 325 pp.

▪ Abstract  Genetics has become the major tool of the life sciences. This is driven partly by technology, and partly by the belief that genes are the ultimate units of biomedical or evolutionary information. The search for variation associated with disease has motivated the Human Genome Project to construct a detailed road map of the entire set of human genetic material, and some additional form of globally representative human genome diversity resource has been proposed for the anthropological purposes of reconstructing human population history. Any such resource raises complex societal and ethical issues as well as scientific ones. However, the amount and complexity of genetic variation has frustrated hopes for simple genetic answers to important biomedical or anthropological questions, and a consequent converging of these differing interests suggests that developing a genetic variation resource will be important in many disciplines.

A long-term epidemiological study of the families of Laredo, Texas, a Mexican-American city on the U.S. border with Mexico is being conducted. Individual records of vital events have been linked into a computer-based genealogical network, relying on interactive methods of data entry, correction and review. Accurate entry, error correction, and the avoidance of false links have been priorities. The record linkage strategy has been to accept pairwise links whose match score is better than a given cutoff and for which there are no close competitors. Errors and variations in names have been compensated for by grouping given names and surnames into affinity classes. Preliminary linkage results and application of some demographic measurements to these data are also presented.