FROM marauding Vikings to clan-dwelling Picts, have you ever wondered who your ancestors are and where you came from?
It's a question that has fascinated Edinburgh scientist Jim Wilson for as long as he can remember and a curiosity that has led him to conduct population studies involving thousands of people.
Dr Wilson's work in genetic ancestry has led to the dis
covery of Viking and Pictish genes that have connected modern day Scots to their ancestors from at least 4000 years ago.
"You inherit your DNA from your ancestors so the genetic code is in some ways a kind of archive of its own that if you know how to read it you can find out who you are related to," explains the 33-year-old.
"Also, when we looked at the deeper ancestry, we discovered a couple of Pictish genetic signatures – the first markers that definitively show this continuity throughout the last 4000 years or more."
The widespread interest among the general public to find out more about their heritage led to Dr Wilson's work inspiring the TV series the Blood of the Vikings.
And just last week, his work in genetics came under the spotlight again when style queens Trinny and Susannah asked him to investigate why some people are overweight. Their show The Great British Body saw Jim travelling around the country with a team of scientists testing more than 100 people for the so-called fat gene FTO.
Super slender Trinny was shocked to find that she was carrying the marker that increases people's propensity to gain weight.
"She was surprised because she's skinny but that was the whole point," explains Jim, "this gene doesn't make you fat it just means your predisposed to being larger.
"But Trinny will be the gym every day so it doesn't matter what her genes are.
"In fact what that shows is that your appearance is all about diet and exercise regardless of your genes but you might have to work that bit harder."
Jim, who is based at the Medical Research Council Human Genetics Unit in Edinburgh, reveals at one point he thought the show might have to be cancelled altogether as his team tried desperately to get their head around the first set of results from a day-long roadshow in Gateshead.
After five hours processing the saliva samples in record time – it usually takes three weeks to get such test results back – Jim momentarily and wrongly thought the machine they'd been using had failed.
"I spent ten minutes of hell thinking we were going to have to phone the programme director and cancel it all," he laughs. "Luckily it turned out we were looking at the graph wrong."
Jim, who lives near Linlithgow with his geneticist wife Angelika and their one-year-old son Magnus, says he enjoyed working with Trinny and Susannah.
He does admit, however, that he was too coy to take part in their living naked sculpture and was left disappointed at their idea of how he should be dressed.
"I was forced to wear a lab coat because it was the perception of what a scientist should wear," he says. "I wasn't entirely taken with that idea – how styled you can be while wearing a lab coat is a question in itself.
"But Trinny and Susannah, they were styled to the nines. I thought that was quite amusing because they matched ever so subtlety and they were wearing the exact same style of shoes – wedges of some description – I just thought it was very funny."
There is of course a serious side to the work the Oxford University graduate does and he is particularly passionate about his medical genetics studies.
In one project he has been recruiting 2000 healthy people from Orkney with a view to finding out why people get heart disease, stroke, diabetes and osteoporosis.
The Scottish Executive-funded project will measure more than 200 risk factors in those taking part, from their bone density, blood sugar to the thickness of their arteries.
As a man who grew up on a farm on the shores of Scapa Flow, Jim is particularly proud of the study which has made him well known in the northern isles.
"They are basically the diseases that most of us will get – some of us will get them some of us will die from them," says Jim.
"They are complex diseases in that they have a genetic component but they also occur because of something in your lifestyle."
He stresses that while there has been much awareness of the risks associated with lack of exercise, alcohol consumption and smoking, little is known about the genetic risk factors that influence disease.
If these can be discovered, scientists will have a much better understanding of how these diseases work.
"Modern medicine is wonderful but imagine how much better it could be if we had this deep understanding of exactly why the one man got the heart attack, what started to go wrong in his body, exactly how it broke down," he enthuses.
"There's no good reason of finding a gene for the sake of it, we want to find it because it will open up a whole new understanding of the disease.
"If we don't have that understanding, we can't design new drugs. If we could understand that we could cure it and that's what it's all about."
DIGGING UP THEIR ROOTSSUCH is the fascination with ancestry that four years ago Jim Wilson established a firm called EthnoAncestry.
The business has been of particular interest to Americans tracing their roots who want to establish if they are related to the early Pict settlers of Scotland, the colonising Norse Vikings or to the people of early medieval Ireland.
The test for Scottishness is performed on the saliva of a male family member, and looks at 27 different genetic markers on a section of DNA inherited from father to son down the generations.
The test costs £135 and customers receive a description of the historical lineage and a map of where those people are to be found.
"It's amazing to me how much people must stay at home," says Dr Wilson, of the public health sciences department at Edinburgh University.
"If they had spread around more then this gene marker would be everywhere within the old world, but obviously they haven't."
