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Tom Hesse.

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Growing up in beautiful, tropical Costa Rica led anthropologist Fernando Villanea to fall in love with the biology of nature. And it’s led him down a path of passion, success and a yearning for home as he studies one of the most interesting animals of all: us.

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Host and producer: May Ortega Mixed by: Emily Williams Editors: Erin Jones, Andrew Villegas Project Manager: Rebekah Romberg Additional editorial support: Jo Erickson, Kibwe Cooper, Luis Antonio Perez Theme music by Pedro Lumbrano; additional music courtesy Universal Production Music Cover art: Mia Rincón Executive producers: Brad Turner, Kevin Dale

Thanks also to Hart van Denburg, Jodi Gersh, Clara Shelton, Matt Herz, Kim Nguyen, Brittany Werges and CPR's members and staff.

<a href="http://quienarewe.org/">QuienAreWe.org</a>

Fernando Villanea: The very first one, and I'll always remember this, the very first one, me and my teammates, a small team of four were assigned to work with peccaries, which are just small pigs that are like javelinas.

May Ortega: Fernando Villanea and his team are college biology students, and they’ve been released into the wild to research these small swine.

Fernando: And they're tiny. They roam in these packs of 30 and they just roam around. And we followed them for three days. And so we are just looking for them, walking the rainforest. We got lost a bunch of times. We found them. We followed them for days. They smell so bad. So they have this musk they exude and they rub it on everything. All the students get back together and we're supposed to present our results. People would tell us we smelled like we somehow absorbed the smell of these peccaries. It was incredible.

May: [Laughing] And you were so proud.

May: By this point in his life, Fernando knew he wanted to be a scientist. This smelly assignment only confirmed that he was on the right track to studying animals. Little did he know, the animal he’d end up studying – you can find in the mirror. From Colorado Public Radio, this is “Quién Are We?” exploring what it means to be Costa Rican, Latino, Hispanic, or however you identify, and diving into the beautiful things that make us who we are. I'm May Ortega. Today, we’re trekking along with Fernando as he leaves home to find purpose, to achieve his dream, only to discover something about us all.

Fernando grew up in a place that biologists dream of: Costa Rica. [To Fernando] You did grow up in this wild, tropical paradise. And I think Costa Rica is known for its diverse wildlife too. I know there's a lot of kids anywhere who like to play with bugs when they're little and animals and things like that. So were you one of those kids?&nbsp;

Fernando: I was a kid that was very much fascinated by all of those things, but I wasn't the kind of kid that actually would go collect bugs. I wanted to look at the bugs and learn about the bugs, but I didn't necessarily want to touch the bugs [laughter]. So in that way, I think I'm different from those kids.

May: Then, came a knock on the door.

Fernando: It's such a cliche, the traveling salesman that goes door to door and sells encyclopedias. But that actually did happen. And my dad bought this 20-volume encyclopedias. They're illustrated. And that was the important part because when you're a kid, that's very important. And they were the best. They were divided by topic. I don't remember all the topics, but I know there was one for invertebrates and there was one for vertebrates, and those were the two I liked the most.

May: What is one particular page or maybe an illustration that you would go back to a lot?

Fernando: So I'm pretty sure the section on the vertebrae one about dolphins and whales was about to just break off from overuse. I probably opened that way too many times, read it way too many times. Those encyclopedias definitely gave me some, the vehicle to learn about everything.

May: Do you think then that your dad maybe bought them because you were already such a curious child who wanted to learn about the world?

Fernando: Oh yeah. No, you have to understand my dad for that. He was so invested. So I went to public school. There's only so much public schools can do, especially in Costa Rica. And I wanted to know about everything. And so I would be upset because the teacher would say something and I would correct the teacher, and then I would get in trouble.

May: [Laughter] This two foot, three foot tall kid.

Fernando: Right. I would read something on an encyclopedia and then it just would not align with whatever the teacher was trying to teach us. I would get in trouble for that. So my dad actually would go and kind of set the record right. And he was really encouraging. I think he just knew that I wanted to do so many things. And we didn't really have the means for that. So he did his best. And he will bring it up now. Yeah, he's super proud.

May: So, a pretty solid foundation. Once Fernando got older and the question of a college degree came around, his answer was clear. But it wasn’t the most popular decision.

Fernando: At some point, I had settled on becoming a biologist. My parents were very supportive. Some other family members, less so.

May: I mean, I feel like that's a job that kind of falls in line with doctor, lawyer – a highly educated job. Is that not right?

Fernando: No, no, no. Because in Costa Rica, biologists, I mean – they have a hard time finding jobs.

May: Oh, okay. And they would've preferred you do a doctor thing?

Fernando: I think they would've. Yeah. I recall specifically them saying, can you do something related to biology that actually would get you a job? You'd be a microbiologist. You can be a pharmacist. The other thing that's important to understand is that in Costa Rica, so – college education can be free if you test high enough. The University of Costa Rica will take you and they will subsidize most of your education. And different majors have different cutoffs. And so there is definitely a ranking, medicine takes the highest score. You would take the test, and then once they give you your score, you then get to decide. And my score was good enough to go for medicine. And that is actually a problem. I want to take my really extraordinarily high score and apply for the biology program, which requires a very low score. I got into the University of Costa Rica. I applied to be in the biology program. I got accepted. It was incredible. I remember those years so fondly. Part of the amazing part of it is you get to experience all these different ecosystems. And what happens is they kind of just trust you to just be a biologist. They're like, you're going to go do this, and you're going to take notes and there's not going to be supervision. It's like you've been taking classes on how to take these notes. You take statistics so you know what kind of data you need, but no one really tells you how to collect it, and then they just kind of release you.

May: Then you follow around a herd of little hogs for a few days, and return to civilization smelling like pig musk. And Fernando was all about it. Then during his undergraduate years, he met some researchers from the United States.

Fernando: There was this sort of big field-side expedition, and they were studying all these different aspects of monkeys. They were interested in genetics of these monkeys. And they were there to collect saliva to see if they could get some DNA out of saliva. And after a week, I think maybe I managed to impress them enough, and they understood that I wanted to continue my education. So I got invited to visit. So I visited ASU, so Arizona State University, for a few weeks and got to meet some really cool people. And then I also visited the University of California at Santa Cruz.&nbsp;

May: These monkey scientists were anthropologists. Fernando started thinking, hey, maybe anthropology would be cool. Anthro’s not all that different from biology. He’d always loved animals. Now he’d just narrow his focus to primates. And humans. Through anthropology, Fernando would get to expand his set of questions. The more he got in tune with his culture, and the history of Latinos around the world, the more he wanted a hand in discovering the surprising things that make us who we are. What kinds of foods did our indigenous ancestors eat? What traditions did they practice that have been lost to time?

Fernando wanted to ask those things, and find the answers himself. Unfortunately, his school didn’t have a PhD program at the time. In fact, they encouraged students to further their education elsewhere and return to work in Costa Rica. So he had to make a decision: leave his home and his family for several years in pursuit of his dream or end things with a bachelor’s, and try to find a job there.

Also, can we just take a second to point out the irony of this? You’ve grown up in one of the world’s most biologically diverse environments. So diverse, scientists come to your stomping grounds to conduct their research! Yet if you want to do the same thing, you need to leave that place first. The thing is, for Fernando, a masters and a doctorate were non-negotiable. He knew that if he wanted to spend the rest of his days learning and discovering, he would need those degrees to get a job that would let him do that. So, he braced himself for the uncertain road ahead.

Fernando: Me and all my friends, we were all sort of scrambling on these different opportunities we had, maybe trying to make collaborations with people in other countries, so they would accept you, which is super hard. Costa Rica, for all its beauty, we're not a very wealthy country when it comes to money. So we didn't really have any kind of grants that would send you. So we each had to find our own opportunities. So this part I think was, I'm not going to say this was sad, but this was the sadly uncertain part of it. Because now I had to apply to grad school. And it's hard to get in. If you are an international student, it comes with these other complications because you're more expensive.

You were never considered an in-state student for tuition purposes. So your tuition is twice as expensive. And there's a lot of opportunities that are only for American citizens. And so it's difficult. And because it's difficult, I had to apply to a bunch of different programs and I didn't get in the first year. And so this is kind of uncertain. I was working at Office Depot actually, which is, I was like, well, I guess this is what I'm doing. I dunno if I'm ever going to be a biologist. In the second year I applied, I actually got accepted to one program and only one program. But it was enough. It’s just what I wanted.

May: A Master’s in Anthropology at Washington State University. And once he was in, he discovered that the road to moving up north became a lot easier.

Fernando: I have found that when you are a student and you're getting a student visa, particularly in a STEM field, I think that really helps because the U.S. kind of wants you actually to come here. So I found that that part of the process was really nice and people were always like, oh, you're doing this. This is great. You're welcome. Please discover important things.

May: Bring your big brain over here. So then you are in Washington for your master's and PhD?

Fernando: Right. I mean, it was immediately really shocking. Part of me, I was so excited. I finally got to do the thing I wanted to do. And that part has always been great. I had never stepped on a campus where I don't feel like I'm at home. But the immediate, the culture shock was huge. It was kind of lonely. It was sad. I missed my family. I missed my friends. The thing that kept me going was just being excited about being given the opportunity to do what I wanted to do.

May: But even though he was excited, Fernando was starting to wonder if all that experience tracking pigs in the rainforest, and reading those encyclopedias – he wondered if it actually helped him. That’s after the break. Learning about nature and science in the tropical rainforests of Costa Rica had been Fernando Villanea’s passion as far back as he could remember. Then for his master’s degree, he decided to focus on the science of people. And it was more than he bargained for. [To Fernando] You spent all this time studying. How difficult was it in terms of the learning, the research, the intensity of the program?

Fernando: Well, it was good and bad. On the one hand, my undergrad program was extremely good. University of Costa Rica doesn't mess around. They make very good biologists. So I was already much farther ahead, I think, than most other students, which was really helpful, except that I went into an anthropology department because, I dunno why I thought that was a good idea. And all these advantages meant nothing because I had never in my life read a book about anthropology. And now I'm taking all these anthropology classes and everyone else seems so comfortable. My first year was really hard.&nbsp;

I felt like there were years of my life that I felt like were useless and I didn't really feel validated. But that was really emotionally difficult. And I think knowing that I really didn't have a choice was also really difficult.

May: Sure, Fernando could switch his degree to biology, back to something he understood far better. But you see, as he became more familiar with anthropology, he began to notice that there wasn’t a ton of research on Latinos. At least, not compared to white people. And it became clear that the field needed more scientists like him.

So Fernando kept his head down, and his eye on the prize. As he learned more, he started focusing on where biology and anthropology meet: genetics. And he did it. He truly earned his master’s degree, after basically starting the program from square one. Oh but his journey wasn’t over. Next, was that pesky doctorate. He knew he needed to stay in his new passion: genetics. And he decided to study that through the school’s biology program.

After what felt like a lifetime of books and papers, more long nights alone, wishing he was back home, he pulled on his doctoral regalia, and got that diploma. He was done. Accomplished. So he started to look for jobs back home in Costa Rica.&nbsp;

Fernando: Once you have a PhD, Costa Rica doesn't really have the means to support you. The kind of research that I do, they don't really have the budget for that. You can be a professor in Costa Rica. Two of my cousins are professors at the University of Costa Rica. I sometimes find myself being jealous, because I know how good and how much of a difference you can make as a professor there when it comes to your students. But then they'll remind me, don't do that because we struggle to produce our research because there's no money, there's no budget. What you're doing is so much higher profile. May: So he faced yet another fork in the road: go home and stunt his career, or stay in this foreign country, and try to do more with what he had; with what he persevered through sadness and loneliness to earn. For now, Fernando knew he had to stay in the U.S.

Fernando: So after you get a PhD, you do some, I think called a postdoctoral fellowship. And I did a postdoctoral fellowship in biology. I was just going to go back to being a biologist. But it turns out that my particular interests are very much in the middle of biology and anthropology. And so when I was looking for permanent jobs, I got a really good offer in an anthropology department.

May: That offer brought him to the heart of the Rocky Mountains and a far different place than his lush, green home of Costa Rica – to dry, landlocked Colorado. [To Fernando] And you're working at the University of Colorado Boulder, is that right?

Fernando: That's right. I am a professor, so that is my title. But what I do is I study people, I study people's genes and genomes. So the instructions for life that tell your body how to work, not so much what to do, but just how to be.&nbsp;

May: Altogether, Fernando has lived in the U.S. for 15 years, three of them in Colorado. In that time, prioritizing the science of Latin genetics helped him come to terms with his feelings around home. While he’s been here, he’s met his wife and earned a job he loves. Most of all, he’s making moves for his gente.

Fernando: I study what makes people around the world different when it comes to their genomes. I'm a Latino, so I'm very curious about Latinos as well. That's something that I always want to know more about. May: Fernando is now a population geneticist. That means he has a special interest in the ancient history of the human genome. Now, you may already be familiar with genetics; maybe even your own. Companies exist today where you can send in your DNA, and you get back data that lays out your genetic makeup, like where your ancestors are from. [To Fernando] When I got my 23 And Me, it said that I am 70% Spanish or Portuguese, and I was expecting some Spanish. My last name's Ortega. I think I can be white-passing. And it sent me into an entire identity crisis because my parents are from Mexico. My parents' parents are from Mexico as well. But my DNA says otherwise at some point. What would you say to somebody like me who got their genetic results and maybe placed a lot of value on that information?

Fernando: I would say, first of all, your ancestry doesn't really define your identity. And you don't have to let it define your identity, right? Your identity is where you grew up, who you grew up with, the foods you ate, the traditions that you celebrate, the things that make you happy. These tests are really interesting. They're an interesting thing you can do, but they don't really have to define who you are at all.

May: It's just something interesting about your genome.

Fernando: Yeah, it's an interesting scientific question. That is pretty normal because the passing of genetic information is not perfect. And so there is tons of biases. People's genomes may look very much like one part of their ancestry is really represented and the other parts are not represented. But it doesn't really mean that your identity is not represented in that way. It just means that the genetic process is not perfect.

May: This is just a piece of what his work encompasses. Recently, he made a fascinating discovery that could have major implications for the future of Latino healthcare.

Fernando: I got to work on this really interesting gene. It's called MUC19. MUC one nine. MUC, I think is short for mucus. It's a gene that is related to mucus. So it makes your snot, I guess, more thick.

Fernando: It makes your saliva more thick. It makes your tears more thick. This MUC19 is interesting in some other ways. So humans carry two different variants of it. One is very much a human variant. When you look at it, it looks human. The other one doesn't look human at all. And when you start poking into it and seeing what it looks like, it looks closer to what Neanderthals have. And it actually also looks closer to what Denisovans have, which are a whole other species of human. People alive today carry that Neanderthal or Denisovan variant, and it's different enough that it's probably doing something really special. And that's interesting enough. But then I started to look at, okay, who is carrying that variant? And as it turns out, Latinos, we carry that Denisovan, Neanderthal variant in very high frequencies.

Fernando: So for some of the populations that I've been able to look at – so people of Mexican ancestry, for example, it's about one in every three people.

Fernando: That Denisovan, or Neanderthal variant.

May: And how much would a traditional European-descended person have?

Fernando: 1% of people, so one in every hundred people.

May: Whaaaat? Fernando did that! He discovered this difference. And it is a big deal. 30 percent compared to just one? And to be very clear: Scientists already knew this gene existed. The discovery here is the difference of how often Latinos carry this gene compared to white Europeans. So what could this mean for Latinos as a whole? We don’t know just yet. That’s the scientific process for you: One small discovery builds on another small discovery, and after a lot of research, eventually you might learn something huge.

Fernando is still following this slimy trail to get some answers. But this begs another question:, why is this discovery just happening now, when scientists have known about this gene for a couple decades? Simple: because researchers haven’t focused much on people of color.

Fernando: Something that I think makes me feel really proud in what I do – there's a reason no one knows anything about it, is because, well, no one was looking at Latinos. Most of the medical data and the genome data that everyone has access to is all European samples. And so if you're not looking into Latinos, then you're never going to find out these really cool stories. And they also might be really impactful. I mean, I dunno what this variant does – it’s clearly doing something really interesting and important. Natural selection is making more of those copies. More people carry it because it's doing something good. And it might be medically important to people, but we dunno what it is.

May: Fernando’s discovery means that scientists can keep asking more questions about what it means. And all those discoveries could change Latino medical care and enrich our identities even more. This is Fernando’s childhood love of learning and exploring, manifesting in his adulthood.&nbsp;

Fernando: I think it's important for people to know more about themselves. It's important for people to be curious about it. I know as a very curious kid, I would've loved to know what I know about my own genome now that it would've answered some questions and maybe produced more questions too. I think there's parts of it that can also be really important for us as a society, as individuals. A lot of Latinos, I feel like a little bit, we tend to feel like orphans sometimes.

May: Like Fernando, living in the U.S. feeling so far away from home.

Fernando: I mean, I always feel good going back. I miss my family so much that I tend to spend a lot of time with 'em. I try to escape the city as much as I can and just go to these green spaces. It's not as easy as it used to be, once upon a time. I think I have more responsibilities. I am also a little pickier. Maybe I don't want to sleep on my back as much or just…

May: [To Fernando] You can't follow around little pigs for three days.

Fernando: Exactly. I can't do that anymore, but I try to and it makes me very happy to be there.

May: The genetics and health of diverse people are still severely under-researched, but he’s gonna keep working to close that gap even if just a little. He will continue to ask questions that others aren’t. He will keep representing his own people, and he may end up helping many, many of us.

Fernando: We don’t get to lay claim to a deeper ancestry. In that way I feel really good about these tests. Because people can say, oh you know what this is me. I am connected to all these other people in Latin America because we are all the same, right? We all have these shared ancestries and histories.

May: And time will tell what else Fernando can discover about what brings us all together. Fernando Villanea is a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He’s also a population geneticist specializing in human prehistory, with a focus on Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry.

Fernando, thank you for explaining, in simple terms, what you do, and, in honest terms, why you love to do it. I’m May Ortega. This episode was produced by me. With mixing by Emily Williams. Pedro Lumbrano wrote our theme music. This episode was edited by Erin Jones and Andrew Villegas. You can find a list of everybody who helped make this episode in the show notes. “Quién Are We” is a production of Colorado Public Radio.

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¿Quién Are We? is a podcast from Colorado Public Radio exploring what it means to be Latino, Hispanic or Chicana ... or however you identify. Host and journalist May Ortega shares stories about our wide-ranging identities and the beautiful things that make us who we are.

¿Quién Are We?

Fernando Villanea's passion for nature led him to study one of the most interesting animals of all: us.

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