BRUNSWICK

To many in Brunswick, she’s the curly haired woman riding her bike around with her kids. She can also often be found rallying support for Brunswick students during school board meetings. There’s another side of Dana Waring Bateman, though. One where she works at the Harvard Medical School as director of education and is cofounder of the Department of Genetics, where she is known as Lady of the Fruit Flies.

“I live in a fruit fly lab,” Bateman told a crowd at People Plus on Thursday, although she’s quick to point out she’s not their handler by any means. Those fruit flies have been used to study genetics by scientists for more than 100 years.

Bateman’s educational background is diverse. She holds a bachelor of fine arts from Syra- cuse University and a master of liberal arts in women’s studies from Harvard University Extension School.

Her interest in genetics appears to come from a personal place.

“Being pregnant got me thinking about the intersection of biotechnology and individual lives,” Bateman told The Genetic Genealogist in 2007. “During my pregnancies, I was genetically tested for the first time in my adult life, and having to live with various statistical formulas and risk calculations was confusing and frustrating. I wanted things to be black and white, and of course they rarely are. (As any parent will tell you, this is a lesson best learned early on, I suppose).”

During the People Plus presentation, Bateman said she studies the ethical dilemmas recent advances in genetic research have presented.

“If we bring back a woolly mammoth, where do we put it, who owns it, what’s the penalty for poaching one?” Bateman asked the group.

Bateman said those questions are far from hypothetical, as there are scientists across the hall from her office right now attempting to bring back a creature that last walked the Earth about 10,000 years ago.

According to Bateman, the human genome project, completed in 2001, took 13 years and $3 billion to complete. Now, companies offer varying degrees of personal genome mapping for as little as $100 that can be completed in a couple of days.

“You can find out quite a lot from your DNA and with that sometimes you can find out things you are not necessarily excited to learn,” Bateman told the crowd at People Plus.

Bateman said that can range from “Oh, geez, I’ve got this risk for a health problem” to issues of family secrets or “nonpaternity events.”

“Who you think your dad is may not be your dad,” Bateman said. “When you go sending off your DNA, getting it analyzed, checking the box that says, ‘yeah, share my DNA with other people,’ you might hear from other people that you didn’t quite expect.”

Bateman said that these companies that commercially test DNA are often used by adopted people looking to find their biological families. She said when you offer to share your DNA, you often get a list back of others who might be your relatives.

Another issue confounding the family tree is the matter of sperm donors — a topic Bateman said is one of her favorites and one that causes the strangest Google ads to show up on her computer.

Bateman told a story of a colleague who became a donor when he was in medical school who thought after donating for a period of time they would no longer use his sperm for families but for research.

“He was misinformed and it turns out he has somewhere in the order of 400 biological children,” Bateman said. That story served as the basis for the Vince Vaughn film “Delivery Man.”

It wasn’t all seedy stories as Bateman told the group of a little boy named Nic Volker, whose condition confined him to a hospital, where he was hooked up to hoses and tubes. Volker received about every test doctors could give him, before a group of scientists from Baylor University looked into his DNA.

Those scientist’s findings allowed doctors to give Volker the right medicine in the right doses. Bateman said Volker is now in fourth grade as she showed a picture of the boy happily swinging a baseball bat.

dmcintire@timesrecord.com