One Penn State Professor Unmasks the Role Genetics Play in Human Faces


The lab is like many others. Located at the end of a long hall on the top floor of Carpenter building, it is filled with microscopes and desktop computers, sinks and samples of human hair. At the far end is a revolving door, the kind used for photography darkrooms, which leads to a clean room for DNA extraction. Shelves of PCR machines line one side of the room, and on the other side are freezers, most of which are “full of saliva — human saliva,” said research assistant Brooke Mattern.

On the countertop are 3-D printers used to make plastic models of human faces. The faces are scattered throughout the lab — arranged side by side on a cabinet, hanging by the dozen on a wall — and adorn biological anthropology professor Mark Shriver’s office door.

Faces fascinate Shriver.

Last March, Shriver coauthored a paper titled “Modeling 3D Facial Shape from DNA.” Drawing on data from hundreds of 3-D scans of human faces, including the faces of Penn State students, the paper purported to uncover the genetic factors...