Diving Genes Keep Sea Nomads in the Oxygen-Free Swim

If the dystopian future dramatized in Waterworld ever comes to pass, the Bajau people of Indonesia have a head start, genetically speaking. The Bajau, renowned for their breath-holding and prolonged free-diving abilities, possess gene variants that result in larger spleens—and larger reservoirs of oxygenated red blood cells.The discovery of the gene variants does more than eliminate the possibility that the Bajau’s larger spleens are a plastic response to diving; it also has implicat