Jay Tischfield prides himself on his long track record of cellular custodianship. As the founding director of the Human Genetics Institute of New Jersey at Rutgers University, he maintains one of the largest university-based DNA banks in the world — much of it, on behalf of the U.S. government. Starting about three decades ago, the National Institutes of Health began outsourcing the storage and distribution of samples from several nationwide studies to Tischfield and his network of finely tuned freezers.
Among the millions of samples he oversees are about 23,000 tubes of frozen spit collected from Americans suffering from psychiatric and substance use disorders over 15 months in the early 2010s. Back then, Tischfield’s team extracted the DNA from cells floating in those saliva samples and began to decode it. Scientists have since used that information to track alcohol and drug consumption trends in the U.S. and find genetic connections between substance use and mental health conditions like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.