Would you be a different person if you had grown up somewhere else? A growing body of research is helping to answer this age-old nature versus nurture question and what it means for your identity.
In one sense, every human being's DNA is unique and its fundamental structure (in big-picture terms) does not change depending on where we go.
But DNA alone does not make us who we are, says Ziada Ayorech, a psychiatric geneticist at the University of Oslo in Norway. Born in Uganda, Ayorech moved to Canada when she was three, spent most of her life in the UK, and then moved to Norway a couple of years ago. "When I think about all the places I've lived and all the ways they have influenced my perspective, I intuitively imagine there's no way that that couldn't have made a difference," says Ayorech.