Basketball player Shawn Bradley always stood out on the court. At 7 feet 6 inches, he could touch the rim of the hoop without jumping. But until recently, the retired pro never knew why he was so tall. The answer turned out to be in his DNA, or hereditary material.

After a chance meeting, John Kauwe, a biologist at Brigham Young University-Idaho, asked to examine Bradley’s genes. These units of DNA help determine a person’s traits, like height. Kauwe found that Bradley’s height could be attributed to small differences across many of his genes. Kauwe thinks these differences could be used to predict all sorts of things, from whether people might develop certain diseases to whether they might have genius-level intelligence.