Would you like a genetic test kit for Christmas?
Years ago I thought it sounded like a nifty idea. But in recent years I’ve decided no, not so much.
First of all, a sibling of mine did it already so I pretty much know the general picture—which I already knew anyway. There were no surprises, either.
But also, I have come to utterly distrust the reassurances that information will be kept strictly confidential. As this article says:
23andMe says that it doesn’t share, sell or lease any data to its collaborators’ without customers’ explicit consent. When it does have permission to share data, the data is not personally identifiable and is shared in aggregate, according to the company. Ancestry also allows data to be used for research only with consumers’ permission, said Jennifer Utley, its director of research.
Still, the Federal Trade Commission warned in a blog post last year that consumers should recognize the risks of handing their genetic information over to a company, saying “hacks happen.”
“That tiny sample can disclose the biological building blocks of what makes you you,” FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection senior attorney Leslie Fair wrote in the post. “The data can be very enlightening personally, but a major concern for consumers should be who else could have access to information about your heritage and your health.”
What’s more, I don’t want to know if I’m genetically predisposed to getting some dread disease that I can’t do anything about. Apparently you can opt out of that aspect of it. But do most people realize that?
I had an entire genome sequence done a few years ago, mostly because it was worth about $10,000 at the time and I was getting it for free as part of an IQ study. I now wish I had not. As more and more people have them done, their relatives’ DNA is increasingly known. Anyone with my info will not know for certain what my sons’ DNA is, but they will know there is an increased chance of certain SNP’s being in the profile. If they also have a cousins on my wife’s side’s results, they can make further guesses.
Group results can be de-aggregated as more data becomes available. My results may in some ways be anonymous to researchers, but discovering the they are working with a sample that shows lots of similarities with Puritan, Scots-Irish northern US immigration and a Swedish inland/Norwegian coastal mix, of such-and-such a height, hair and eye color still leaves it as one among a few thousand possibles. With just a few more factors, they will be able to narrow it to a dozen. All without knowing my name, age, or where I live. Yet.
I got a 23&me kit for Christmas a year or two ago from my daughter. I then ordered an Ancestry kit, partly to check how well they corresponded. We did discover an unknown relative who had been given up for adoption.
I know of another infant given up for adoption many years ago but there has been no contact.
People are looking for ancestors, and possibly cousins, but they forget that they might also uncover nieces and nephews, or (gulp) siblings. We have a situation in which clear relatives of my nephew (whose mother was closed-adopted) are telling us we must have this wrong – they have no female relatives that close (it’s pretty close) who had a baby in Boston in 1967. No one wants to go around asking their four aunts which of them it was, obviously. Easier to just say “there must be some mistake.”
You open yourself out to a lot. I worried I might be notified of a sibling in Hokkaido, as my father was in the Army of Occupation there, and he was not a sexually continent person even later in life, never mind as a 19 y/o.
I wouldn’t trust the privacy promises at all.
Interesting stuff, this DNA is. My daughter gave me the test for Christmas last year and since I was adopted at birth when I was born at the end of WWII we wondered what we might find. I was a close match to my birth mom’s granddaughter (later a 1/2 sister did her DNA test and we matched even closer) and I had enough info, all the legal stuff with her name when she signed me over years ago that the parts fit and I was able to read her obituary and was pleased to find that she lived a full good life, had a nice bunch of children and passed away in her 90’s.
There were some surprised 1/2 siblings who never knew their mother dated before she was married to their dad in the late 1940’s and they are all nice, smart, well educated folks with good families. I have shared some phone calls and texts along with photos and some day I might want to meet them but just the knowledge that my birth mom had a good life after me was all I needed to know.
I have narrowed down my birth father’s family, there are a lot of them and I suspect those who knew more, if they even knew at all have passed away. I was raised in a great family, four of us adopted siblings and I feel blessed every day, with a nice children and grand children. Not all discoveries are as good as the one I made but mine did work out and answered some questions for me.
I’ve always felt like my ethnicity was boring, German, Scots Irish, Dutch, English (you get the picture) so I just did an ancestry DNA test, hoping for some surprises. The results were Northwestern Europe, Germanic Europe, France, Ireland/Scotland. Not so exciting.
I’ve been working on my family tree for years, so I also thought I might turn up some surprise relatives. So far, I’ve found a second cousin I didn’t know about, but they haven’t responded to my message requesting more information. That’s a frustrating thing about this process. When you find matches and they don’t want to talk to you. I would normally understand that, but if you’ve taken a DNA test, you’re obviously looking for something. As more people take the test, more DNA matches can come up, Being an only child whose parents are both dead, I would be thrilled to discover a sibling or even a close cousin that I didn’t know about.
I specifically was not interested in 23&Me, because their focus seems to be more on health than where you actually come from. It’s fine for some people, I guess, but not what I wanted.
“When it does have permission to share data, the data is not personally identifiable and is shared in aggregate, according to the company.”
Retailers do this with every recorded transaction, have for years, and they share it with each other. This is how Amazon, among many, can make recommendations of the sort: people like you that bought what you just bought often like/buy the following items.
There’s a fad of people ordering these DNA tests and opening them on YouTube. I saw one the other day where a young woman got hers and found out that the man that she thought was her father wasn’t her biological father, that her mother had cheated on him. She was heartbroken.
More so that people born in the years since the end of WWII, I would not be surprised–given all the turmoil of WWII, testosterone, uncertainty, the fear of death, women newly in the war workforce, and all of the young men (and some women) in the military moving all around the world–if quite a few of the people who were born during WWII, and have taken DNA tests, have been in for a lot of surprises.
I and my siblings were disappointed that the DNA test didn’t show our Cherokee great-grandmother.
No, I am not Elizabeth Warren.
Grandad’s mom was indeed 1/4 Native, but never got on the Rolls.
Otherwise I might have gone to Yale.
I’ve done a lot of documentary genealogical research over the years. More recently, I did two of the genetic tests, which tended to confirm the results of the documentary research–enough at least to definitely confirm that my mother and both my grandmothers had not betrayed their spouses. I guess the modest sum of money involved was well-spent, since it showed that the documentary research was probably reliable.
According to some of the reporting done after Senator Warren released her DNA test results, her DNA profile was not run against American Indian samples, because tribal leaders have reportedly persuaded their members not to give DNA samples to researchers.
Thus, there is not yet an extensive enough database of American Indian samples to reliably run tests against.
Instead, the testing, done privately for Warren, was reportedly run against samples from people from Mexico, Peru, and Columbia, on the theory that the Ancestors of today’s American Indians crossed to North America over the former Bearing Strait land bridge some 10-20 thousand years ago, then started moving southward, as small groups of these ancestors peeled off and eventually settled in various parts of the U.S, the remnant ending up in Mexico, Central, and South America.
Given this, I don’t know what kind of samples various genetic testing companies are using to determine if one of their subscribers has any American Indian ancestry.
My family found three generations of nieces/nephews/cousins: a cousin adopted out of the family in secret a long time ago, and his descendants. Bittersweet in the discovery of unspoken loss decades ago, but joyful in the discovery of fine people with whom we share an uncanny sense of connection. We used Ancestry, which is supposed to be better than 23nme for family connections, and I opted out of the health info. Ancestry has a pretty amazing database of family trees, and I have traced my family and my husband’s much farther back than I would have thought possible. I suppose I should be worried about privacy, but it has been so interesting and enriching that I haven’t given the downside much thought.
On the question of discovering unexpected paternities and other family scandals:
This has always been a problem for dedicated genealogical researchers.
My mother and her cousin Vi once went digging through a Texas courthouse archive looking for their mothers’ parents’ marriage certificate.
It wasn’t in the book where it should have been, according to the date in the family bible.
Knowing that their grandparents had eloped, because he was an itinerant circuit preacher, she was still in her teens, and her parents objected to the courtship, my mother was ready to shrug it off as just one of those things.
Vi gave her The Look, and announced: I will not go home and tell my little old aunties (all 8 of them still living!) that they are il-le-git-i-mit.
They kept pulling out record books, and eventually found the document.
Only a fool allows a third party to harvest their dna.
I know a woman whose results claimed she was 0.5% American Indian.
Problem: she’s Portuguese. An immigrant to the United States.
It turns out, according to Ancestry.com, I’m 100% European Jewish, which is simultaneously boring, weird and exactly what my mother told me. They even located the exact spots in Eastern Europe my family was from and waaaaay over 50,000 4th cousins.
So what is European Jewish, aka Ashkenazi? Well, I uploaded my results to gedmatch, hoping for Atlantis or space alien, but they don’t test for that. Their models say my dna appears to be Sicilian, and if not that Tuscan, if not that Greek and if not that, then….
Anyway, gives you something to think about. But, I think it might have been a while since my ancestors were in Italy, 😀
I did this, and discovered that I was over 1.5% Neanderthal and almost 1% Denisovan. So, Senator Warren, *I* am diverse on an inter-species level.
If you’ve had your DNA done, you’ll be told your haplogroup. You, in turn, can give that information to DNAgeeks dot com, and they’ll send you a t-shirt that displays either the female (mitochondrial DNA) or male (Y chromosome) haplogroup, along with a map showing the migration pattern of the haplogroup out of Africa.
More fun with science? Christmas gift?
@ Snow on Pine – unless you have some supported theory on where else those other New World peoples came from, unrelated to Native American tribes, it’s a good proxy.
No, this is not a ‘serious’ concern, that 3rd parties will vector us wholesale via tested relatives. American Natives already blazed this trail and it’s settle law, and their case was much more benign that the bogeymen we’re worried about. It’s similar to searching a car or person without Due Cause, and even more like Copyright … you need do NOTHING to hold unassailable rights to your intellectual property – which is what your DNA is.
More irksome, is that Testing Companies have been Shanghaied by the Left to peddle political correctness.
You have to knuckle down and do Thesis-level/scientific homework, or the emerging mainstream of product-packaging will foist off a mush-mouth line of hyper-generalizations and smeared-out equivalencies. Their attitude has become that it’s unhealthy and unethical to support persons who want to focus on their Scandinavian or Hungarian etc ethnicity.
Instead, they want to create a market in which it’s your Stone Age affiliations that are most relevant … none of which is recognizable in the recent centuries/millennia populations in which we actually arose.
Be vewy, vewy caofo, or you will end up the brunt of the cartoon.
Basically, you need to step up the Geno-DNA game to the raw-data level. Companies sell a ‘processed interpretation’, and some of them are still genealogically on-point. But the hot products now are clearly a diversion.
The Industry now relies on custom ASIC microelectronics, similar to DNA work in real science labs. But these devices are ‘rigged’ to derive certain & limited conclusions … and pragmatically most companies end up sending samples to the same few labs. Focus on the raw data … and the far bigger project of learning the software & how it’s analyzed, yourself. There are already companies or networks emerging, who assume you have your full data set, and they will then perform certain kinds of work on your raw data. But it’s nothing like as warm & fuzzy as things used to be … a passionate affinity for sci-geekiness is a big help.
It’s not that you really need to perform an original analysis yourself; rather it’s that in the current climate, if you can’t talk the talk at a pretty high level, the default outcome is the herded-consumer.
It’s an updated version of Gloria Steinem’s old idea that all females share her politics … and those who don’t aren’t real women, and are Fair Game.
Sad but true. Watch yerself, out there in the DNA-testing marketplace.
Later, probably fairly soon, tests will be able to ID meaningfully-close living people, with whom a generic WASP will share a common ancestor from William the Conqueror’s England. At that point, we will again have a keen interest in very specific facts. Meanwhile, entities like National Geographic, with committed political agendae, are using DNA to massage genealogy into something else.
I had mine down, and found the results interesting. I cared a lot about the health results and had mine analyzed by Prometheus – it goes into an incredible amount of detail.
I’m predisposed to male pattern baldness and at a higher risk prostrate cancer, so I’m not overly worried.
I do have a few potential problems out there, but when they talk about an increased risk, if you’re 10 more likely to have a specific problem, and that elevates your risk to .0125%, does it really matter?