What's it like getting your DNA results back from 23andMe
philosophistry.com
philosophistry.com
I later found out I was part of the 23andMe data mixup[1], so the results I had for a week actually weren't mine. Kind of killed my faith in the system, and when I got my actual results they were quite boring. At the very least it makes a good story, worth the $99 in my book.
[1] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/06/Sample-swaps-at-23...
As far as cousins - I have about 100 relatives discovered through the relative finder - lots, and lots, and lots of 5th and 4th cousins, and a few 3rd cousins. No second or first cousins yet.
I originally purchased my kit about 4 or 5 years ago for $1000, so the $99 cost is a huge jump in such a short period of time. It's important to note that 23andMe doesn't do a full DNA Scan, but just samples it in important locations known as SNPs. Watching the trends on singularityhub.com, I'm guessing that a full DNA scan will be available to the individual consumer for $1000 in about five or six years.
Should be faster than that. I'd put even money down at it being available in three years, probably even 2.5 or 2 years. Genomic sequencing has been one of the fastest Moore's Law analogues in history.
Edit: On reflection, this is probably because I'm an Ashkenazi Jew, and we have a relatively small gene pool and relatively cyclic ancestor graphs (at least when considered undirected). If your ethnic background is broader/less insular then the relative finder will probably work better for you.
Overall, the experience has provided me with plenty of infotainment. Well worth the $99 I paid.
Regarding your "mostly seem not to be cousins" comment, I think people have an overly narrow definition of cousins where 23andme has a much more strict genetic definition. If you look at their FAQ, they claim that it's fairly accurate that if someone is marked as a relative, that's a relative. The degree of relation may be off by a generation or two, but it's there.
I find it interesting how many people, even those who sign up for the service and enable visibility on relative finder, heck, even those who fill out their profiles with surnames and extra information, either don't respond to contact requests or entirely dismiss relations dubbed by the system "likely 3rd cousin" as "impossible".
At the 6th, 5th, and even 4th cousin levels, especially going into the past with typically large families, we are talking about fairly large networks of people. I see a lot of folks say things like "I can trace my roots back 10 generations", when they really just mean one single paternal line, for example. How can you be sure that someone didn't jump in the hay with someone else in secret that one summer in 1807, or that some forgotten sister of a great-great-grandparent went off to America for 5 years before returning to her homeland, etc? With such large numbers of people, the likeliness of having huge numbers of cousins goes way up.
For example, look how many hops it takes to get to your 4th cousin:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4th+cousin
Can we all vouch for all the surnames, brothers and sisters, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc in a relation even as "close" as this?
>I think people have an overly narrow definition of cousins where 23andme has a much more strict genetic definition.
Well, I consider someone to be a cousin based solely on our most recent common ancestor. If someone happens to have similar genes to me but we haven't shared an ancestor for 5,000 years then that person's not a cousin for any useful definition of the word.
It also might be that Asheknazi Jews, as a historically small/insular community with, therefore, a smaller gene pool, have a different experience with the relative finder than people with less, uh, incestuous (broadly speaking) family trees. Edit: Just logged into 23andMe and saw this relevant thread: https://www.23andme.com/you/community/thread/6449/. So I guess my speculation was right, and my concerns should be disregarded if you aren't part of a similarly small population.
I have 472 Predicted Relatives on 23andMe, 382 of which are 5th cousin or closer. It's pretty awesome seeing all these "Percent DNA Shared" at 0.09% to 0.86% (My previous High) and then seeing my mother/brother/niece/nephew pop out at 49.98%, 43.77%, 21.92%, 21.11%
I do wish that my "3rd" cousin would respond to me - they are the only ones I think I have a chance of tracking down.
According to one of my cousins, the relative finder is quite a bit different/better for her family members that don't have Ashkenazi heritage.
What are the consequences (immediate, or further down the track), not so much of using a service like 23andMe (I imagine it will be a fairly standard part of medical testing in X generations) but of posting on your blog that you're (to paraphrase) 1.90x as likely to contract Parkinson's?
In the future, if a given insurance provider knows you have purchased a service like this, they also can then figure out which SNPs you know your genotypes for (it would be fairly trivial for any insurance company to find out which 950,000 or so SNPs 23andme tests for), and can then craft a survey form asking about these specific traits.
Many people will likely still try the service anyway because they'd rather know, pro-actively address certain issues, and risk the insurance game, than not know at all.
[EDIT: Apologies for not having read your question all that clearly. Just assume the above applies to "admitting you've used the service in public"]
I can't stress this enough. I've had a bunch of friends buy the 23andme kit while it was on sale recently because they were interested in my results from a while ago, and their buildup to getting their own results was "what if it tells me I'm never going to have x?!" and things like that. Kind of frustrating to explain how it works.
23andme put me at average to low risk of a few things they test for that I have in real life. One of the more frustrating things to read was that 23andme declared from preliminary asthma research that I was at lower than average to average odds, when in my past I've had severe asthma I've even been hospitalized for.
On the flip side of things, 23andme determined my risk of melanoma from genetics is 0.1% (as compared to 1.7% average). But I live in Los Angeles and I get sunburnt/suntanned multiple times a year, not to mention the sheer number of hours I spend outdoors in general. I regularly track skin changes and visit a dermatologist once in a while because new spots and changes on my skin stress the hell out of me. I know my risk likely skyrockets past the 1.7% easily if you take my environment into account.
Insurance companies already play this risk/percentage game anyway with lots of other information, and I don't think I see a big of a risk as people being denied insurance from testing like this. If anything, it means everyone can be more proactive and save money and lives in the end. (Of course, I am being pretty naively optimistic here...) I mean, I imagine that's what they're trying to do on some level when they send me pamphlets about STD testing and prenatal care in the mail every other week just because they know I'm a 20something female on birth control.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrimi...
The stuff about family origin/history was pretty boring for me and just confirmed that I'm as white/boring as they come. Both lines from Europe? You don't say... But for someone who doesn't know that they are 100% European, it could be interesting to see what else is in your background.
On the other hand, I like yourself also thought I had a "boring white Polish as far back as anyone can remember" background. Instead, I got some rather awesome results on the ancestry front that changed a lot of what I know about my background.
The results in both haplogroups are interesting (if a bit broad) in their own right, but what really blew my mind was the sheer numbers of very close cousins I have amongst "neighboring" or not-so-neighboring ethnicities/religions/countries. There's a definite history in my family of "running away from the Russians", and so it's fascinating to find out just how much of those Russians (and other people round the 'Bloc) are in fact directly related to me by only a couple generations.
Some time this year, they seem to have put their prices at $199, down from $499.
Personally, I'm waiting until whole-genome resequencing is down to about $300 from a commercial outlet. I don't anticipate this being the case in the next 5 years, at least, but it's not like my DNA will be changing any time soon.
What's boring about being white? Sorry, but this attitude strikes me as being nonsense political correctness. I'm quite sure that whatever race or culture your ancestors come from, there's plenty to be interested in on a personal level at the very least.
The political correctness that is a problem is that you can't say 'white/boring' without offending someone like the person you responded to.
It isn't to say that us white people are boring, but just that there was nothing novel in that part of the results. It was about as exciting as the genetic test in there that confirmed I have brown eyes. If it said I had blue eyes, it would have been interesting news to me.
My dad downloaded his raw data and is enlisting me to use some of the 3rd party tools out there to do some other comparisons, but I haven't really dug into it yet. Home bioinformatics...
(I actually bought the kits on DNA day last year, and just haven't gotten around to sending them in until now, so this really is weird for me)
* I don't think the tech is mature enough to be 100% reliable
* It'll probably just worry people more than anything.
* Doctors are trained. Some guy getting this thing isn't.
* It's fun. It really is. Even the part about the Parkinson, after you get over it.
* You're pretty much subsidizing a new industry.
* There is a chance you can actually use this. Either if you actually
have a rare disease gene, or if you're a carrier.
I'm sure doctors hate this. I'm of the opinion we should leave trained professionals to do their job.
But I think I understand a bit of what you mean. For example, my results lists obesity at "normal", with a whopping 60% chance. Same way, one slightly raised chance of a certain disease may not mean much when compared to a host of other illnesses with much higher baseline chances. As it happens though, prostate cancer is already high on the list, so I do intent to fully make use of the information.