Hacker News Reader

Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

I've been wary about submitting my DNA to a company so this is very intriguing. Is there enough data and/or a community and open software to support things like ancestry and disease profiles locally?

View on HN

I've been curious about what my DNA says, and went so far as to buy a 23andme kit years ago. I never sent it in, because I don't like the idea of some company retaining that kind of deeply personal data about me. It's useless to resist, though; my sister and some cousins submitted theirs, and that's enough to destroy any real sense of anonymity I might have. I don't have any particular concern; it's just one of the myriad ways that privacy no longer exists.

> I don't have any particular concern

we don't have even the slightest idea of where it could go right now. look 30 years ago and DNA wasn't a thing that people were worried about and now it's catching sloppy criminals. the technology opens up new, unexpected opportunities

I get your point, but your timeline is pretty far off. The first human gene therapy happened in 1990 so DNA has been a thing for awhile.

The first use of DNA in a criminal case only goes back to 1987. As such 30 years ago people generally weren’t really aware of generic testing or any of it’s implications outside of science fiction.

I am talking about DNA wrt crimes... it was first proposed as possible in 85 and in the early 90s used for it. I'd say my timeline was fairly ok give or take a few years for an off the cuff recollection of events.

It's tricky to organise, but in theory, yes, you can interpret your own results.

Ancestry/23andme-type medical results are (in my opinion) almost entirely a nice write-up and display of public databases of research on SNPs, e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/snp/docs/entrez_help/, https://www.snpedia.com/

You could (for example) submit the data you get to Promethease which will do the processing for you. Promethease is now owned by MyHeritage, so I'm not sure how their terms are looking - I'd be a little cautious about using that.

There is plenty of open software and data in genomics. The hard part is knowing what to do, using the software correctly, and interpreting the results. Bioinformatics is still mostly research-level work, so you'll need years of experience and lots of trial and error to get anything done.

I'd wager for most people, DNA still isn't a thing they're worried about.

Would be rather interesting to create sth like bloom filters from ones DNA to find relatives. In contrast to phone numbers the DNA space here might really be big enough for private "contact" discovery to work ...

23andMe does this already; I've found relatives from some distant parts of the family this way!

Good question. I'm always afraid most of the useful medical data will be kept secret by these giant corporations, but let's hope this is not already the case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com