Curious About Your Ancestry? Submit a DNA Swab, and a Big Grain of Salt
By Maud Newton,
The New York Times
| 06. 18. 2018
By now, millions of us have taken ancestry tests. We’ve spit into tubes and allowed our genetic information to be uploaded into databases. In return we’ve had our genomes assigned to different parts of the world. The fine print warns us not to rely on those results, despite their seeming precision: 0.1 percent Oceanian! It’s hard to resist telling friends and family that we’ve turned out to be partly sub-Saharan African or Middle Eastern or Scandinavian. But testing with a different company may yield different results, or we may log into our account one day and find that the allocations have changed. Often the tests create as many mysteries as they solve.
The explanations that testing companies give for these shifts tend to be passive and blandly opaque: Identifying “ancestry-informative markers” depends on “sufficient data” from “reference populations.” Errors are “noise.” In her smart, searching new book, “Futureface: A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging,” the journalist and former MSNBC host Alex Wagner recounts being incorrectly assigned enough Scandinavian DNA that one of her grandparents could...
Related Articles
By Carey Gillan, UnSpun | 03.18.2024
A Mexican standoff with the United States turned into a Mexican smack-down this month with the release of Mexico’s formal rebuttal to US efforts to overturn limits Mexico has ordered on the use of genetically modified (GM) corn and the...
By Hilary Brueck, Business Insider | 03.23.2024
"OpenAI Co-Founder & CEO Sam Altman speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019 at Moscone Convention Center on October 03, 2019 in San Francisco, California (Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)" by TechCrunch is licensed under CC by...
By Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic | 03.18.2024
People are discovering the truth about their biological parents with DNA—and learning that incest is far more common than many think.
When Steve Edsel was a boy, his adoptive parents kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings in their bedroom closet...
By Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | 03.20.2024
There is a new most expensive drug ever—a gene therapy that costs as much as a Brooklyn brownstone or a Miami mansion, and more than the average person will earn in a lifetime.
Lenmeldy is a gene treatment for metachromatic...