hijack
Would someone please explain the interest in meeting (or learning of) someone who somehow shares a common ancestor?
Who even knows the names of their great-great-great-great- whatever?
Some huge % of white people are descended from Charlemagne - so what?
/hijack
But they can only find 990 relatives if those 990 people have signed up for the service, right?
Some people are interested in things that other people don’t care about or understand. It’s a human thing.
Seriously folks, can some of you remember that this is an international board, and some of us have never heard of 23andme.
I read the above paragraph thinking that the dinner guest had her bbq-spit-rotisserie (call it what you will) totally overhauled/serviced by this wonderful company, and she was extremely pleased with the result, and EVEN LEARNED some extra stuff about her ability to perform the next service herself!!!
Hey, I’D pay someone ninety-nine bucks to clean MY bbq. 
How would I know that 23andme is marketed exclusively in the US? Are Americans the only ones with chromosomes or something? Did Charlemagne become a US citizen when I wasn’t looking? Meantime, you’re letting “crazy American commercials for U.S. products” threads go without complaint?
I’d sign up but only if I turn out to be a distant relation to the Senate Minority leader. Sadly, I’ve got 990 relatives but a Mitch ain’t one.
/slowclap
Me, I’m wondering which macular degeneration test they used. There are at least two available that I know of, and they do not test the exact same sets of genes (though there is overlap).
I agree and reported accordingly.
For those wondering, in 2002 a new spambot was developed that coincided with Internet protocol xkcd.810. Usernames were registered en masse and recursive algorithms were developed to mask commercial posts. Though many usernames lay dormant and many were discovered early on, some successfully maintained membership for eleven years–until the botnet owner activated them and, well, here we are. Insidious, subtle, hard to detect, but spam nonetheless. Amazing what you can do with cutting edge technology. Also, the cake is a lie.
(In actuality, I was on the fence curiosity-wise and leaning towards Ancestry’s service. This thread has pretty much pushed me over an to the 23 side of things. Very effective spam. I hope PRR gets a digital snack from his botnet overloards.)
How does 23andme.com compare to National Geographic’s genomic project test? NG’s is doubled their price from $100 to $200 a while back, and while I still really want to do it, I can’t justify it to myself.
But a $100 for a comparable test, I’ll hold my brother down and make him spit in a cup.
I don’t think it is as many of my matches are in the UK and Australia.
23andme’s services are available internationally, but the postage is kinda extreme.
I fully expect job and health insurance applications in the near future to ask if you have acquired any knowledge about your genetics in order to screen out applicants with undesirable predispositions. Even though there is already a federal genetic non-discrimination law, I don’t believe it prevents them from (or being severely penalized for) asking the question. You would be out of luck if you refuse to answer, or provided genetic data they didn’t like, and the corporation could give any other reason for rejecting you…it would be impossible to prove it was discrimination.
You don’t need to provide ID or your real name when you register the bar code from a sample kit. A single person can order a truckload of kits if they so desire.
I thought the price on these tests was supposed to be coming down?
The safest thing to do is assume everything is only marketed in the US and wait for people to come in and say “Actually, we have that where we are”, IMHO.
My 11th grade “Political Studies” teacher (it was actually a section within History) was from out of the region.
She gave us homework to draw our family trees “as far as you can”. Confused, we asked, “uh, how far?” “Oh, as far as you can!”
We all had the common sense to stop in the Felipe V (early XVIII century) “blood tests”. You see, His Royal Motherfuckedness, faced with the request to call Parliament in Navarra, and with a custom but not a written law that said any citizen could take advantage of a call to Parliament to talk with the King, he claimed that you could only do so if you could prove that all your grandparents were descended from people who’d ever spoken in Parliament.
The results were so much not in his favor that he repeated the stunt a few years later (for no better results); it’s common for Navarresse families to have copies of their own Tests and to keep up-to-date family trees.
She almost had a nerdgasm seeing all those “only three centuries because really, getting further would have taken forever” trees. Years later Middlebro showed her our copy of the Tests - erase the “almost”.
Maternal side I stop at great-grandparents and a few great-great-grands; she’s Not From Around Here, you see. Despite half my family tree being from Parts Elsewhere, I was able to find common lastnames with all my classmates but one (we were 38 in class IIRC). We figured that must be some sort of fluke: there’s bound to be common blood at some point, just not in the last three centuries.
FDA warns Google-backed 23andMe to halt DNA testing services
Pretty much as I said in the other genetic testing thread. 23andMe is giving out medical advise which has not been proven over multiple, decade long genetic studies involving thousands of patients, as you would expect would be required to provide accurate results.
“You have a gene with makes you N% more likely to develop Fluxomioma!”
Really? And how many people were studied who had variants of this gene to determine this?
From their website:
This is where they get in trouble–saying they’ll provide health recommendations. And the fact their testing platform hasn’t been approved this, AFAIK (Illumina HumanOmniExpress SNP chip).
They’re not actually doing research themselves, but data mining the literature and bioinformatics databases, which is what everyone else does, like Ingenuity with their Variant Analysis software, for example. I’m sure they have created their own proprietary databases.
They hire people to do this. As of today, they’re looking for a Statistical Geneticist for Parkinson’s Disease:
This is pretty standard–showing this variant is associated with that condition. You could find tons of papers on PubMed–some done better and more meaningful than others.
But they’re not authorized to provide medical advice based on their testing. This is what the FDA had to say about it:
I think it’s more about 23andme being authorized to provide this type of data and “make recommendations”, and less about the genetic association data they’re mining.
Certainly the association evidence for certain diseases can be stronger than others, as you point out. The BRCA variants, for example, versus Fluxomioma genes (no hits in PubMed, so the evidence seems lacking ;)). And correlation doesn’t mean cause.
If you have the background and knew you had a certain variant, you could find a lot of the information yourself. But most people don’t and wouldn’t know how to evaluate and verify the findings in 23andme’s report.
Where’s the other genetic testing thread, BTW. I’d be interested in that one.