Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What's it like getting your DNA results back from 23andMe

philosophistry.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 54 posts

Re: What's it like getting your DNA results back from 23andMe

#41

Post by myth_drannon »

endtime wrote: post #22
Maciek416 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had better luck with relative finder as well. My very first contact was able to trace his great-great-grandparents roots to a village that is only 30 minutes away or so from my Dad's ancestor's town. This person is marked as a 5th cousin, so I'd consider that pretty compelling. Regarding your "mostly seem not to be cousins" comment, I think people have an overly narrow definition of cousins where 23andme has a m…

Well, I can trace back 3-4 generations, at least in terms of surnames and maiden names, and none of the people I've talked to are even from the same parts of Europe or know of any relatives with the same last names (with one exception for Miller, which is a very common name). I've talked to several Ukrainians, one Portuguese, and one Argentinian - whereas my family is English, Dutch, German, Lithuanian, Polish, and R…

The same person can be Polish,Russian,Ukrainian or Belorussian depending on which years he lived in.

Re: What's it like getting your DNA results back from 23andMe

#43

Post by jeffthebear »

I got on the deal for $100 on DNA day and found that most of the results I got back were interesting and cool to show my friends but it didn't change my life/habits in anyway. Most of the 23andMe's data is currently targeted for people of European descent and there isn't a whole lot of data on people of African and Asian descent in their database but even many of the European traits have varying confidence markers based on genetic data we have available today. I am hoping that much more data will be coming in the future but at the moment I wouldn't accept the results as gospel.

Re: What's it like getting your DNA results back from 23andMe

#44

Post by VladRussian »

rms wrote: post #37
ghshephard wrote: post #10

I managed to get one of those $100 23andMe deals, so I bought Christmas presents for my mother, brother, sister in law, niece and nephew (Actually, I bought them wayyyy in advance on DNA Day - couldn't resist a great deal). About 7 weeks later, everybody's profile came online, and the relative finder instantly identified all of us and our probable relationship to each other (it was correct, in all cases). It's intere…

>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.

the shotgun sequencing (specifically the assembly stage) directly relies on the advances of the original Moore's Law

Re: What's it like getting your DNA results back from 23andMe

#45

Post by ams6110 »

randallsquared wrote: post #30
axod wrote: post #13

Never understood why people pay money for this. It seems crazy to me.

It seems crazy to be curious about your genes? Could you elaborate on why?

Not something I want to know much about. I figure I'm in this life for however long it's going to last, based mostly on factors I can't change. I don't want to know that I'm predisposed to get ALS, or Parkinsons, or cancer, or whatever else they might tell me.

Re: What's it like getting your DNA results back from 23andMe

#46

Post by ghshephard »

endtime wrote: post #22
Maciek416 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had better luck with relative finder as well. My very first contact was able to trace his great-great-grandparents roots to a village that is only 30 minutes away or so from my Dad's ancestor's town. This person is marked as a 5th cousin, so I'd consider that pretty compelling. Regarding your "mostly seem not to be cousins" comment, I think people have an overly narrow definition of cousins where 23andme has a m…

Well, I can trace back 3-4 generations, at least in terms of surnames and maiden names, and none of the people I've talked to are even from the same parts of Europe or know of any relatives with the same last names (with one exception for Miller, which is a very common name). I've talked to several Ukrainians, one Portuguese, and one Argentinian - whereas my family is English, Dutch, German, Lithuanian, Polish, and R…

Each Cousin will go back typically (there area always exception) go back no more than 50 years. In my family, the separation in age between youngest and oldest cousin is 35 years. So, A fifth cousin speaks to a common ancestor no more than 250 years ago.

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.

Re: What's it like getting your DNA results back from 23andMe

#47

Post by VladRussian »

endtime wrote: post #3

I've done 23andMe as well. If anyone's curious I'm happy to answer questions. Without prompting, I don't have much to add other than that the relative finder doesn't seem to work quite as well as I'd hoped. I do have one distant cousin on 23andMe, and it did find her, but assigned higher confidence/probability/whatever to a few tens of people who mostly seem not to be cousins. This might not be their fault - I imagin…

How far are you from Genghis Khan? Or was it some other startup who determines it?

Re: What's it like getting your DNA results back from 23andMe

#48

Post by silencio »

Maciek416 wrote: post #20
JacobAldridge wrote: post #15

Combining two recent HN discussions here - this one, and one yesterday on the difficulty in getting insurance in the US ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2247560 ) 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) 1.90…

One simple immediate consequence may be that you cannot answer a question like "do you have any reason to believe that you may be at risk for XYZ" anymore without potentially having to rely on a result that may or may not have statistical significance -- or which you may have misunderstood. A lot of 23andme reports are in the form of "if you are east asian and have the following genotype for SNP rsXXXXXX, you have a…

> potentially having to rely on a result that may or may not have statistical significance

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.

Re: What's it like getting your DNA results back from 23andMe

#49

Post by Sticker »

prawn wrote: post #35
CWuestefeld wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just confirmed that I'm as white/boring as they come 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.

Perhaps that they feel white/boring and that their lineage traces to more of the same. An Asian person might not be particularly excited to learn that their ancestors trace back through China. Candidate one, however, might be more intrigued to find ancestry tracing through Northern Africa, or candidate through India - just guessing.

correct, I believe that was the obvious point he was trying to make.

The political correctness that is a problem is that you can't say 'white/boring' without offending someone like the person you responded to.

Re: What's it like getting your DNA results back from 23andMe

#50

Post by endtime »

VladRussian wrote: post #47
endtime wrote: post #3

I've done 23andMe as well. If anyone's curious I'm happy to answer questions. Without prompting, I don't have much to add other than that the relative finder doesn't seem to work quite as well as I'd hoped. I do have one distant cousin on 23andMe, and it did find her, but assigned higher confidence/probability/whatever to a few tens of people who mostly seem not to be cousins. This might not be their fault - I imagin…

How far are you from Genghis Khan? Or was it some other startup who determines it?

I can find Genghis Khan's haplogroups, but I don't see a way to compare my DNA to his.
Post reply on HN