DNA testing company vanishes along with its customers' genetic data

No it doesn't. We don't have DNA from 100 or even 50 years ago. These genetic tests are essentially geographical.

For example, there are tens of millions of people in Africa and Latin America who unknowingly have mixed ancestry and will be labeled in the data set as being "from X country."

That will mean the dataset thinks European genes might indicate Latin American descent or vice versa.

They aren't truly geographical- they're based on population structure in the genome. This is a pretty well-studied area of science that has been established for some time now; are you coming from a "I am a scientist who works with the data and understand the issues well", or a "I don't like 23&Me, so I'm complaining", or something else? I don't want to get in arguments with folks who aren't knowledgeable about population genetics. Above you said "ex has a doctorate in genetics".

> They aren't truly geographical- they're based on population structure in the genome.

Determining whether people are genetically similar is indeed well-studied. The problem is saying with certainty that you know where their ancestors lived.

There are a few ways the results end up being inaccurate, and they apply to all the companies.

The first and most important is that the data is from where people live now or in the very recent past (as I alluded earlier). That means they can only tell you how closely-related you are to people in a certain geographic area, whether those people have been there for 100 years or 1,000 years.

The second is that the data sets are filled with mostly European data, so anyone with even a bit of non-European ancestry is going to have less-accurate results[1] presented to them with a misleading degree of confidence.

The third is that there isn't an objectively "correct" algorithm for determining if someone is from one place or another. Every company has their own, which is why people get (sometimes wildly) different results from different companies.[2][3]

And the fourth is that the data collection doesn't seem to be especially accurate, perhaps related to the quantity or variety of SNPs that the testing company collects data about.

> Above you said "ex has a doctorate in genetics".

Correct. And the same way I take climate scientists' word for it that climate change is happening, instead of getting 10 degrees in different fields and gathering data myself, I understood her explanation and trust her expertise. Being a science consumer is always about trusting other people who have done the research, not about learning it all yourself and gathering your own data.

If you can find someone with a doctorate in genetics who has no affiliation with testing companies and believes these tests accurately tell someone where their ancestors were from, I'd be happy to consider the counterpoint. I have never seen such a thing in my research.

Regardless, all of the commercial operations have given twins differing results, so we can be fairly certain that any accurate way of determining genealogy from DNA has not been commercialized.

These tests, however, are good for finding relatives or determining how closely-related two people are.

1. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/previous-genetic-association...

2. https://www.livescience.com/63997-dna-ancestry-test-results-...

3. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/1/28/18194560/an...

My doctorate is in biophysics with deep experience in genomics. I've attended talks from the world's leading experts (as well as scientists/researchers/engineers) who work in this field, and read papers. From my inspection of the data, identity by descent does exactly what the researchers say, with a level of accuracy that is consistent with our current understanding of population structure and its changes in the past.

BTW, the main reason african genomic inference is so complicated is not the lack of genomic data, but rather that africa itself has far higher genetic diversity than any other continent, due to populations (whose genomes we can infer!) moving and interbreeding for a long time before humans left africa and spread out to the rest of the world.

(Article #1 is correct, there are definitely populations for which our current models are inaccurate due to bias and underlying complexity. I am not disagreeing with any of that).

(Article #2, where an individual compared the results, shows that the results are nearly identical, and well within the expected accuracy of the tests)

(Article #3 isn't interesting- yes, 23&Me and other companies have marketed truly terrible ideas. That doesn't mean IBD is scientifically invalid. The article also strawmans many of the realities underlying the nature of the tests and their relationship to disease prediction, or any other phenotype of interest).

What an interesting thing to microdose. How’s your productivity on it?