Pulling Back the Curtain on DNA Ancestry Tests

A Tufts expert discusses whether direct-to-consumer genetics testing kits really work, their privacy risks, and potential surprises.

 The Risks and Benefits of 23andMe DNA Analysis

Before you spit into that vial and mail it away, make sure you understand the risks of what you're about to undertake. This devil's bargain is about much more than learning about your genealogy and health traits. It could comprise your ability to get life, disability, or long term care insurance or severely affect the rates you pay for those services.

When Your Ancestry Test Entangles Others

Today’s DNA kits can reveal secrets that affect not just your own family but strangers as well. Should one person’s right to know take precedence over another’s life narrative?

Are Genetic Testing Sites the New Social Networks?

Like Facebook, but for fifth cousins, adoptive mothers and sperm-donor dads.

Can Genetic Counselors Keep Up With 23andMe?

The rise of spit kits is leaving consumers with lots of data and few answers. Genetic counselors could help people understand these results, but there aren’t enough of them to go around.

Don't Take the DNA Test You'll Probably Get for Christmas

On the face of it, these tests seem like the perfect stocking stuffer. They’re pegged as a novel, exciting experience, one that might even bring a family closer together by revealing their shared genetic past. But in this humble writer’s opinion, consumer DNA kits are one of the last presents you want to unwrap on Christmas morning. Why? Because they can still be laughingly imprecise, are barely regulated, and most worryingly of all, could expose your identity to people you’d rather not know anything about you.

How Do You Know When a DNA Test Is B.S.?

A company called Helix wants to sort through the pseudoscience in DNA tests, but it has its critics, too.

How To Sign Away The Rights to Your DNA

DNA-testing kit company 23andMe, announced a new partnership with drug giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). GSK gets exclusive access to 23andMe’s troves of customer data — which it plans to use to develop a whole host of new drugs — and 23andMe gets a $300 million dollar investment. The company was quick to clarify that 23andMe customers had the option to opt-in or out of sharing their genetic information for research purposes, stating that “As always, customers choose whether or not to participate in research.

The Best DNA Testing Kit

Anyone who wants to learn more about their ethnic roots or discover connections to past and contemporary relatives may be curious about at-home DNA kits. The appeal is obvious: By simply spitting into a tube or swabbing the inside of your cheek, you can unlock genetic mysteries that may stretch back generations. But such DNA testing services also come with inherent privacy concerns, and they’re bound by few legal guidelines regulating the use of your data. The ramifications of sharing your DNA with for-profit companies are continuously evolving, and opting into a recreational DNA test today will likely lead to future consequences that no one has anticipated.

Why DNA tests are suddenly unpopular

As more and more people took consumer DNA tests, a number of privacy concerns bubbled up, including how outside companies, law enforcement, and even foreign governments might try to use that data. In one high-profile case, police used DNA test info from third and fourth cousins, uploaded to a third-party site, to track down the Golden State Killer, highlighting that you’re not necessarily just revealing your own DNA when you take ones of these tests.

A History of Slavery and Genocide Is Hidden in Modern DNA

Genetic testing of people with Caribbean ancestry reveals evidence of indigenous population collapse and specific waves of slave trade.

Ancestry genetic tests are making it extremely easy for cops to track all white people

So many white people have bought into consumer genetic testing that it’s now possible for law enforcement agencies to use genetic data to hunt down virtually anyone of European descent — even if they’ve never spit in a trendy tube themselves — by tracking their distant relatives who have already shared their results from companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com.

Ancestry Tests Produced Shocking Results. Should I Tell My Family?

The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on the burden that comes with obtaining genealogical information.

At-home DNA test kits can tell you many things. Race shouldn't be one of them

DNA test kits like the ones created by 23andMe and Ancestry.com do not emphasize the 99.9% of the human genome that is the same across humans. Instead, they focus on the 0.1% variation among humans. The tests give users results based on large geographic locations, known as continental ancestry. But as Fuentes points out, "Africa, Asia and Europe are not biological units, right? They're not even single geobiological patterns or areas or habitats or ecologies ... They are geopolitical. We named them."

At-Home DNA Testing, Placed Under A Microscope

At-home DNA tests are becoming a popular holiday gift over the holidays. A recent survey by MIT found that 100 million Americans are on track to take one by the end of the next year. This trend offers private companies the world's largest collection of human DNA. But what are they doing with it? Can you get a health and ancestry test while also protecting your privacy?

Big Pharma Would Like Your DNA

23andMe’s $300 million deal with GlaxoSmithKline is just the tip of the iceberg.

Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing's Red Herring: “Genetic Ancestry” and Personalized Medicine

Genetic ancestry results, with their percentages by region and often slick presentation, certainly provide an appearance of precision to the consumer but this very appearance is “dangerously seductive and equally misleading”

Genetic testing is an inexact science with real consequences

How flawed genetic testing could be used for more than screwing up your race.

Home genealogy kit sales plummet over data privacy concerns

Two third-party uses of genetic genealogy have given consumers pause for thought. One: Almost every database shares information with the pharmaceutical industry. 23andMe was clear from the beginning that its health information would be used by its research partners and asked consumers to consent. But when it started to sign major deals with drug developers in 2015, consumers began to realize that, once again, similar to social sharing platforms, they were the product. A fact not so surprising from a company whose initial investors were from Google and Facebook.

How African Are You?

DNA testing for genealogy has become increasingly popular, as a Newsweek cover story in February attests. Especially attention-getting have been efforts to trace genetic relationships along the male lineage. In January the New York Times wrote up attempts to trace Irish genealogy through the male line to Niall of the Nine Hostages, a fifth-century Irish warlord. Other tests have also shown that as many as 14 million men may share the Y chromosome of Genghis Khan. But tests that seek a single, Y-chromosome male lineage are limited: They leave out the vast majority of ancestors. Newer tests can survey all the DNA that can be inherited from either parent, but at a cost of precision: They don’t tell which ancestors lived where, and they can’t detect traces of ancestry.

How DNA Testing Botched My Family’s Heritage, and Probably Yours, Too

In truth, your specific ancestors actually have relatively little impact on your DNA. Some 99.99 percent of your DNA is identical to every other human’s. We’re mostly just all the same. But instead of embracing our genetic similarities, we cling to those differences as symbols of what makes us unique. Consumer DNA testing tends to reinforce that—even though the difference that one test reveals might not even exist in another. “These companies are asking people to pay for something that is at best trivial and at worst astrology,” said Rutherford. “The biggest lesson we can teach people is that DNA is probabilistic and not deterministic.”

I took 9 different DNA tests and here's what I found

The thing about me is that I'm Jewish. It's not the only thing about me. I'm also 5 feet 11 inches tall, a glasses wearer and into bicycling. But most people who know me probably wouldn't be surprised to learn that most of my ancestors lived in shtetls in Eastern Europe. So, it wasn't too surprising when I sent off nine DNA samples to three different DNA companies under a variety of fake names, and the results indicated that I'm super-duper Ashkenazi Jewish. (Ashkenazim are Jews who trace their ancestry back to Yiddish-speaking populations inhabiting the region between France and Russia.)

Siblings Can Have Surprisingly Different DNA Ancestry. Here's Why.

When it comes to tracing your roots through your genes, biological siblings may have less in common than many people expect.

Stanford sociologists explore who does, and doesn’t, want a DNA ancestry test

Stanford sociologists found that racial identity, immigration generation and knowledge of family history influence people’s decision to take a DNA test.

The dark side of our genealogy craze

Genealogy research and DNA testing provide powerful and meaningful points of access into self-discovery. They can also, however, be exploited and misused. During a moment shaped by racial grievance, police violence, indigenous disenfranchisement, religious discrimination, child caging, border violence and anti-immigrant bigotry, ancestral claims to a selective immigrant past provide seductive narratives of “specialness” that help mitigate the culpability of whiteness in creating the conditions of our modern racial unrest.

The FTC is investigating DNA firms like 23andMe and Ancestry over privacy

As the DNA testing market has exploded—worth approximately $99 million in 2017 and expected to increase to $310 million by 2022—concerns have also grown about the use of genetic data.

The limits of ancestry DNA tests, explained

23andMe wants to sell you vacations based on your DNA. But what are they really basing that on?

The Opt Out: 5 reasons to skip at-home genetic testing

Read this before you spit into that tube. IN THE LAST DECADE, direct-to-consumer genetic tests like those from Ancestry.com and 23andMe have become ubiquitous in the US. These services cater to Americans looking for distant relatives, a missing piece of their history, or insight into their health. But if you can’t wait to swab your cheeks or spit into a plastic tube (or have done so already), you should know the privacy risks involved in putting your entire genome in the mail.

These people took DNA tests. The results changed their lives

Using at-home DNA tests to predict ethnicity can be problematic. The tests give results based on geographical regions, which are human inventions, not biological categories, and the reference groups used to give ethnicity estimates come from self-reported nationality and identity. DNA tests may be able to show the location where people with similar DNA to you typically live, but the population data they use is limited.

When Your Ancestry Test Entangles Others

Today’s DNA kits can reveal secrets that affect not just your own family but strangers as well. Should one person’s right to know take precedence over another’s life narrative?

Why DNA tests are suddenly unpopular

23andMe and Ancestry are laying off workers as interest in their DNA tests declines.

‘It made me question my ancestry’: does DNA home testing really understand race?

Dubious results, emotional fallout, privacy concerns: inside the £7.7bn industry that promises to tell you who you really are.

‘It made me question my ancestry’: does DNA home testing really understand race?

Dubious results, emotional fallout, privacy concerns: inside the £7.7bn industry that promises to tell you who you really are