Purgatory 2024: DNA tests for fun
North East Quine
Purgatory Host
BBC Radio has started a new series The Gift reporting on people who were given a DNA test as a fun Christmas or birthday gift, with unforeseen consequences.
Companies such as Ancestry and 23andMe advertise their tests around occasions such as Christmas, although they do issue a clear warning that those testing might uncover information which they would rather not know.
I suspect that anyone receiving such a test as a "surprise" gift might feel pressurised to do it and not to waste it.
Is it ethical to market such tests as a potential gift?
Companies such as Ancestry and 23andMe advertise their tests around occasions such as Christmas, although they do issue a clear warning that those testing might uncover information which they would rather not know.
I suspect that anyone receiving such a test as a "surprise" gift might feel pressurised to do it and not to waste it.
Is it ethical to market such tests as a potential gift?
Comments
I don't think marketing the tests as gifts is ethical.
I am a librarian at a library that often deals with genealogy research. When genetic testing was a new "gee whiz" thing, I started seeing people at the reference desk, who were suddenly faced with the reality that people in their lives weren't always genetically, who they thought they were. Sometimes it answered some important questions. Often, though, it was crushing.
So, yeah. Approach with caution.
And how I'm 0.7% Iberian (1850s?) and 0.2% Greco-Balkan (1800s?) I have no idea!
He wondered how he could find out more about the trucker who had been with mom. I suggested looking at the first cousins in the list that were not in our family. None of them wanted to talk about it. He apparently never had any siblings by that man.
Through it all, I assured him we still considered him our cousin and continue to invite him and his family to our gatherings. He still uses our last name.
On the other hand, I have discovered much about the various branches of the family. Some names that had previously been marked end of the line, suddenly had fathers and mothers I did not know.
Every so often Ancestry updates its DNA findings and I learn just a little bet more.
I have never given a DNA kit as a gift--correction--I did give it as a gift to my wife. She took it and it confirmed she could apply as a Daughter of the American Revolution. Beyond that, she has not used the information.
https://tinyurl.com/p2nztavv
"An emotionally intelligent and affecting one-off documentary about identity and belonging. Luke Davies is a 30-year-old man who grew up in Rochdale, thinking that his parents were his biological parents, and that he was white – until he did a DNA test to trace his heritage, and found far more questions than he did answers."
I don't believe it is, not just because it reveals information about the person but also because it gives information about their family to a set of entities that I wouldn't necessarily trust in perpetuity.
Decades earlier he and his wife had attended a fertility clinic for tests following a miscarriage. He had provided a sperm sample. Somehow that sample had been used as the donor sperm for another couple at the fertility clinic.
As a keen genealogist, I did an Ancestry test six years ago. It enabled me to knock down one of the two "brick walls" in my tree and identify a great great grandfather. The other brick wall, the identity of a 3 x great grandfather, remains unsolved.
That is ... extraordinarily bad.
I had a 4th grandmother I could not trace. I finally went to the LDS site and found the missing 5th grandparents and it opened up another couple of doors. I did get that line down into the 1400s.
1/2,000,000th to 1/34,000,000th. You're 8,000 to 131,000 times more closely related to anyone you bump into. Was the line genetic or by descent? As it's quite possible to have no DNA from ancestors that far back.
You're 8,000 to 131,000 times more closely related to anyone you bump into.
More closely related to anyone you bump into than what? or whom?
Besides, as the thread says, I do my family genealogy for fun. I do not take it seriously beyond the American Revolution.
No I'm not asking.
You're telling.
Finding ancestors in the 1400s means 21 to 25 generations back. 2-34 million contemporary ancestors (many of whom have to be the same people of course). After 8 generations back - 256 concurrent ancestors - you are no more likely to share DNA with them than you are with a total stranger. 8,000 times more dilute still with 21 generations. 131,000 with 25.
Yes, and this gets to the heart of my criticism above.
Yes, my brother is very wary of these tests and if I'd asked him before doing mine, I'm sure he'd have said he'd rather I didn't.
Depends. The current British monarch (a good benchmark for a traceable family tree) takes 14-17 generations to get to the 1400s, depending on whether you want the early 1400s (Duke Frederick II of Brunswick, born 1418) or the late 1400s (Duke Ernest I of Brunswick, born 1497). Of course Charles III has grandchildren, so for them it's 16-19 generations.
When I say, as I did, “in the line in my family that has been traced back that far,” then the only thing it depends on are how many generations there are between the 1400s and me in that one line of my family. That says nothing about any other line of my family, much less anyone’s ancestry.
I simply offered one line of my ancestry as a counter-example to Martin’s blanket “Finding ancestors in the 1400s means 21 to 25 generations back.”
But if you mean, there can be no general assumption and it depends on the circumstances of any one line of one person’s ancestry, then sure.
It transpired that his father had killed his parents, been convicted and jailed in America, but had escaped from jail and made a new, entirely law-abiding life for himself in Australia.
In an attempt to solve the cold case of the escaped prisoner, the American police had obtained a DNA sample from the escapee's brother and had registered it on Ancestry.
When the young man got his Ancestry results he thought he had connected with an uncle - but actually he'd connected with the American police. As his father / the escapee had died many years earlier, there were none of the wider implications there might have been had they caught him alive.
I found this disquieting. If police had a DNA sample from a crime, I'd happily provide my DNA to rule myself out, but if a close relative was being sought, would I be happy to hand over a DNA sample for them to register on Ancestry pretending to be me? I don't think so.
That's how they caught the Golden State Killer.
I take a different perspective. If I thought a close relative was a serial rapist/murderer (like the GSK) I would consider it very important that they stopped serially raping and murdering and if it took police intervention to make that happen, so be it.
That has nothing to do either with DNA, or the number of generations it takes for mathematics to demonstrate that its significance has dissipated. He wasn't claiming it was. Luke 3:23 explicitly and Matt 1:16 by hardly veiled implication, both recognise that DNA and family trees may not coincide with quite the convenience that people might assume.
This won't necessarily apply elsewhere in the world, but I've been told that if all your known recent ancestors are English, mathematics means that by the time you multiply your ancestors back to somewhere around about 1250-1300, you must be related to everyone else English. That's more or less where the number of your ancestors, doubling in each generation crosses the estimates for the population at the time.
I'm not sure why @Crœsos has cited two figures from the House of Brunswick as specially significant. or what this is supposed to have to do with this thread. Even if this thread was about royal descents, which it isn't, according to published family trees, King Charles III can trace his line at least as far back as a man called Cerdic who died in 534. He has that in common with every English and then British monarch since except, I think, Canute, Harold Godwin, William I, William II and Henry I. That's not through successive male descent. Presumably, @Crœsos sees them as the male ancestors of the House of Hanover, but both Charles III and Edward VIII inherited as the heirs of female sovereigns. Victoria was the last actual Hanoverian ruler.
As two entertaining, and completely irrelevant titbits on this, the last person who could claim the British throne as a Stuart by patrilineal descent, was Henry Stuart, Duke of York and Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia and Velletri. He was Bonnie Prince Charlie's younger brother and died in 1807. He was badly impoverished by the French Revolution and subsequent wars, and eventually was kept afloat by a pension from George III - yes, that is the same one as the one whom American shipmates will have been taught was an insufferable and malevolent tyrant.
I understood Gramps49 in the same way as Enoch.
I'm not sure that makes a practical difference. In both cases a publicly available database was compared to criminal evidence to solve a crime.
Is it a false profile? It contained real DNA from a real person who was actually a match for another person with a profile. It doesn't seem that different from someone submitting a sample pseudonymously.
On Ancestry, my DNA is linked to my e-mail address. I'm not sure if I'd be happy to provide DNA which would be linked to a police e-mail. I wouldn't know who was contacting "me" and I would have no control over the communications made as "me".
I can understand someone wanting to take steps like that to catch their parents' killer, even if that killer is a sibling.
Wouldn't that be obstruction of justice?
You put it so succinctly it slipped right by me!
I really wonder whether 4th Amendment search and seizure protections aren't going right out the window with the collection of DNA info.
DNA surveillence replicates and adds to the biases already there in our "justice" system -- Black men are massively over-represented in the federal and state DNA databases because they are more likely to get arrested than anyone else, and US officials are collecting DNA samples from people detained at the border. This is happening at the point of arrest, not conviction.
Also, there are all sorts of ways in which DNA evidence can be misleading: a sample collected at a crime scene might only be partial, it might combine DNA from multiple people, it might be contaminated by mistake (or on purpose even) in a lab, it might come from any number of people who were at that place shortly before or after the crime, or it might come from someone with excema who shed more DNA in a particular place than the actual culprit. Labs techs' interpretations of DNA evidence can be influenced about what they know about the status of an investigation.
This whole thing is asking us to trust the system and the people that brought us bite mark "evidence" and blood splatter "evidence," that are allowed to lie to people they're investigating, and that give police officers qualified immunity to prosecution for brutalizing people.
If that's a problem it's one that has existed for quite some time. Other identifying characteristics (fingerprints, mug shots, etc.) have routinely been collected this way at time of arrest long before anyone thought of using DNA analysis for identification.
DNA evidence is a bit different than other forensic evidence used by the police insofar as it's one of the few techniques that wasn't developed by police (i.e people without any formal background in science). DNA analysis was developed by actual scientists and only later applied to law enforcement.
Not sure who Edward VIII is/was. I think you meant Edward VII????
FFS
As an aside, the hack predates the current conflict, and this kind of thing is yet another reason why no one should have anything to do with these companies. They present attractive targets to all sorts of nefarious actors and have proven time and time again not to be up to the challenge of securing the information they store.
He was still king, from the moment his father died until he abdicated. Just as Edward V was king until Richard III had him declared illegitimate and usurped the throne.
I don't trust these DNA test firms either. Who knows what might happen to your data once it's in their clutches? For that matter, who knows whether the data you get back is actually yours? Mistakes happen even in the best-regulated companies.
Yes. it's one of the theories of UK constitutional law that there is always someone who is monarch.