See my friends getting tested and what interest me is the genetic conditions you may be more pre disposition for. But having a private company with my DNA is privacies of all privacies out the window. Is it worth? General thoughts?
I work in clinical genomics / bioinformatics, and I think the current health-related results that companies like 23andMe offer are pretty misleading. They look only at a few specific genomic coordinates that are known to be contain pathogenic variants, but chances are if you have the associated disease you don't have a variant at one of those few select locations. Because of this, a negative test result does not mean someone isn't at risk for the condition. I think this nuance is likely lost on most customers. (There are certain diseases that are associated with just a few gain-of-function mutations at well characterized sites, these would be better candidates for testing of the sort 23andMe does - but that's not what they are offering in general.)<p>The paradoxical nature of genetic variation, especially deleterious variation, is that most of it is very rare. Even with today's massive genome sequencing efforts it's still common to find variants that don't exist in ANY previously sequenced genome. Looking only at just a few sites will rarely get you the whole story.
I think a large part of the reason for giving money to a company like 23andMe is speculative; you are expecting that widespread genetic testing will result in us (as a society) learning a lot more useful info than we know now, and towards that end you want to see private sector companies like 23andMe succeed. If all we ever got out of it was what 23andMe (and their competitors) can give us now, it would not be worth it. But, sometimes you need some "foolish" early adopters to get the ball rolling. Plus, there is some entertainment value. If you would not find it either satisfying to know that you helped this industry get going, or interesting to know about the ancestry stuff, it will not (at this point) be worth it.
Not really - I did both the genetic and ancestry testing. All I got out of it was that I was a significantly higher percentage of a particular ethnicity that I didn't know about, which was pretty cool.<p>The genetic side didn't have anything meaningful (but maybe because whatever markers it tests for, I didn't have any risk factors).<p>I also loaded the data into Prometheus, but all it gives you is academic journal articles that you'd have to sift through and do your own interpretations.<p>They recently partnered with a genetics company to share data - at that point, I opted out of data sharing since I was unsure how my data was exactly going to be used.<p>Also watch for discount deals - don't pay full price - you can get 30% off the kits during sales on Amazon.<p>tl;dr: do ancestry if its on discount, unsure about genetics.
I found out I had two (!) dangerous recessives (the sort that if you have these from both sides, your body/life is pretty messed up), neither of which I knew about from family history. Luckily, my wife has neither, but I appreciate knowing this and being able to warn my children.
No, you have no idea what danger you are putting your family or descendants in by giving these companies a good DNA sample. On the plus side you might get told some vague "risk factors".
Not anymore. The original 23andme I definitely found useful, and they had a lot of interesting insights. But then the FDA basically shut them down and for a while the only thing they could offer was ancestry reporting, and that I really didn't care for. It seems like the FDA is slowly approving them to run more genetic tests for various conditions (last I saw it was 10), so perhaps it will increase in usefulness again. But I think it will be a while before it will get to the level of reporting you used to get at the beginning.
What you need to do is export the file and upload it to Promethease to know all your genetic predispositions. then map your lifestyle/diet in a way that allows you to avoid any early onset. For example: APOE4 = alzheimers, BRCA = Breast cancer. there are plenty of preventative measures to avoid these terrible diseases.
Yes, for several reasons.<p>If you have an interest in ancestry and family trees in can be useful. I've connected with a couple relatives I didn't know I had because of it. Trying to build out a family tree was a fun exercise for me and from a cost-time ratio I've gotten more out of it than I did movie pass.<p>Several people here seem to have been earlier adopters when they had more health related information that the FDA made them pull. They've been re-introducing some of them but for now 23andme is still a cheap way to get a useful sampling of your dna that you can run through services like <a href="https://promethease.com/" rel="nofollow">https://promethease.com/</a>.<p>If you get lucky (or unlucky depending on your perspective) it can make a difference in your life. It showed me that I had a slight increased risk of Celiac Disease so I had my allergy-immunologist do a blood test which came back positive. Endoscopy w/ biopsy also confirmed. I didn't have a lot of the stereotypical GI symptoms but after going Gluten free I can tell that I had other issues because of it. I doubt I would have been diagnosed correctly without my health report from them.<p>My wife also got a lot of value from hers. On the other hand our two adult sons got a couple mins entertainment from it and moved on.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY</a><p>DEF CON 25 - John Sotos - Genetic Diseases to Guide Digital Hacks of the Human Genome<p>The Chief Medical Officer of Intel says genetic testing in general seems like a terrible security risk one should avoid incurring at all cost.<p>So that's a big fat no.
Let me save you the trouble:<p>Your genes indicate you’re likely predisposed to some diseases X, Y, and Z. There is no vaccine from any of these, but you can reduce likelihood of those diseases if you exercise regularly, but not too vigorously, mind your diet, reduce stress, drink rarely, and have satisfying social life. Also remember your annual medical exam, and consult a medical professional when things feel wrong.<p>This is true for nearly any person as I understand.
Is it worth it, nope.<p>If you actually got any benefit from knowing your genetic conditions you were more pre disposition to then insurance companies would offer it to you for "free" to improve there screening process (or they could be purchasing that data from 23andme). But really knowing you are 20% more likely to get breast cancer are you going to start getting more breast exams, or just keep on living life?<p>Plus a couple months ago HN had a link to a news article where they sent there DNA off to multiple companies that do DNA testing and had mix results across the board. Companies like 23andme are only as good as the database of DNA they have. You will always get mix results because comparing DNA falls into NP where you can not improve the time it takes to compare DNA.<p>You will never get a full picture of you DNA from a service that only charges a few hundred bucks. It is like paying $10 a month and expecting a CDN at google scale.
My wife and I did 23andMe years ago (on the original chip). I think we paid $100 each. It came up with "not much interesting" for me but one risk factor for my wife that was significant enough to prompt a behavior change.<p>I consider it worthwhile, even for me - "no news is good news".
You get information like: You have a 11% greater chance of developing disease X as compared to most people.<p>That first line above sounds useful, right? But read on...<p>Then you find out that most people have a 0.3% chance of getting disease X (3 tenths of 1 percent chance, for those who wonder if I've made a typo). So, instead of a 0.3% chance, you have a 0.333% chance.<p>Big deal.<p>The ancestry part is interesting. But if I had it to do over again, I might not do it, because by doing so I made some of my family members uncomfortable by revealing some of their private information without their consent.
I bought one of these home-DNA tests years back to give to a relative as a Christmas gift. After I read the ToS I immediately threw it out in the garbage instead. Don't remember the exact phrasing but IIRC it basically made you agree that they own your data. No thank you.
Yes. Just do it when they have $99 specials (at least twice every year) and download your raw data. I don't think you can find cheaper. At the same time, I did a whole genome sequencing for less than $400, so, maybe $99 is way too much anyway.
Ancestry has the better chip at the moment:
<a href="https://snpedia.com/index.php/Testing" rel="nofollow">https://snpedia.com/index.php/Testing</a>
What privacy intrusion are you worried about exactly? I'd be more worried about how accurate the actual results are and whether that inaccuracy is worth the money.
I'd really like to know if there's a GNU-like project for the human genome.<p>I do understand that the 'value' in DNA testing is largely the ability to follow the social graph of inheritance along with phenotypical metadata. This is pretty much at direct odds with privacy even for the strictest of 'anonymizing' setups considering that the greatest context-dependent 'utility' such as curing a truly unpleasant genetic disease or persecuting an ostracized person or group is due to identifying and understanding highly anomalous genes, phenotypes, or linkages of interest that come down to damning specificities.<p>There is one case I can think of that I _might_ be willing to participate in the "Human Genome Revolution", and at first thought it seems to me to be useful to both those that submit their samples and to humanity as a whole: a 'simple' counter of every allele across all DNA samples uploaded. However, I would appreciate feedback as to what are the gotchas here that will be abused, because I'm positive I have not thought such a system through at all and the Monkey's Paw [0] will grant my wish. :(<p>It would be a project that requires three components listed in increasing importance:<p>1. Cheap commodity DNA sequencer that can export its data in a free format.
2. A network protocol for uploading DNA alleles to a swarm of peers that archive and distribute the total counts.
3. A probablistic anonymizing data structure that combines something like a generalized crypto accumulator[1] and a zero-knowledge negotiation process between the network and a client for incrementing the common counters above a fairly large threshold such as maybe several thousand or million submissions. Perhaps uses a modification of something like the approximate counting algorithm[2] in a game setting.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey%27s_paw" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey%27s_paw</a>
[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accumulator_(cryptography)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accumulator_(cryptography)</a>
[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_counting_algorithm" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_counting_algorithm</a>
What's "private" about your DNA? You spread it everywhere daily. Anyhow these tests are basically pseudo-science. If you like pseudo-science, like probiotics and so, go for it.