The most surreal email I ever received arrived with a thirtysomething American woman's curly-haired photo. "Hello, my name is Alison," the note began. "I'm contacting you because we share 0.62 per cent DNA on six segments, and we could be distant cousins. Please let me know if the names and places in my profile sound familiar to you..." I'd submitted saliva to a gene-testing company called 23andMe, and here I was a few weeks later hearing from a stranger on 23andMe's database who thought we were related.
I didn't follow up -- sorry, Alison, just too many LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter notifications clamouring for attention -- but I was intrigued enough to learn more about 23andMe, featured in this issue. I'd submitted my spit under a false name (well, who knows what could happen to one's innermost biological secrets?) and sent a couple of hundred dollars to learn what my body's code was telling me. But what happened next made me realise that -- as genomic testing becomes ever cheaper -- it's going to affect us in all sorts of unpredicted ways. Yes, I learned of my risk factors for a whole bunch of ailments (nothing serious, thankfully, though I do have an apparently elevated risk for restless leg syndrome, which on balance I'll live with). My personal web page told me my likely response to various medications, and geographically where my family probably originated (the Ghengis Khan connection I'm still struggling to explain, though the WIRED production desk finds it convincing). But what really surprised me was the transparency about who else in the network was my first, second or third cousin -- including discovering that I'm related to my favourite neuroscience-novelist, David Eagleman. We still haven't quite worked out the family connection.
It didn't surprise me when US regulators last year warned 23andMe to stop marketing its service to consumers. As valuable as the test can be, its findings are not conclusive, and there's the risk that some customers will act on raw genomic data without consulting medical specialists. We also need an informed public debate about ownership of such data and the risks inherent in submitting DNA to a for-profit industry. But Anne Wojcicki, the company's cofounder (who gave a great talk at WIRED2014), is a formidable campaigner for empowering consumers with their own medical data, and her product is a big step towards greater public understanding. As the cost of genomic tests plummets, it's right that the UK regulators recently approved 23andMe's gene tests. Now it's up to you to think through the ethics of taking one.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
