It seems we are on the precipice of the explosion of widely available commercial precision medicine, which will be one result of the DNA testing explosion. People have willingly shared their information, and now we’re seeing mind-blowing technological explosions of information.
I took a 23 and Me test to find out some of this medical information outside of my medical record. I have the realistic fear that asking my doctor about the BRCA gene could mean future breast cancer treatment wouldn’t be covered due to being labeled a pre-existing condition. I went looking for all the information I wanted in a different place.
I don’t have the breast cancer gene, which was a big relief when I got the results. I don’t carry the Parkinson’s gene either, which is also a relief. I did the 23 & Me +Health test, but later when I did an Ancestry test, I didn’t do the health/traits extra testing, although you can log in and get access to that information later for more money. I am often tempted, but never seem to have the $20 sitting around.
There’s a lot of overlap with what I got from 23 and Me, so I didn’t see any value in it. I think it will be really interesting to see how genome information will develop specialized care for all sorts of developing medical issues. As we get more information about gene therapies, I think we will see some terrifying but radical changes.
One of my professional roles is teaching at the college level; this year, I was having a conversation about bioethics with some of my students, two women who were born after 9/11/2001. These young, bright minds were pointing out all of the potentially dangerous places they saw gene therapy heading, and their trepidation is on point.
People started taking these tests for fun, surely— but also to find out about their ethnicity. I am a Anglo person who believed herself to be mainly English & German, which is what the test bore out. (About 70/30)
Looking for simple answers about ethnicity sends a lot of people to these testing sites; the relative that popped up to shock me was a young person just bored during the pandemic, who wondered what her ethnicity is. Two years later, here I am, still reeling from my discoveries.
There have been estimated over 35 million people worldwide have taken commercial DNA tests; there are a lot of places you can upload your raw data to look for additional matches, but you might want to learn about some of the basics behind the science first.
Some of the stuff I needed to learn right away can be found here— I don’t think it’s too heavy on the science.