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Ancestry.com To Add DNA Test Results
Spamicles writes "For less than $200 and a cheek-swiped cotton swab, you will soon be able to add DNA results to family tree Web sites. Ancestry.com plans to launch the DNA testing product by the end of summer, offering customers the possibility of finding DNA matches in the site's 24,000 genealogical databases. By taking a simple cheek-swab test and comparing results against DNA profiles in a test-results database, virtually anyone can uncover genealogical associations unimaginable just a few years ago. Users can easily connect with and discover lost or unknown relatives within a few generations, as well as gain insight into where their families originated thousands of years ago."
This has been available for a while at www.fbi.gov. Users can easily connect with and discover lost or unknown crimes they have committed, as well as gain insight into the legal system and prison food.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Why would I want to find out that I have more?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I had a genealogy site up a few years ago. I eventually took it down due to complaints from my (extended) family regarding privacy concerns. I had people emailing me asking to remove their mothers' maiden names from the database.
God only knows how something like ancestry.com manages to keep afloat with all the privacy concerns.
P.S. I would try to put my database back up and require registration for searching, but there is no way for me to validate any registration (to avoid identity theives), so the point is probably moot.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Doctors calculate that about 5-10% of all children have a different biological father than they (and their "social" fathers) think.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
I was pretty interested in the service that would trace your genetic heritage- race, country of origin (or percentage, etc)- it would have been fascinating. My uncle has mapped his side of the family (1/2 mine) back to the 1400's... so this extra step would be incredible to combine with.
Then... there's the privacy aspect. But just because I didn't do anything, yet, doesn't mean....
It'll be interesting to see.
Give the people some sugar and they will willingly hand over what they normally wouldn't give you at gunpoint...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
>wouldn't it be nice to find out the DNA of your neighbours?
Some of mine are pretty sweet, I'd like to give them some DNA if you know what I mean.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I hope people realise that when they post DNA it's not just their own but also contains information about parents, children, siblings and cousins. Basically your family.
Insurance company - "We've found that your family has a higher risk of kidney disease. In the interest of sharing the risk we won't offer insurance for dialysis or kidney transplant".
I just hope they make the effort to educate people about the pro's and con's of making your dna public.
For less than $200 and a cheek-swiped cotton swab, you will soon be able to add DNA results to family tree Web sites.
Excellent, now the last thing left is for someone to invent a practical cloning machine.
For less than $200 of course.
Anyone got a bittorent to Pamela Anderson's DNA?
Genetic traits can be a better pointer to which region a family came from than simple DNA. After all, DNA takes all that combination stuff (I think it's called sex) and has many latent traits that may or may not show up depending on genetics of both parents.
For example part of my family is Swiss, about six generations back. Part of my wife's family is also Swiss, about four generations back. Her family happens to be from the part of Switzerland that has a wierd abnormality in a small percentage of their population. Sometimes their adult teeth don't develop. Because of this trait and research my wife was able to trace her family to an exact village.
Oh, and no ones privacy was ever in danger.
DNA on the other hand is still latereal in time and not verticle. Unless you want to test a corpse you can't go back many generations. A good tool to see what uncle Joe REALLY did on those "sales" trips in Vegas, but not much good as a family history research tool.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Is a website the best place to discover that your DNA doesn't match any of your close relatives, as you were expecting it to - that your parents are not your natural parents and you were adopted?
Unfortunately, there are many cases of people not being told that they were adopted and a web site like this is not the ideal way to discover this. You really need an organization that has some form of immediate support for people who receive unexpected surprises.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
The LDS Church doesn't run Ancestry.com. It runs FamilySearch.org.
And no, that has nothing to do with "put[ting] more names in the Book of Mormon". In fact, while Baptism for the Dead is mentioned in the Bible (1 Corinthians 15:29), it isn't mentioned at all in the Book of Mormon.
Fell out of a tree?
Landed in a volcano in a spaceship that looked like a DC3?
Descendants of the arc?
There are so many stories. Pick one. No, pick two, keep it interesting.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
A married couple went to the hospital to have their baby delivered. Upon their arrival, the doctor said he had invented a new machine that would transfer a portion of the mother's labor pain to the father. He asked if
they were willing to try it out. They were both very much in favor of it. The doctor set the pain transfer to 10% for starters, explaining that even 10% was probably more pain than the father had ever experienced before.
But as the labor progressed, the husband felt fine and asked the doctor to go ahead and bump it up a notch. The doctor then adjusted the machine to 20% pain transfer. The husband was still feeling fine. The doctor checked
the husband's blood pressure and was amazed at how well he was doing. At this point they decided to try for 50%. The husband continued to feel quite well. Since the pain transfer was obviously helping out the wife considerably, the husband encouraged the doctor to transfer ALL the pain to him. The wife deliverer a healthy baby with virtually no pain. She and her husband were ecstatic.
When they got home, the mailman was dead on the porch.
Since its fat gravy train is going to end soon... How? With the massive FREE release of the entire scanned archive from the Mormon Vault in Salt Lake City (to be available on www.familysearch.org). Once this project has gone live much of the information that Ancestry.com currently charges for will be essentially public domain.
There already is a schism forming between Ancestry.com and Familysearch.org, seen from the collapse of arrangements between the Mormon church and Ancestry to provide the Ancestry.com service free in the LDS Family History centers around the world.
The white zone is for loading and unloading only. If you need to load or unload go to the white zone. It's a way of life
My wife and I are trying to have a baby... only our mail carrier is female.... I don't have any backup!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
If I had the spare cash, I'd take a swab from a slab of lunch meat and send that in. Or my cat.
But I still would never put my DNA on file with anyone, much less pay for it.
More power to those who will try this out, though, you're far less paranoid than I am!
FFS! Rather than moderate the /dribble about DNA forensic testing as OT, I'll contribute.
This is a valuable service (yes there are others available) that tests certain parts of the mitachondrial DNA to establish your maternal lineage and tests certain parts of the Y chromosome (I make the assumption that 98% of the readers are male) to establish your paternal lineage.
If you want to educate yourself on one of the benefits, please take a few hours to learn how this technique has provided amazing details of the 165k yr journey of mankind to populate the planet http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
Studies have generated a range of rates of "non-paternity events". There's an article with more details in this month's The Atlantic (subscription required):
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200707/paternity
From the article:
"When geneticists do large-scale studies of populations, they sometimes can't help but learn about the paternity of the research subjects. They rarely publish their findings, but the numbers are common knowledge within the genetics community. In graduate school, genetics students typically are taught that 5 to 15 percent of the men on birth certificates are not the biological fathers of their children. In other words, as many as one of every seven men who proudly carry their newborn children out of a hospital could be a cuckold."
"Non-paternity rates appear to be substantially lower in some populations. The Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, which is based in Salt Lake City, now has a genetic and genealogical database covering almost 100,000 volunteers, with an overrepresentation of people interested in genealogy. The non-paternity rate for a representative sample of its father-son pairs is less than 2 percent. But other reputed non-paternity rates are higher than the canonical numbers. One unpublished study of blood groups in a town in southeastern England indicated that 30 percent of the town's husbands could not have been the biological fathers of their children."
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Your DNA is not public, just the markers. When your DNA is profiled they will use a set number of markers (anywhere between 12 and 44) to determine your halpogroups (where your DNA originated from) and place you into a combination of groups. It is these markers that become public. Generally the testing sites will destroy your DNA after 6 months; it is kept this long incase you want to have other tests done like y-chromosome, mitochondrial, etc.
Chances are the testing is being contracted out to another organization like The DNA Testing Center of America or another large DNA testing lab at which the DNA retention policies would be that of the lab.
Nihilism means nothing to the dancing peasants
Oh, I can only imagine the mischief this will potentially cause... as people discover, not just ancestors they didn't know they had, but ancestors they thought they had, but don't.
"So the years went by and he wished he was dead. He had seventeen girls and still wasn't wed.
When he'd ask his papa, papa would always say, 'No! That girl is your sister but your mama don't know!'
"So he went to his mama and he bowed his head. Told his mama what his papa had said.
His mama said, 'Son, go, man, go! Your papa ain't your papa but your papa don't know!'"
--"Ah Woe, Ah Me," Nick Reynolds, Bob Shane, John Stewart, popularized by the Kingston Trio
"She's the illegitimate daughter, of the illegitimate son, of the illegitimate nephew of Napoleon."
--Ira Gershwin, _Of Thee I Sing+
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The most extreme test available (67 Y-chromosome markers + deep subclade + Kittler DYS385, 25 autosomnal DNA markers, 16 X-chromosome markers and complete mapping of the mitochondrial DNA + identification of sub-sub-branch), assuming the DNA was from a male, would be good enough to identify a person and all their male siblings. It's no better than that. And, frankly, these tests aren't cheap and unless you were adopted from a fairly high-tech country, no sane person would ever get this level of testing. They'd have the family tree back some number of generations and would not bother testing more accurately than needed to examine the next few generations out.
The other thing to consider is that these are not supervised tests. Anyone can send in DNA from anyone else under any name at all, and the lab would have no way of knowing. It makes no difference to the person getting the test done, because all lookups from there-on-out are all done by reference number or by the name of the most ancient ancestor known, not by the living person's name.
From a law-enforcement perspective, it might eliminate some possibilities, but I can't see it being useful in positive identification.
Now, there IS one area of concern for me. Some DNA labs do retain additional DNA samples for retesting or upgrades from previous tests. This is raw DNA material and could potentially be accessed by the wrong person. Usually, there is some protection (the vials are only marked with a serial number, not a name), but law enforcement could potentially gain access to the database that links name to number. That could be a problem.
Beyond that, though, this really does only have use for genealogists, historians and anthropologists. The data is just too vague for anyone else.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)