Hungarian Sequencing Company Vets DNA For 'Gypsy Or Jew' Genes

ananyo writes "Hungary's Medical Research Council (ETT), which advises the government on health policy, has asked public prosecutors to investigate a genetic-diagnostic company that certified that a member of parliament did not have Roma or Jewish heritage. The MP in question is a member of the far-right Jobbik party, which won 17% of the votes in the general election of April 2010. He apparently requested the certificate from the firm Nagy Gén Diagnostic and Research. The company produced the document in September 2010, a few weeks before local elections. Nagy Gén scanned 18 positions in the MP's genome for variants that it says are characteristic of Roma and Jewish ethnic groups; its report concludes that Roma and Jewish ancestry can be ruled out." Adds ananyo: "The test is of-course nonsense, and notions of 'racial purity' have long been discredited." Just when you think the world is too modern for such things, modernity gets hijacked by flim-flam.

Comments

Maybe not Gypsy or Jew...

[turkeyfeathers]

But did they scan him for the vampire gene?

As a hungarian

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel like throwing in the towel and getting the hell out of this country.

Re:As a hungarian

[octothorpe99]

I feel like throwing in the towel and getting the hell out of this country.

Don't do that! You'll need your towel if you're going to travel!

Re:sort of two distinct issues

[MightyMartian]

Anyone with even a brief understanding of the history of that region of Europe realizes that notions of racial purity are bunk. Now it is possible that the Roma and Jews are still sufficiently genetically distinct due to lower rates of interbreeding, but the fact is that the Hungarian people are, to put it vulgurally, mongrels. Even the ancient Huns themselves were likely a hodge podge of ethnic/racial groups from all over Eurasia, and Hungary has so many layers of occupation and invasion dating back to Classical times that while we can say the progenitor population probably spoke a Uralic mothertongue, you have a wide array of later groups; early Indo-Europeans, Turkic, Germanic, Latin, Slavic and on and on. If you want to find a population approaching a full blooded Hungarian, I suggest you go to Finland.