23 and Me
VIEWPOINT
By RALPH HARDIN
Evening Times Editor M y wife bought both me and herself one of those DNA ancestry kits from 23 and Me for Christmas. You know, one of those little kits where you provide them a little saliva and they test it and let you know about things like your genetic makeup, your health profile, your family tree, etc.
As a history guy, I was pretty excited to get a look at where “my people” came from, although, spoiler alert … one look in the mirror is about all it takes to assess that I am a pretty basic “white guy” for the most part.
If you’ve never done one of these kinds of things, it’s pretty simple. You open the box and retrieve the little vial. You pop the top and start filling it with your sample, AKA your saliva, AKA your spit.
It takes a little while to summon up enough moisture to get the vial full (or at least it did for me) but once that is done, you just seal the vial and push down on this little tab that mixes the saliva with some sort of chemical compound and locks the sample.
All you have to do then is stick the vial back in the box and mail it back to them. One last deal before you do that, though, is that the vial has a 10-digit code on it. You’ll need that code to register your sample online at the 23 and Me website, because that’s how you’ll get your results. While you’re on the site, you can sign up for whatever extra stuff you’d like them to do with your sample, that can include things like health screenings, deep dive ancestry profiles and such.
Anyway, after dropping our completed kits off at the Post Office, it took us about two weeks to get our results, and … drumroll, please … I am, in fact, a pretty basic white guy. Now, that’s boring, but fortunately, they do break it down further than that. It turns out that, yeah, I’m white. I’m, in fact, 99.3 percent Northwestern European. And to break that down further, I’m 83 percent British and Irish, 15.6 percent German and French, and 0.7 percent Scandinavian.
But that does leave 0.7 percent, right? Well, that part is also broken down. In that small part of my ancestry it’s Northwest Asian (which can be Mongolian, Russian and Tartan) and Mesopotamian (which includes Middle Eastern and Caucasian areas). And there was a little sliver (0.1 percent) that was classified as “trace ancestry” which could be a lot of things, including … Neanderthal. That would explain my weird forehead ridges and hairy back, I guess.
In case you were wondering, my wife’s was largely the same kind of deal. Hers was more “British and Irish” than mine with maybe a little more of one of the “trace ancestry” traits in there, but yep, we’re white. Which probably explains why our kids are also pretty white.
The info dump doesn’t stop there, though. We got the health screening stuff to, which lets you know if you have any predispositions to a wide array of health concerns. Not gonna lie, it’s a little scary to read that list and see if you’re more than likely to develop any chronic or potentially deadly diseases, like diabetes or cancer.
Fortunately, I only had two conditions flagged on my report, and neither were much of a shocker: age-related macular degeneration and late-onset Alzheimer’s disease. These conditions don’t run in my family – they sprint. So I guess if I live long enough, I will probably have to deal with those issues, which it kind of a bummer, but at least I know what I’m getting into.
They also give you a list of “genetic traits” that range from things like predicting your eye and hair color (they got both of those right for me) to like whether or not you’re a deep sleeper or you’re lactose intolerant. And even weird things like whether or not you’re prone to bunions or having dimples, moles or bald spots. Kinda weird but kinda cool.
And the last thing I did with the results (there was a bunch of other stuff you could do, but it was part of the “23 and Me Premium” package and I ain’t spending money on all that) was take a look at my family tree. It went back, I think four or five generations. Now, if anyone else in your family has done the kit, they’ll be on it, but the rest is just little dots showing your unidentified family members, but I did have a couple of cousins and nieces and some far-flung relatives on there.
I also had some interesting “half-(whatevers)” show up on the ol’ timeline, though, so that’s pretty interesting. My family is pretty chock full of marriages and divorces and remarriages, though, so it’s really not all that surprising, I guess.
Now that my name and information is on their site, maybe I’ll finally get to meet that previously-unknown rich uncle who can leave me the family fortune?
