With characteristic envelope-pushing humor, Michael Rosbash, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, couldn’t help dropping a joke into a press conference Monday morning about the life of a scientist. In the library of Brandeis University, where he has taught for over forty years, Rosbash told a packed crowd of colleagues, university…
23andMe isn’t the only company that conducts mail-order DNA tests that reveal consumers’ ancestry. There’s also MyHeritage, Living DNA and GPS Origins, to name a few. But it’s 23andMe, founded in 2006, whose name is becoming a synonym for spitting in a vial and finding out what percentage of you comes from where. Now the…
The Jewish world has been obsessing over genetics recently. Are we or are we not white? Has the Khazar hypothesis been conclusively disproven? All these are interesting questions that are fun to discuss, but it’s time to take a breather. Not only are the tests that tell you your ancestry less reliable than people believe…
For geneticists, like me, genetic testing has always been a game of trust. We can test people’s DNA to learn about their ancestries, relatives, disease predispositions and crimes. We geneticists do genetic testing after providing counseling that explores the process and outcome. In turn, we request consent to proceed. One of my common questions is,…
Researchers in California have created software for turning a person’s raw DNA data into a predictive picture of their face. Using anonymous data — the kind that genetics companies like 23andMe sell to pharmaceutical companies for research purposes — scientists from Human Longevity, Inc., a private genetics lab, have made computer generated images that resemble…
The Wirecutter, a popular product recommendation site, recently offered reviews about the leading genetic ancestry testing services. The big surprise? 23andMe, the popular genomics company, was not listed as a top pick. Instead, the site ranked Ancestry.com and Family Tree DNA as the best picks. The Wirecutter’s decision not to recommend 23andMe had to do…
23andMe has backpedalled from broadcasting the discredited theory that a portion of Ashkenazi Jews are descended from an obscure tribe from the Caucasus. But that hasn’t stopped members of the “alt-right” from jumping on the news that the giant Silicon Valley genomics company had given credibility to the so-called Khazar theory, which undermines Jews’ perception…
The genomics company 23andMe has retracted a statement made on the profiles of some users with Ashkenazi heritage that they may be descended from an extinct tribe from the Caucasus known as the Khazars, inadvertently wading into a political-genetic debate with far-reaching implications for Jewish identity and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The company said in a…
