7 ms·
One of the concerns I had when I did 23andMe many years ago was that someone in the future would be able to recreate me Jurassic-Park-style. Now I'm not an expe
by wenc 2y ago
One of the concerns I had when I did 23andMe many years ago was that someone in the future would be able to recreate me Jurassic-Park-style. Now I'm not an expert, but based on my reading of how they collect data, turns out 23andMe doesn't actually have my DNA sequence data.
They do what is called "genotyping"[1] which is much cheaper than full "sequencing" [2], but which only probes for a limited set of known variants. So it's only partial information.
Since then 23andMe has launched a more expensive 23andMe+ Total Health offering, which does full sequencing, but like most people, I never subscribed to that package. In fact I had no occasion to interact with the company after the first result, which may be why they are struggling financially.
DNA testing is something most people might do at most once in their lives -- then they lose interest.
[1] https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/202904610-How-Does-23andMe-Genotype-My-DNA https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/202904610...
[2] https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/202904600-Difference-Between-DNA-Genotyping-Sequencing https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/202904600...
- bilsbie 2y agoIt wouldn’t be you in any case. Basically the same as an identical twin.
- Auracle 2y agoAlso, why would they bother? Maybe if you were a celebrity of some sort, maybe, but even then..
- Teever 2y agoI see a near future scam where people seek out genetic material of the wealthy to create children so that they can sue them for child support. Imagine someone doing this to the judge that ruled they owe child support for their child from a previous marriage out of spite.
- layer8 2y agoThey could sell the organs back to you when you need one. Or the whole body for a brain transplant. (This was a plot point in a sci-fi story I vaguely remember.)
- braunshedd 2y agoYou're probably thinking of "The Island"[1]. Good movie, I saw this myself a long time ago. [1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0399201/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0399201/
- layer8 2y agoIt’s a different one and I actually remember it better, but I didn’t want to spoil the plot twist for that story by naming it.
- justinclift 2y agoErr, so what was the one you were thinking of? I've seen The Island before, so would be potentially interested in something else along the same lines... :)
- r721 2y agoMaybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortality,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortality,_Inc. ? (there was a movie too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freejack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freejack)
- justinclift 2y agoThanks. :)
- alexey-salmin 2y agoEven that is unlikely. We don't yet know what exact information is enough to recreate a human (or his twin) but by now we know that DNA alone is not.
- personalityson 2y ago[flagged]
- pixelpoet 2y agoCurt imperative demand makes this sound like an AI prompt, and I truly hate the trend (see also "sound on").
- jonathrg 2y agoWhat is "sound on"?
- pixelpoet 2y agoYou see it all the time in videos, where they demand you not view with sound off. Every time I see it I can only think "No, I don't think I will. Get absolutely fucked."
- jonathrg 2y agoRight, I've seen this occasionally. I don't really mind since it's usually because there is some unexpected audio that you might miss if you're watching on mute.
- stavros 2y agoWhat's "sound on"? The thing on videos?
- Dibby053 2y ago23andMe being a Google spin-off I wouldn't be surprised if they do a full sequencing regardless of whether you pay for it or not. At the very least I would expect them to store the samples indefinitely so they can do it once it's economically viable.
- blktiger 2y agoAs I understand it, full sequencing is a _lot_ more expensive. 23 and me currently shows the genotyping is like $100 while sequencing is $1000. It’s probably too expensive and time consuming for them to sequence everybody’s samples unless they pay for it.
- AbstractH24 2y agoOnly a couple years ago full sequencing was closer to $10,000 Everyone knew price would drop in time, but, assuming you’re correct, it’s amazing to hear that’s happening
- glitchc 2y agoHousing the samples in a controlled environment for an extended period of time is likely way more expensive than sequencing. I suspect the samples are discarded once genotyped.
- Dibby053 2y agoI'm no biologist but the samples seem to survive being shipped by standard mail so it doesn't look like they would need very strict storage requirements. If for any reason they do, since they take very little space it shouldn't be too expensive per-sample. What am I missing?
- falcolas 2y agoThis data would be of much more interest to your health insurance company. The ultimate preexisting condition pricing guide. Mostly a US concern, as usual.
- pfdietz 2y agoHealth insurance companies are prohibited by law in the US from considering preexisting conditions.
- yumraj 2y agoYou mean, “at present”.. No way to know how the regulation will change in the future depending on the amount of lobby dollars that are thrown.
- pfdietz 2y agoIf you want to hand wring about future changes you don't need to look at dubious inference of risk from DNA. Just consider cancellation of insurance policies if you come down with some illness that requires expensive long term treatment.
- collingreen 2y agoThe point of this attack vector is to drop patients who are high risk BEFORE they get diagnosed so they can claim it isn't for any existing condition. This is especially scary in small, closely related communities like Iceland or Utah where a relatively low number of collected samples can be extrapolated to large swaths of the population that didn't give their genetic info away. Also that protection is relatively new in the US and is constantly being attacked politically so it isn't unreasonable to think about a world where it is removed like other longstanding health related protections.
- dragonwriter 2y agoThe Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act is almost as old as 23andMe and older than the prohibition on discrimination for preexisting conditions, so it would be strange to come up with a hack where you break the first to try to get around the second.
- amy-petrik-214 2y agoWell the rightful answer is "it's complicated" DNA wise yes there are 3 billion bases and they sample about a million of them, so 1/3000 bases. THing is about the bases 1. most of them are the same in everyone 2. the ones that are different tend to be correlated with each other locally and thus captured by their 1Mb assay so 3. you can infer all the stuff they didn't sequence with pretty high confidence. Not a "in theory" but more like "has been a typical thing to do in the statistical genetics field for at least a decade" 4. outside of the genome there is the epigenome which may or may not be relevant, it undergoes very specific resets short after fertilization also worth noting 5. bioinformatics is an imperfect and algorithm based science. Reads are aligned according to error and difference profiles (i.e. string mismatches and the most and least types of mismatches). So unless things are finely calibrated, a level of analysis most bioinformatics don't do, deeply study their read alignment penalties for particular data sets, even a robust bug-free read aligner correctly applying penalties will have bad alignments, false positives, false negatives anyways I for one hope the futurepopele will clone me from the bytestream