Worry over one’s DNA ancestry is an overreaction
People are reading too much into it. A DNA test can’t really tell you who you are or divine your future health
People are reading too much meaning into DNA – Elizabeth Warren’s and their own. It continues to carry a mystique as a key to who we are, where we belong, and when and how we’ll die. Just days before Warren announced her DNA ancestry results, headlines were warning of a new threat to the genetic privacy of us all. But the experts offered no compelling examples of what DNA snoops might find out about us and how that information would cause us harm.
The privacy warnings came from a paper in Science, which proclaimed that detectives, or hackers for that matter, could find the identity of “almost anyone” from a sample of DNA. Of course, if you committed rape or murder and left your DNA at the scene, this DNA matching capability could reveal that you are the perpetrator. But what can it reveal about the rest of us?
The reason it’s now possible to connect names with otherwise anonymous DNA is that so many people have entered their DNA into databases to trace their genealogy, and many have posted it publicly in the hope of connecting with relatives. .
One serious concern is that, in principle, someone could use the same techniques to unmask the identities of people who donated DNA for scientific studies. But it would be against the law for anyone to use any of their genetic information against them.
Back in the 1990s, scientists and medical ethicists worried that the health insurance system would refuse coverage over genetic risk factors, and that might lead to employers firing people over their DNA. And so the US and many other countries adopted laws to prohibit genetic discrimination.
A small minority of people carry a real genetic time bomb, such as Huntington’s disease or mutations associated with a high risk of certain cancers. For most of us, our health is tied to multiple genes and environmental factors, such as exposure to pollution, stress and diet – and to some extent random chance.
Beyond forensics, DNA has revolutionised the understanding of evolution and where we as a species came from. But there are limits to what it can reveal about any given individual. Since Elizabeth Warren published her genetic profile, everyone is reading something different into the test results. Supporters say she has now proven that she is indeed part Native American, while her foes say the test proves the opposite, that she has too little Native American ancestry to qualify.
News stories have quoted several boasting about how accurate their tests are in finding minuscule contributions to people’s DNA. But they can’t answer whether Warren’s result means she can identify as Native American. That’s a line drawn by cultures, not by science. And so the bad news is that a DNA test can’t really tell you who you are or divine your future health. But the good news is that any hackers who stole your DNA wouldn’t learn much either. The views expressed are personal Bloomberg Opinion