Ancestry services show limitations
Precise numbers offered by some testing raise eyebrows among researchers
Bob Hutchinson’s mother told him and his siblings almost nothing about her family. “She was good at brushing people off,” said Hutchinson, 60.
When he was growing up, there were no photos of his mother, or of her own parents. She said that she was an only child, that her parents were dead. Her heritage, she claimed, was Italian and Swedish.
Hutchinson suspected that wasn’t the whole story. Then his sister-in-law, digging into the family past, found their mother’s childhood home listed in a 1930 census.
The family had lived in Montclair, N.J., and was described as “Negro.” Hutchinson, who runs an advertising agency and lives in Pacifica, Calif., had never been told he had African-American heritage.
A growing number of companies now offer DNA tests that promise to pinpoint a customer’s heritage and, with permission, to identify genetic relatives. They include generalists like 23andMe and Ancestry.com and specialty companies like African Ancestry.
Millions of people have signed up with these firms, sending saliva samples to laboratories and paying $100 or more for an analysis.
The answers hidden in DNA can be revelatory, shedding light on hidden events occurring decades earlier and forever changing the family narrative. But a new analysis of DNA test kits by The Wirecutter, a review site owned by The New York Times, finds that the services also have limitations that the providers do not always fully acknowledge.
Hutchinson decided to have his DNA analyzed by 23andMe. The report revealed he is one-eighth sub-Saharan African, which means that his mother was of mixed race. There was some Italian and Swedish heritage.
Hutchinson also learned that his mother was not an only child, but had a brother. A genealogist helped him track down some first cousins in Alabama, who said they had been told never to contact Hutchinson or his family.
The cousins, Sandra Green and Eve Clark, were delighted to hear from him.
Hutchinson’s results were enlightening, but in other contexts ethnicity has posed particularly knotty problem for DNA testing firms. The very definitions of “race” and “ethnicity” are fuzzy, said Joseph Pickrell, a computational geneticist at the New York Genome Center laboratory, affiliated with Columbia University.
“Different people mean different things when they say ‘race,’ ” he said. In the United States, for example, a person with almost any African ancestry often is identified as black. “That’s not necessarily the case in other parts of the world,” Pickrell said.
Researchers at 23andMe acknowledged the difficulty in a recent paper, writing, “It is important to note that ancestry, ethnicity, identity and race are complex labels that result both from visible traits, such as skin color, and from cultural, economic, geographical and social factors.”
The precise numbers offered by some testing services raise eyebrows among genetics researchers. “It’s all privatized science, and the algorithms are not generally available for peer review,” Jonathan Marks, professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, said in The Wirecutter.
“That’s why their ads always specify that this is for recreational purposes only: lawyerspeak for, ‘These results have no scientific standing.’ ”