What I learned from home DNA testing
by Barbara Ellen from on (#2X6YV)
They promise to reveal everything from our ancestry to our chances of serious illness. But are DNA tests accurate and do they tell us anything worthwhile?
There may come a time in everyone's life when they find themselves sitting at the kitchen table on an otherwise unexceptional weekday morning, drooling saliva into a test tube in the spirit of scientific inquiry.
The spit is for one of the home genetic-testing kits I'm sampling. A growing number of these kits (brands such as 23andMe, DNAFit, Thriva, MyHeritage DNA, and Orig3n) promise to unlock the mystery of your genomes, variously explaining everything from ancestry, residual Neanderthal variants, "bioinformatics" for fitness, weight loss and skincare, to more random genetic predispositions, denoting, say, the dimensions of your earlobes or the consistency of your earwax.
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