Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Potential Perils of Personal Genetic Testing

Biologist "George Doe" (a pseudonym) described how: "With genetic testing, I gave my parents the gift of divorce".

I'm glad the 23andMe service allows people the option of learning about close relatives. But a couple of take home points:
1) If you get a 23andMe genetic test, make sure you really really want to know if you might have genetically close unknown relatives before you click through on that part of the results.

2) If you have a child you didn't tell your current family about, maybe you should come clean before you get your 23andMe test.
Related: "Genetic testing brings families together. And sometimes tears them apart".