[Lilug] Unrelated Question

Wed Apr 5 14:02:08 PDT 2017

Thank You, Jeff

It may be a bad idea, but they received by spit about 2 weeks ago, there's
no turning back now.

I did read there were something like 750k pieces of data they looked at,
but i didn't realize that was "out of 3 billion" :-)

Thanks for sharing.

I'm not so interested in how smart/intelligent i am, i don't think dna says
that (some of that is upbringing, what parenting you've had, what schools
you went to, what your neighbors/classmates encouraged or
discouraged---peer pressure pro and against education-- when i was growing
up 'geek' and 'nerd' were bad words and you didn't want to be one, now i
understand it's a badge of honor, in some communities anyway).  On the
other hand, the sample results, as i think i mentioned, showed how with
certain pairs you could identify potentially genetically predisposed health
conditions (including mental health).  I was surprised that same pair
identified chronic sinusitis too- horrible long term issues i've had with
that, but i found a machine to flush my nose which hsa been keeping the
problem at bay somewhat.
---
Sent from Tablet

On Apr 5, 2017 2:29 PM, "Josef 'Jeff' Sipek" <jeffpc at josefsipek.net> wrote:

> I realize my reply is somewhat late, but I thought I'd share my thoughts
> anyway.
>
> On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 22:06:35 -0400, Robert Wilkens wrote:
> > On this mailing list a few months ago (??) there was discussion of DNA
> and
> > Crispr and all that.
> >
> > I finally got curious enough to buy a DNA test kit, but i didn't do
> > anything with it yet (didn't get it yet).  Thanks to this list i learned
> > there are places you can upload your raw DNA data file to for analysis,
> one
> > i found was something called promethease i think.
> >
> > In the 'sample results' (again, i don't have mine yet) -- one single
> result
> > (gene) found showed a likelihood for autism, schizophrenia, and chronic
> > sinusitis, and i deal - daily - with some level of all three.  I am
> > expecting a similar genetic result in that department.  I am curious if i
> > am right.
>
> My mom got curious about the ancestry aspect of it last year, and I
> couldn't
> help but try to read up on it.  I looked at two or three websites, which
> I'm
> not going to name to avoid advertising for them (and I'd have to look them
> up again anyway to get the names right).  Since the services were very
> similar, I'll just lump them into a simple "they".
>
> The thing that I found intriguing about some of the DNA ancestry sites was
> that they let you download the "raw" data.  (The interpreted data is of the
> form "you are 35% eastern European, 27% western, ..." and therefore a cute
> curiosity, but otherwise totally useless if you or your family has *ever*
> moved.  I could see how it could be useful for someone who didn't know that
> some ancestor was from a different continent.)  Anyway, raw data...  If you
> dig deep enough into the FAQs, you can find out what sort of sequencing
> they
> do.  They'll say things like "we use blah-blah DNA testing, which samples
> 750k locations."  If you do a bit of reading up on DNA and then do a bit of
> math, you realize that what they are really saying is "of the 3 billion
> base pairs in your DNA, we look at less than 1 million, so we ignore
> 99.9%".
> While I am certain that this sort of sampling is perfectly fine for very
> course grained classification (e.g., which continent are you from?), I
> expect it to be mostly useless if you want to do any serious research.
>
> When reading up on this, I had an unfair advantage - a friend of mine has
> spend some time working with DNA sequencing researchers so he was able to
> dumb down some of the explanations to my level.  He concluded our
> conversation with this gem: "I would heartily recommend against such
> screening".
>
> (He also pointed out that there is a problem that no one in genetics likes
> to talk about - the missing heritability problem [1].  I don't even pretend
> to understand it, but as far as I know the gist of it is - using DNA is a
> questionable way to answer questions like "how intelligent/something are
> you?", but it is ok for matching up DNA substrings against geotagged
> substrings for genealogy reasons.)
>
> There apparently are some new developments with DNA sequencing
> and genotyping, but it is all "lab grade" stuff.
>
>
> As other's have pointed out, there is certainly a privacy issue.  One of
> the
> pay-for features is actually "willful privacy violation" of sorts - they
> try
> to figure out family relationships between the DNA samples they received.
> And if you pay them, you can see the results.  This can be very useful for
> finding long lost relatives, but at the same time it encroaches onto
> people's privacy in some ways.
>
> Ultimately, do whatever makes you happy.  Chances are that even such a
> limited sampling of ones DNA can provide days of entertainment to amateurs
> like us.
>
> Jeff.
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_heritability_problem
>
> > I think someone mentioned some kind of "open source" DNA analysis?  If
> > there is can you mention what it was called?  I will then put it 2-3
> months
> > ahead on my calendar to then remind me to find and try it once i have
> > results, hopefully something compatible with ancestry's file format (? is
> > it different?).
> >
> > I am OK to run software comptaible with Linux, Android, or Windows.
> >
> > -Rob
> >
> >
> >
> > ---
> > Sent from Tablet
>
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>
>
> --
> Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them
>                 - Albert Einstein
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