Over at Genomes Unzipped Vincent Plagnol has put up a post, Exaggerations and errors in the promotion of genetic ancestry testing, which to my mind is an understated and soft-touch old-fashioned “fisking” of the pronouncements of a spokesperson for an outfit termed Britain’s DNA. The whole post is worth reading, but this is a very grave aspect of the response of the company:
…The main reason is that listening to this radio interview prompted my UCL colleagues David Balding and Mark Thomas to ask questions to the Britain’s DNA scientific team; the questions have not been satisfactorily answered. Instead, a threat of legal action was issued by solicitors for Mr Moffat. Any type of legal threat is an ominous sign for an academic debate. This motivated me to point out some of the incorrect, or at the very least exaggerated, statements made in this interview. Importantly, while I received comments from several people for this post, the opinion presented here is entirely mine and does not involve any of my colleagues at Genomes Unzipped.
From what I can gather this firm is charging two to three times more than 23andMe for state-of-the-art scientific genealogy, circa 2002. So if you can’t be bothered to read the piece, it looks like Britain’s DNA is threatening litigation for researchers having the temerity to point out that the firm is providing substandard services at above-market costs. Plagnol’s critique lays out point-by-point refutation of assertions, but the interpretation services on offer seem to resemble nothing more than genetically rooted epic fantasy. A triumph of marketing over science.
In other scientific genealogy news, a friend recent sent me results for his family from Ancestry.com’s AncestryDNA service. Looking at the pie-charts, I can say one thing: they were whack! But the question then is are they truly just whack, or does their peculiarity indicate real genetic insight? I have no way to judge, because they still aren’t providing raw data downloads, though they promise to soon. I actually talked to a scientist from Ancestry.com for a little while at ASHG 2012, and he claimed that they were tweaking the algorithms as as we were speaking. Nevertheless, bizarre results still seem to abound. It would be nie to figure out the method to this madness.
Finally, the genomic angle to the Dan MacArthur → Dan MacCurry saga is approaching closure. My friend Zack Ajmal promises to put up his analysis before he goes on vacation. I asked Zack to look into the matter because he has a very large database of South Asians, and I want to see if he could find the best match to Dan’s chromosome 10. If it does turn out that it is highly probable that Dan’s South Asian ancestry is Bengali, then I’ll have to make sure he’s introduced to the aloo bhorta which his ancestors no doubt relished (and which is unpalatable to people of other South Asian ethnic groups because of the mustard oil).