The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 13: Is the FBI Watching Your DNA?
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 13: Is the FBI Watching Your DNA?This week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Podcasts)we discussed the controversy that has erupted around Family Tree DNA and genetic privacy. We talked to Ju…
American folkways & American pedigrees
St. Augustine Historic districtOver ten thousand years after the first Americans settled the New World, from the Arctic to Patagonia, a new people arrived on these shores. From “deep history” to colonial history. Before Plymouth, before Jamestown, even…
When journalists get out of their depth on genetic genealogy
For some reason The New York Times tasked Gina Kolata to cover genetic genealogy and its societal ramifications, With a Simple DNA Test, Family Histories Are Rewritten. The problem here is that to my knowledge Kolata doesn’t cover this as part of her beat, and so isn’t well equipped to write an accurate and in […]
Personal genomics and adoption
With DNA Testing, Suddenly They Are Family: Several companies provide tests that can confirm whether adoptees are related to individuals they already know. Others cast a wider net by plugging DNA results into databases that contain tens of thousands of genetic samples, provided mostly by people searching for their ancestral roots. The tests detect genetic […]
The genomic heritage of French Canadians
Image Credit: Anirudh Koul
One of the great things about the mass personal genomic revolution is that it allows people to have direct access to their own information. This is important for the more than 90% of the human population which has sketchy ge…
The confusions of genetic relatedness
Last spring I posted ‘Beyond visualization of data in genetics’ in the hopes that people wouldn’t take PCA too far in assuming that the method was a reflection of reality in a definite fashion. Remember, PCA visualizations are showing you two, and at most three, dimensions in genetic variation within the data set at any […]