The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

by Deborah Blum

  VIRGINIA HUGHES

  23 and You

  FROM Matter

  CHERYL WHITTLE TRIED HER BEST to fall asleep, but her mind kept racing. Tomorrow was going to be the culmination of three years of research and, possibly, a day that would change her life forever.

  Around 4 A.M. she popped two Benadryl and managed to drift off. But in just a few hours she had to be up and ready to go.

  Cheryl and her husband, Dickie, are retired and live in eastern Virginia, way out on the end of the Northern Neck peninsula, which juts like an arthritic finger into Chesapeake Bay. It’s a beautiful and isolated spot, where most people tack up NO TRESPASSING signs and stay close to home. The Whittles enjoy their life in the country, but Cheryl was eager that day to make the long drive to meet Effie Jane.

  She showered, threw on a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, dotted makeup on her cheeks, and scrunched a dollop of mousse into her thinning brown hair.

  There’s nothing showy about Cheryl, not even on a day like this. She’s short and shy, with nine grandchildren and no pretensions. She grabbed a shoulder bag, heavy with the day’s supplies, and kissed Dickie on her way out the door.

  Note: Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

  Her anxiety mounted as she drove her yellow pickup truck past sleepy cornfields, old plantations, and cemeteries, up the peninsula and into mainland Virginia. Then she pulled into the tiny parking lot of Panera Bread in Richmond. She didn’t have to wait long before Effie Jane Erhardt found her—that yellow truck was hard to miss. Effie Jane pulled open the truck’s passenger door and announced, “I’m here!”

  Cheryl and Effie Jane met on Ancestry.com, a popular web site for people trying to fill in their family trees. After several e-mail and phone encounters, each woman felt a kinship that neither had experienced before. Both were born in 1951, and grew up about 20 miles from each other in the Richmond area. They both speak with soft southern drawls, had traumatic childhoods, are devout Christians, and, as children, felt like outsiders in their own families.

  Cheryl quickly got down to business, retrieving a small cardboard box from her bag in the back seat. She opened the top, plucked out a fat plastic tube, and handed it to her friend. Effie Jane held the tube under her mouth and spit—and spit, and spit, and spit. She had never realized how much saliva froths and fizzes. She passed the tube back to Cheryl, who snapped on a plastic cap, gently mixed the tube’s contents, and dropped it into a clear plastic bag with an orange BIOHAZARD label. Then the two women went into Panera for lunch.

  Since 2000, when a company called Family Tree DNA sold the first commercially available home testing kit, an estimated one million people have dabbled in genetic genealogy—also known as recreational genetics, extreme genealogy, and even anthrogenealogy.

  Traditionally, amateur genealogical research was regarded as a niche hobby for older white men, but today it attracts people of all ages, races, and walks of life.

  The rapid transformation is the result of two technological revolutions. Twenty years ago, doing genealogy meant hitting the pavement: traveling to local historical societies, courthouses, libraries, and cemeteries to paw through dusty books and records. Then came the Internet, which made the most useful references—census and voter lists, birth certificates, military records, even the archives of local newspapers—accessible from home. Not only that, but genealogists started connecting with each other online, sharing their research and overlapping trees, creating a vast online database that anyone could tap into and, more importantly, add to.

  In 1997 a company called Infobases, which sold compact disks of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints publications, bought Ancestry Magazine and its web site, Ancestry.com, turning the latter into a subscription genealogy service. By 2009, when Ancestry.com went public, it had a near monopoly on the booming industry. The world of ancestry research has become a perfect example of a highly scalable business based largely on freely provided, user-generated content. Today Ancestry.com has a few competitors, like MyHeritage.com and Brightsolid, but it remains dominant, with almost 3 million paying subscribers, 12 billion records, and 50 million family trees. Revenues from the company’s ten popular web sites and the Family Tree Maker software totaled $400 million in 2011. In late 2012 a European private equity firm bought the company for $1.6 billion.

  The second transformation came from rapid advances in genetic testing. After Family Tree DNA launched its test, other companies followed: eleven by 2004, and almost forty by the end of that decade. Today you find celebrities like Meryl Streep and Yo-Yo Ma tracing their lineage on prime-time television shows. As the price of commercial genetic tests has plummeted—many now cost just $99—families like the Whittles have been able to join in.

  Three companies—23andMe, Family Tree DNA, and Ancestry.com—have emerged as major players, and each is intent on growing its most valuable asset: a proprietary database of customers’ genetic data. 23andMe has information from more than 400,000 people and counting, and Family Tree DNA has over 650,000 different genetic records.

  The bigger these databases become, the more useful they are for filling in genealogists’ ever-expanding family trees. But the growth of the databases also raises serious privacy concerns—not only for people who buy the tests, but for close or even distant family members who share some of their DNA.

  Searching your genetic ancestry can certainly be fun: you can trace the migration patterns of 10,000-year-old ancestors or discover whether a distant relative ruled a continent or rode on the Mayflower. But the technology can just as easily unearth more private acts—infidelities, sperm donations, adoptions—of more recent generations, including previously unknown behaviors of your grandparents, parents, and even spouses. Family secrets have never been so vulnerable.

  If you find a relative on a genetic genealogy database—say, a second or third cousin—then, with the help of Google, social media, digital obituaries, and other publicly available resources, it’s usually possible to find closer kin. Adoptees have used their newfound genetic knowledge to browse photo albums and look for potential biological relatives on Facebook. Children of sperm donors have found siblings they never knew they had. Couples who used artificial insemination to conceive have discovered that another man’s sperm was used.

  And then there are people like Cheryl, who learn to their surprise, late in life, that they aren’t the person they thought they were.

  Over sandwiches at Panera, Cheryl and Effie Jane exchanged photos and told childhood stories. Taking advantage of the restaurant’s Wi-Fi, Cheryl took out her laptop and logged in to the 23andMe web site, patiently explaining how the process worked. Cheryl was a veteran. Genetic testing had already shaken up her world, raising startling new questions about where she came from. She was here because she believed that Effie Jane was her sister. She was praying for it. If she was right, the journey she’d been on for the last three years would reach its end. Her mind could rest.

  The women left the restaurant together, drove to a nearby post office, and sent the sealed package to a lab in Los Angeles. There technicians would screen Effie Jane’s DNA for about one million genetic markers. Four to six weeks later, 23andMe would send Cheryl an e-mail saying the results were ready.

  Cheryl’s quest began one afternoon in late 2008, when she and Dickie were sitting in their living room watching Oprah. The episode included a segment about a Silicon Valley start-up called 23andMe that was selling genetic tests directly to consumers. One of the company’s founders, Anne Wojcicki, was nine months pregnant. She told Oprah how her DNA test results and those of her husband—Google cofounder Sergey Brin—offered clues about their unborn child.

  Cheryl, then a registered nurse, was intrigued. She had married Dickie when she was fourteen and he was twenty. The pregnancy that spurred their young union resulted in a stillborn girl, born with too much fluid in her brain.

  After hearing Wojcicki’s story, Cheryl thought that this DNA test migh
t provide a genetic explanation for their daughter’s death. What’s more, she had been interested in genealogy for years and had done a lot of work on the line of her father, Josiah “Joe” Wilmoth. Perhaps DNA testing would expand that research.

  Cheryl remembered some of the basics about how genes work from nursing school, and learned more after browsing 23andMe’s web site. For instance, most of us have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, or long segments of DNA. Both sexes have twenty-two pairs of so-called “autosomal chromosomes”—each pair includes one copy inherited from each parent. But the twenty-third pair, the “sex chromosomes,” is different. Men inherit a Y chromosome from their father and an X chromosome from their mother. Women, in contrast, receive an X chromosome from their father and a second X from their mother.

  To investigate her father’s ancestry, Cheryl decided to look at the DNA of a male in her father’s line. Joe Wilmoth had died in 1989. But his son Milton Wilmoth, Cheryl’s older half-brother, was alive and well. So she called Milton and asked: If she paid for it, would he consider taking a genetic test?

  Milton didn’t own a computer and had no interest in his DNA, but he readily agreed to help his sister. So in early 2009 Cheryl bought three kits from 23andMe—one for her, one for her husband Dickie, and one for Milton—at $495 a pop. Two months after that, she was back at her computer poring over the results.

  From what she could tell, nothing in her genes or Dickie’s gave any clues about why their first baby had died. But not long after she took the test, 23andMe launched Relative Finder, a service that allowed customers to find relatives in the company’s database based on shared segments from all twenty-three chromosomes. Oddly, Milton’s name did not appear in Cheryl’s list of DNA relatives. She tried signing in to 23andMe using Milton’s account instead, and saw that her name did not appear in his list of DNA relatives either.

  After a couple of months, Cheryl reached out to CeCe Moore, an expert in genetic genealogy who runs a popular blog on the subject. “I wrote to her and said, ‘Can you tell me what I’m doing wrong? I can’t get this thing to work,’” Cheryl recalls.

  CeCe revealed the truth that Cheryl suspected but had been scared to confront: Milton was not biologically related to her. For Cheryl, there was only one explanation: she was a Wilmoth by name but not by blood.

  The notion that Joe wasn’t her biological father didn’t sit well with Cheryl. It meant, after all, that her mother had lied to her—and maybe to Joe and everybody else—for decades. But Cheryl didn’t feel anger toward her mother. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she felt comforted. Many things about her childhood suddenly made sense. When she was growing up, Joe never gave her much affection or attention. And when he drank, which was often, he could turn mean. “I never felt a part of him,” she says. “I grew up believing in my heart that I did not belong.”

  The news was a painful shock, however, to Cheryl’s younger sister, Sandi Satterfield, who was crushed at the thought that they weren’t full siblings. Joe had always doted on Sandi, and Sandi had adored him, despite his flaws. Yet she worried about what it might mean for her own roots. Could it possibly be that she, too, wasn’t his?

  After prodding from Cheryl, Sandi agreed to take a 23andMe test to confirm that Joe was her father. When her results came back, in June 2010, they showed that she was at extremely high risk for colorectal cancer. Just seven months later she was diagnosed with stage IV of the disease. “If we had known this earlier in her life, she may have been able to take the appropriate actions to prevent this horrible disease,” Cheryl says.

  But Sandi’s DNA results also resolved her worries about her own lineage. Cheryl and Sandi didn’t share half of their DNA, as full siblings do. They shared around 22 percent, making them half-siblings through their mother. Sandi shared 25 percent of her genome with Milton, which meant they were half-siblings through their father, Joe.

  Sandi’s first reaction was acceptance. Four days after the results came back, she sent Cheryl an e-mail: “The bottom line is that it really doesn’t matter. I love you and they loved you . . . in their own way I guess. Daddy was OUR daddy, nothing can change that.”

  But as the information sunk in, Sandi became distressed about the implications of the test. She was hurt when, a few weeks after the results came through, Cheryl sent an e-mail to Sandi and fifteen other friends and family with the subject line “Who is my biological daddy?”

  In the e-mail, Cheryl laid out the whole story of Milton and Sandi’s tests, revealing that Joe wasn’t her biological father and reflecting a bit on her feelings:

  My thoughts . . . Daddy Joe knew in his spirit I wasn’t his. After all, animals know their child from someone else’s, it is part of nature. AND male animals will usually destroy the offspring of other males. And momma never cared for me like she cared for Sandi, why? Because she had a problem with my father, whoever he was. Was she raped, was she involved with someone and he dumped her, or was she just ashamed for some reason. We do not know, as no one is here that we can ask.

  Two days later Sandi responded to the e-mail and similar things Cheryl had posted on Facebook. She was upset that Cheryl referred to Joe as Daddy Joe, as opposed to just Daddy. “I know you mean no harm and [are] only trying to distinguish between sperm donor and daddy, but it really bothers me for him,” Sandi wrote. “I just feel so bad for him wondering if he knew and now I feel as though he was played a fool.”

  “I should never have taken that test,” she added. “I feel so terribly guilty.”

  Blaine Bettinger is a well-known figure in the genetic genealogy world. The thirty-seven-year-old is an intellectual-property attorney by day. “But I joke that it’s just a way that I make money to pay for more genealogy tests,” he says. He has been researching his family history since he was a kid, and he studied molecular biology and genetics in graduate school, so he was perfectly poised for the genetic genealogy revolution. Bettinger bought his first genetic test in 2003. A few years later he launched a blog—The Genetic Genealogist—with the aim of explaining the science behind the tests in simple language. It now receives around a thousand visitors a day, he says.

  Genetic genealogy can be extremely complicated, but most cases require only a basic understanding of our twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. Most chromosomes, you could say, are promiscuous. During the formation of egg and sperm, each chromosome inherited from the mother physically crosses with its counterpart from the father, and as the pieces mingle they freely exchange segments of DNA. This recombination gives our species great genetic diversity, and it’s the primary reason non-twin siblings are never genetically identical.

  But the Y chromosome is chaste. The vast majority of its 50 million DNA letters do not swap with other chromosomes, passing almost identically from father to son, son to grandson, and so on. That means that when a genetic change spontaneously occurs in a Y chromosome, it can be passed down to male descendants forever, serving as a reliable marker of their paternal lineage.

  This was famously demonstrated in 1997, when researchers published a study of Jewish priests in the journal Nature. According to Jewish belief, the high priesthood began 3,300 years ago with Aaron, Moses’s older brother, and has been passed from father to son ever since. Today many Jews have the surname Cohen or Kohen, meaning “priest” in Hebrew. The researchers scraped a few skin cells from the inside of the cheeks of almost two hundred Jewish men from Israel, North America, and England, and compared the men’s Y chromosomes. Close to seventy had been told at some point that they were direct descendants of the high priests. And these men, it turns out, had a distinctive Y-chromosome profile. “The simplest, most straightforward explanation is that these men have the Y chromosome of Aaron,” the lead researcher told the New York Times.

  The following year, a similar genetic study made headlines when it bolstered the controversial theory that Thomas Jefferson had fathered a child with his slave, Sally Hemings. The researchers looked at the genes of male descendants of J
efferson’s paternal grandfather and found that they carried a combination of nineteen genetic markers that is quite rare, showing up in just a tenth of a percent of all men. But the researchers found exactly the same set of markers in a descendant of one of Hemings’s sons, Eston, meaning that Eston’s father was either Jefferson or one of Jefferson’s close male relatives.

  For genealogy buffs, these studies had thrilling implications. Since the Middle Ages, Western cultures have passed surnames from father to son. In theory, then, men who have the same surname should share markers on their Y chromosomes. This wouldn’t be true for everyone, of course: multiple families may have taken up the same surname even if they weren’t related, and adopted children often take the last name of their adoptive fathers. But it’s true for enough people to be useful for tracing family trees.

  When Family Tree DNA launched its genetic genealogy test, which screened for twelve markers on the Y chromosome, genealogists could find members of their paternal line not with treks to libraries or cemeteries, but by uploading their DNA results to the company’s database.

  That was in 2000. By the end of 2001, the company’s customers had organized research projects for about a hundred surnames. After 23andMe launched, in 2007, it added thousands of markers associated with health risks, such as those that Cheryl heard about on Oprah. There are also companies that specialize in determining ancestry for African Americans, Native Americans, and other specific ethnicities.

  For people like Bettinger, DNA testing has made genealogical research richer and more fulfilling. “Once I got the DNA test back, I was able to look at my family tree in a whole new light,” he says.