by Alex Wagner
My Internet sleuthing confirmed that in 2012, Ancestry—which had been primarily an online network for traditional, records-based genealogy—wanted to get into the lucrative business of DNA-based ancestry testing. To do so, the company needed some data from reference populations, and so it acquired the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation—a genetic research foundation with (surprise!) ties to the Mormon Church.
The lab’s founder was billionaire Mormon businessman James LeVoy Sorenson—a self-made mogul whose wealth, according to Forbes,3 came from a variety of products ranging from disposable surgical masks to real estate to blood filtration equipment to Mormon lingerie (“Elegance of Modesty” was the product tagline) to heart monitors and video compression technology. When he died in 2008, he was Utah’s richest man.4
Sorenson spent much of his life fascinated by medical “gizmos,” which reportedly got him into the world of DNA science. In 1999, he created the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, assisted by a Brigham Young professor named Dr. Scott Woodward. Many of Sorenson’s samples were collected at church-sponsored events, with the lofty goal of “sharing genetic data to show how the similarities we possess are greater than our differences.”*4 In a 2004 interview, he declared: “We are all sons and daughters of God. By understanding how closely related they are, people will treat one another differently. Once the database is complete, it will become a gold mine of information.”5
His son echoed these sentiments, affirming to the Deseret News after his father died, “He had a great love for people and a great altruistic desire for peace, particularly in the latter part of his life. The whole DNA project and his foundation and the money that’s been spent there was really motivated by helping people to see how they’re related, and, through that, gain a greater sense of belonging or kinship and get people thinking a little bit more about each other.”
As further proof of these intentions, Sorenson also founded the Sorenson Unity Center and the Sorenson Multi-Cultural Center. And yet, profit was never exactly absent from the billionaire’s mind: In 2001, Sorenson created Sorenson Genomics, a company that offered its customers paternity tests and ancestry tests—even then, DNA tests were an exploding, multimillion-dollar market. In 2006, Sorenson Forensics was created to provide “forensic DNA casework services for federal, state, and local crime laboratories and assisting Officers of the Court in individual criminal cases.” In addition to having created a database to theoretically bring the world closer together in perfect harmony, Sorenson was officially in the lucrative business of DNA testing.
When Ancestry purchased the Sorenson Molecular Geneaology data, Sorenson’s collection of DNA samples became the property of AncestryDNA.*5, 6 Many of these samples, collected at church affairs, were from Mormon worshippers, and they in turn may have had Scandinavian heritage (according to a 2009 Pew study, 86 percent of Mormons in the United States are white).7 If Sorenson had a particularly large collection of Scandinavian DNA, then, based on logic, AncestryDNA would therefore seem more likely to return Scandinavian results for its customers, like me and my father.
But Greenspan’s own Family Tree DNA test had returned similar results—in fact it had shown my father to be 10 percent Scandinavian, while I was allegedly also 10 percent Scandinavian. Was this the fault of his database, too? Greenspan was (naturally) more defensive of what his team had determined about my DNA.
“There is some concordance between ourselves and [others],” he offered. “And if you think of your history, those people in Scandinavia came over from places like Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. We’re seeing that in your DNA.
“All of us are kind of a cornucopia of the DNA from the last couple thousand years.”
So we were just a cornucopia. Simple as that, dude. Except for the fact that my father had only 6 percent Scandinavian DNA, according to Ancestry’s test, and I—according to the very same test—had 14 percent Scandinavian DNA! How was it possible that I—somehow—had more Scandinavian DNA than my father? It was pretty clear that my mother was not Scandinavian, unless she had really forgotten a significant portion of her family history.
On this, Greenspan agreed.
“I’m gonna say—and I’m trying to figure out a way to put it nicely—that it’s error. It’s just noise. It would indicate…trying to overfit something.”
The explanation that being a fifth Scandinavian was “just noise” was a fairly significant concern—and by “significant” I mean it seemed to be actually more of a holy-shit moment. It was one thing to be inexact in the art of percentages; it was another when a company was suggesting to a customer that, essentially, her grandfather or grandmother was from Sweden.
“Yeah,” said Greenspan, “you could have been hanging up your lederhosen for…some sort of Scandinavian clothing.”
Neither one of us could name a Scandinavian article of clothing, which might have posed more of a concern had I actually been Scandinavian.
I was fairly incredulous that this sort of ancestral oopsie was (inevitably) happening to thousands of other people all over the place, men and women who were presumably rethinking their Christmas holiday to include a Saint Lucia celebration in midwinter, young girls with braids running around the living room with candles in wreaths on their head and whatnot. (Beyond the potentially misguided cultural identification, it was a fire hazard.)
I asked Ball about this: Was it possible that certain tests had told me I was Scandinavian rather than French-German because they just happened to have a ton of Scandinavian DNA on hand? Or was it something else?
“Not to throw Northern Europeans under the bus,” Ball began, “but the farther you get away from Africa, the less genetic variation you’re gonna see. It also makes it harder to tell between one population and its neighbor. Especially if they insist on marching their armies back and forth and sharing their genes with one another.”
Apparently, this Scandinavian Problem was not limited to just my DNA results: Online amateur genealogists had blogged about their own questionable Scandinavian results.8 One explanation was that the British Isles were more of a “melting pot” than previously understood, including sizable populations of Scandinavians who migrated west. If you had Brits in your bloodline, then their DNA might thus be read as “Scandinavian.” Which highlighted the problem I’d had with these classifications all along: At what point did British blood become “British” and at what point was it “Scandinavian”? And, to Ball’s point, wasn’t almost all European blood in particular the result of historical mixing? Those damn warring European countries and their intermarriages! Separating that DNA was arbitrary and confusing.
About this, at least, there seemed to be some agreement. Joanna Mountain from 23andMe was up-front about the problem. “At times we’ve over-polled certain ancestries,” she said. “You’re always trying to refine, each company is always trying to improve up on its [results]—and that’s because each company is in a different stage of refinement. It just as easily could have been [23andMe] that came up with that result.” (She noted, of course, “that companies differ in their reference population data and the algorithms used to make ancestry assignments.”)
I couldn’t help but think that if some of these companies were making significantly inaccurate assumptions about my European heritage, to what lengths were they over their skis in areas of the globe where the reference data was even less developed? It made me wonder again about my mother’s and grandmother’s “Mongolian” DNA.
Ball explained one reason why Mongolia often showed up in ancestry reports.
“In China,” she said, “it’s illegal to collect DNA and take it out of the country, which limits our ability to do those kinds of collections.”
Mongolia, Ball explained, “is close to China, so it’s geographically as close as you can get to China without breaking Chinese laws.”
In other words, my Burmese DNA
might have registered as Mostly Chinese (because there was no Burmese DNA on hand), but instead of Mostly Chinese, some of it registered as Somewhat Mongolian (because it was really hard to get Chinese DNA out of China).
So I was a descendant of Genghis Khan because of market forces and political realities. And I was Scandinavian because of market forces and political realities. It was far-fetched enough that I found it somewhat funny, even though other people with less of a questionably loose handle on their heritage might be (rightfully) pissed if they were returned similarly faulty results.
Not surprisingly, as it concerned the even smaller and less significant ancestry percentages—my father’s .7 percent Balkan bloodline, as reported by 23andMe, for example—certain experts were completely dismissive.
“All of those things tend to be stretches,” said one expert, who wished to remain anonymous. The companies that offered fractional breakdowns were doing so, this expert said, mostly “for commercial reasons.”
And if a company couldn’t come up with one of these alleged and intriguing “really accurate results”—.1 percent Italian, for example—it would be at a market disadvantage, but it might also be considerably more truthful. Winnowing DNA slices to tenths of a percent—or even single percentages—seemed like a fairly exact science, and from what I was seeing, the whole process was supremely inexact.
“Some interpretations are more reasonable than others,” Dr. Bamshad conceded. According to his experience, yes, certain companies were making claims “that population geneticists would raise an eyebrow toward. They create narratives,” he said, “and their basis in reality is sometimes fairly modest.”
That seemed like a polite way of acknowledging that some of these ancestry profiles tripped into the realm of the fantastic and possibly absurd. That indeed, you could unwittingly hang up your lederhosen for…something Scandinavian; that you might forsake your longyi for…a Mongolian item of clothing.
But Professor Jeffrey Long, professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of New Mexico, was sanguine about the whole endeavor. I asked him whether people should believe any of the results they got.
“It depends on the level of precision you want,” he told me. “In the broad strokes, people would probably see fairly reasonable results, but oftentimes people aren’t interested in the broad strokes. People want to know if they are from a particular locality of the world.” People did indeed—even if it didn’t matter whether they were actually from that part of the world.
* * *
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Having spoken to scientists and experts and associated persons, I came to the conclusion that the landscape of consumer-focused DNA ancestry testing was a lot like the Wild West: Full of optimism and ambition and broken dreams, populated by groups of some charlatans and pioneers and inventors and evangelists. Much like the shop owners who offered miracle powders and gold-divining tools to adventurous settlers on the frontier, these genetic testing companies offered the curious customer a chance to (literally) Validate Uncertain Relationships! Confirm Family Lore! And Gain a Genealogical Leg Up! Most charitably, this was just the dog-eat-dog world of commerce, part of our ongoing American hustle. This was the way we did things, and sometimes (many times), we offered promises that we couldn’t keep.
And yet if this was part of the reality of capitalism and the hustle, wasn’t the flip side of this—also part of the American hustle—the reality of regulations and transparency? Of lawsuits and fine print? Dr. Bamshad explained that he and some colleagues were trying to establish a way to make the information on reference populations “publicly available and transparent.” Some guidelines were needed—standards, you might call them—establishing how researchers and companies were performing these tests, and how genetic genealogists were determining the ways in which the data should be analyzed and interpreted.
Not everyone necessarily agreed.
Professor Long said that “the amount of reference data is astronomically better” now than it was in the early years of consumer genetic testing. “And some of the companies have very large reference populations themselves. I’m not sure it would be possible to make a compendium of all the reference data available.”
If it was too much to hope for more specific disclosure on company data, what about a window onto the interpretation of the results themselves? After all, the reading of results in an autosomal test was not uncontested science. Not only were the classifications in large part vestiges of colonial conquest, there were also apparently backroom puzzle solvers deciphering the results. And then there was the reality that this testing scanned only a limited piece of one’s genome—given how much material there was on chromosomes one through twenty-two.
The American Society of Human Genetics says:
Because the genome is finite, only a small fraction of ancestors are represented by each given genomic segment in an individual, and every ancestor does not necessarily pass on his or her DNA at any given genomic segment to a descendant, so one can only ever have limited information on the origins of a given individual’s ancestors [emphasis mine].9
Wasn’t it incumbent upon these companies to, you know, better explain that the results could be, occasionally, wildly wrong? Only a very small part of the genome was scanned, and those limited results were compared against limited reference data, which was then assessed according to certain laboratory preferences. Which were, by their very nature, limited.
This was the arms race of the ancestry market: When one company was able to offer its customers surprising or even shocking genetic information, the pressure was on for all of its competitors to do the same. With “results that make people say, ‘I thought I was German, but I’m Scottish!’ that’s all people want to hear,” according to Greenspan.
Here we were again blaming the nacho-chip-chomping bubble butts for their insatiable lust for extra nacho cheese product: Ya can’t take it away from them! “Unfortunately, we live in a world where people read less,” Greenspan said. “Everything is distilled into a ten-second sound bite. That’s not what people need; that’s what people want. Sometimes you need to know a little or a lot more to understand the answer.”
Yeah yeah yeah, I said—I was tired of blaming myself for all the snack chips I had known, and, anyway, shouldn’t there be something, somewhere, that stipulated to the unsuspecting cheek swabber: WARNING: DO NOT START EXTOLLING VIRTUES OF IKEA BECAUSE OF APPARENT SWEDISH DNA?
“I think all the companies try to get those asterisks across,” said the unnamed expert. “How well we do on that front, I don’t know, given that you have people on television like [Henry Louis] ‘Skip’ Gates, who loves the percentage test and hawks the percentage test…and delivers it with the moral authority of a person on the TV. It becomes challenging when a member of the public does that. Sometimes it works well; sometimes it doesn’t.”
In other words: Sometimes you were Scandinavian, and sometimes you were Mongolian, and all of the time (at least where these tests were concerned), you were gonna have to accept the results. Simple as that, dude.
And yet, I confess: For the six days that I believed myself to be partially Scandinavian, I began cultivating a taste for equanimity and butter cookies, mentally ticking off my taller-than-average height as a vestige of my Nordic ancestry. I thought about my Mongolian blood and explained away my lust for fur-lined clothing as a genetically determined sartorial predilection. I felt—fleetingly—a sense of pride. That satisfying peace that comes with conclusion, as if I could finally say, Yes, world, this is who I am, a modern-day amalgamation of Scandinavian and Mongolian genes, tossed into a blender and thrown halfway around the world.
But in the end, these percentages, these flossy statistics, were just a ruse. They were gold-colored nuggets glinting at the bottom of a riverbed, shiny nothings that lured people like me to unknown frontiers by promising one thing and delivering another. Ancestr
y results played on our most basic desire to know ourselves, to belong to something innately. And then they exploited that desire by delivering something possibly real, possibly diluted with half-truths and educated guesses.
In the back of my mind, I knew the question of identity and heritage was more complicated and deserving of ethical treatment than perhaps some of these scientists (and myself) might have considered. And so I decided to contact the éminence grise of skeptical sociologists—a leading critic of consumer-based ancestry testing—Troy Duster, professor of sociology at UC Berkeley, who said immediately, “Autosomal AIMs are nutty and complicated, and that’s where the transparency becomes the central issue. These markers are based on proprietary entrepreneurial developers who don’t wanna give away their secrets.
“If you can’t replicate that test,” he explained, “if you can’t show your strategy…then you’re asking for a kind of faith on the part of the consumer.”
In Duster’s opinion, that was a lot to ask.
But he, too, hit on the tension inherent in the whole practice of commercial genetics: Companies want to maintain a market advantage. They want to do things in a cost-effective manner, to scale, and as much on their own terms as possible. This was Greenspan’s point: Consumers want the most accurate results—but they also want some sense of reward, a feeling they’ve learned something that they didn’t know before, that the investment was worth it. Those competing interests can end in questionable results, and, sometimes, inaccurate ones.
Was it fair to feel indignant about the status quo, the fact that most eager consumers were in the dark about just how much the companies themselves were in the dark?