Well IMHO you would want his permission though you're probably not legally bound to get it (I suspect this is a Boston Legal episode waiting to happen). Again, I'm not a lawyer but I'd imagine it would depend on how old he is and what state you live in. But as far as the science goes, as your biological son his Y is…

That's true, but GINA is full of holes: It doesn't apply to life, long-term care or disability insurance. It doesn't apply to companies with < 15 employees. It doesn't apply to the military. And it's not really been tested in court yet.

23andMe does the latter. There are some places doing whole-genome sequencing on a retail basis, but I'm guessing that'd run you $3000 to $5000 to get it on a flash drive with no interpretation.

I might have said yes it will a few years ago but I think as time goes on, most people are likely to want everything. Certainly the research participants and patients we sequence at Duke overwhelmingly want access to everything. I suppose there might be a sub-group of cautious users but they will have to be a large…

The former! The patents per se were not the problem IMHO, but the business practices: exclusive licensing and hoarding of data. Myriad didn't have to wear the black hat—it *chose* to.

I think we're done? Thank you all for the terrific questions. It is a confusing and exciting time full of opportunities and thorny questions...As I said below: READ THE CONSENT FORMS AND THE TERMS OF SERVICE! I will leave you with a cartoon from this week's New Yorker:

Hmm...I'd have to know more but you sound like a promising candidate for either a research study (I am involved in one at Duke) or a clinical sequencing test ordered through a physician. Over the last several years a lot of groups have coalesced and begun to do large-scale sequencing of people with undiagnosed…

There's a wonderful geneticist at Harvard named Robert Green who spoke about this today at the personal genomes meeting at Cold Spring Harbor. What he said basically was, people who are already anxious tend to be made more anxious by genetic information. People who are sanguine tend to be sanguine. What I can say…

Who is they lol? Probably at some point you will have the opportunity to get sequenced at zero or very low cost. But this comes with a caveat: it will be free in the way that gmail and facebook are "free." Your data will be kept on a server somewhere and shared with drug companies and probably they will look at your…

Full biological sibs share 50% of their DNA but we don't know a priori which 50%. This is why I don't look exactly like my brothers—the genetic deck gets reshuffled at every conception.

Great question...and a difficult one. Every family is different. I would encourage you to read the story about the mother of an adoptive child and her 23andMe experience in the current issue of Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com/3018598/for-99…

Again, to be clear, I am going to assume you mean *genotyped* and not sequenced—the latter is many times more expensive and produces many times more data. If I were of African descent and interested in my ancestry, I would consider a company like africanancestry.com (disclosure: I know and like the co-founder, Rick…

The 23andMe test purports to do that though I confess I'm not completely sure I buy those percentages. FWIW they think I'm 2.9% Neanderthal...sounds low to me lol

The cost has fallen by a factor 10 every year for the last 7 or 8 years (some data suggest it's leveled off int he last year or two).

I suspect is will be a routine test in the next decade or so, despite the signal-to-noise issues I raised above.

Well, just to be clear, if you do a DTC genetic test where you spit in a tube, you are not getting sequenced, you are getting *genotyped*, that is analyzed at a million places or so out of the tens of millions of places in the genomes where humans differ from one another. Such a test will tell you your genotype at the…

Some results are vague because your particular genotypes are not well represented in the databases. My ancestry is strongly Ashkenazi Jewish and I am inclined to believe those results not only because of my oral family history but because my peeps are well represented in the databases. For people of mixed ancestry the…

It depends on what you're hoping to find. If you did a low-cost DTC genetic test, you could learn something about your Y chromosome if you're male. If you and your Mom did one together you might be able to infer some things about your biological father including his ancestry. I am reluctant to advise you without…

yeah, I think there are things that are of interest if you're interested in reproducing, things that are good to know if you require certain medications, and things that are of interest if you have a strong family history of genetic disease. It's hard to predict a priori what you'll find and what you might consider to…

Great question. I would say they have a responsibility to try and that it's in their interests to do so: we the taxpayers pay for their research. Unfortunately, we only have a few thousand genetic counselors in this country and IMHO, while patients and families love them, they are not treated very well by the medical…