A single, distinctive envelope lay nestled among the stack of junk mail when I got home last night. And, no, it wasn't a subpoena – I'm pretty sure those have to be hand-delivered.
So I took a second to open it despite Harley's increasingly urgent pleas for Scooby Snacks. Apparently they starve them at day care.
At any rate, turns out it was from one of those fledgling DNA-testing companies. You know, for a few hundred bucks and a mouthful of spit they can tell me where I came from, what's wrong with me and how (or maybe just when) I'm gonna die.
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OK, so maybe I'm exaggerating a little. But the company, 23andMe (which sounds a little like some kind of mathematically mismatched dating service at first), promised to reveal:
- "More than 240 health condition and traits" (God help me if I have half that many…)
- "Your personal ancestry" (which strikes me as infinitely less dramatic than that Lisa Kudrow reality show)
- "Reports on [more than] 40 inherited conditions (you mean I moved more than 700 miles and I still can't get away from my family?)
- And, of course, "Updates as science advances."
It's this last selling point that opened the floodgate of questions as I fended off my ever-inpatient toddler. Does that mean my DNA stays on file? Does it get re-tested regularly? Are they gonna run me through some "cold cases?" (Not that I have anything to worry about.) Do they get to patent my DNA, thereby "owning" me?
(This is the part where I point out that, if I were so inclined and able, I still couldn't get this company to test me for what Angelina Jolie had. See, that particular test is patented and, apparently only one company can test for it.)
Can they clone me? (Not that any of us want that…) And, by the way, what mailing list did they get a hold of that had my name on it and what's it called? Mendel's Minions? Nietzsche's Names?
But, after an initial chuckle, more serious concerns sprang to mind, as well. What if something pops? Do I run the risk of losing my health insurance – I'm looking at you, UnitedHealth? At what point does my genetic makeup become a pre-existing condition? And, sure, this test is voluntary – one might even say a luxury – but could we one day see these as compulsory, not unlike physicals for individual life policies? Even worse, am I condemning my kids to a lifetime of "pre-exiting conditions" based on their father's wonky genetic makeup?
The more I thought about this test, the more downsides seemed to appear than upsides. It has the potential to be a helluva bigger deal than finding out whether your wife's gonna have boy or a girl.
So I looked them up online – I mean, isn't that what we do with everything and everyone these days? Dating must suck in a wired world.
Anyway, they're doing OK. After a huge capital infusion late last year, and some tinkering with their business model, 23andMe bumped their price down to a flat, one-time $99 fee in a bid to go mainstream and backload their database. They've already gone on record as saying they want to hit the million-customer milestone this year.
I know, I've been making a lot of jokes about it, but I can't help but be intrigued. I've been thinking about it all day. So, I guess I've decided I'm gonna to do it, even though I feel a little bit like the 12-year-old Storey ordering the X-ray glasses from the back of the comic book all those years ago. Sure hopes this turns out better. I'll keep you posted. Stay tuned.
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