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It’s the holiday season, which means you’re seeing DNA testing ads everywhere. Ads encouraging you to: “Bring the family closer than ever this holiday” with an AncestryDNA kit. "Celebrate your family with 23andme.com” "Put your family front and center with the ultimate gift, a MyHeritage DNA test.”
Major ads accompanied by major sales in test kits during this annual season is nothing new, but this point in time is special. The year 2020 has proven to be a remarkable one for DNA testing, the year when an invention originally envisioned as a niche product for genealogical hobbyists established itself as a true cultural phenomenon, touching our public and private lives in ways we never could have anticipated.
To understand how we’ve come so far, it helps to go back to the beginning, to the roots of this technology’s first milestone. This is the 20th anniversary year of DNA testing for ancestry purposes. In the spring of 2000, the first American company offering DNA testing for ancestry purposes sent out its initial test kits. Houston-based FamilyTreeDNA was founded by a genealogist and entrepreneur named Bennett Greenspan, who originally envisioned his venture as appealing to a limited market, serious family history enthusiasts like him. When I interviewed Greenspan, he told me stories about the early years of his company, when he had difficulty persuading fellow hobbyists at genealogy conferences that his DNA tests, cruder and more expensive than such tests are now, would help them with their research. He could not have imagined a future in which products like his were transformed into mainstream consumer items shipped all over the world.
And how did this transformation take place? Genealogy has been an important hobby in America for decades, helped along by the Internet, the personal computer, the rise of free and subscription-based genealogical archives, an influx of ad dollars from companies selling DNA testing and genealogical subscriptions, a public awakened to curiosity about its roots after generations of assimilation, and the popularity of shows like “Who Do You Think You Are?" and “Finding Your Roots.”
All of this has led up to the year’s second milestone: the major DNA testing companies have sold more than 35 million DNA test kits, the majority of them in the United States. Tens of millions of people suddenly have access to information about their genetic relatives, their ancestral roots, and their risks of developing certain diseases. A few short decades ago, this information would have been unimaginable; now, it is accessible via a popular holiday gift.
As a result, we now live in the era of genetic reckoning, when family secrets can no longer be maintained, and when even those who don’t test their DNA can be impacted by others’ decision to test. Because of the shared nature of genetic material, one person’s decision to test can have implications for the life of a third cousin she’s never met, and who never chose to spit into a vial. Adopted people can find their birth parents, and those conceived by sperm donation can identify the strangers who contributed half their genetic material, regardless of whether those men expected to remain anonymous. Some Americans are discovering the man they call Dad is not, in fact, their biological father, and grappling with the implications of those discoveries for their families and their own identities. Others are discovering they have half-siblings they never knew about or learning that their families’ true genetic ancestries were hidden for generations.
The revelations unveiled by recreational genetic testing have the power to change people’s lives, prompting reconciliations both personal and historical. The search for genetic kin that often follows these surprises can end in reunion or rejection, and the hows and whys of these receptions, and how they impact the “seekers” looking for family, are important topics we’re only just beginning to examine.
This year’s third major milestone underscores the value of this testing, not only for ancestry purposes but also for information on health risks, which is a direction into which the industry has recently begun to pivot. These days, Ancestry is the behemoth in the direct-to-consumer genetic testing space, with the biggest database of genetic samples at 18 million, as well as three million paying subscribers to its genealogical archives and a new AncestryHealth test offered in partnership with a physician network. Four years ago, the company was valued at $2.6 billion, but this year, the value of the company proved to have grown significantly when the investment giant Blackstone Group announced it was acquiring a majority stake in the company in a deal worth a hefty $4.7 billion, “placing a big bet on family-tree chasing as well as personalized medicine,” as Reuters put it. As one industry observer suggested to me, in the future we may see more of a convergence between the consumer genetics testing space and the medical establishment.
The last of this year’s major milestones for the industry is the sentencing of Joseph James DeAngelo, known as the Golden State Killer, who terrorized California with a string of brutal rapes and murders in the 1970s and ‘80s. When DeAngelo pled guilty this summer to 13 murders and was sentenced to multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole, it marked a major moment for the nascent field known as investigative genetic genealogy—the closing of the case that started it all. DeAngelo was arrested in 2018 after genetic genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter helped law enforcement investigators identify him using methods originally developed to help adoptees and others find their biological parents, comparing crime scene DNA to genetic information gathered for genealogical purposes through a publicly-accessible website called GEDmatch.
Even as the approach has provoked fierce debates over genetic privacy, it has been taken up by law enforcement agencies eager to try to solve the oldest and coldest cases. Investigative genetic genealogy is emerging as a small industry in its own right, and Rae-Venter recently estimated that the approach has been used to solve over 200 cases.
What do these major milestones in the history of DNA testing mean? An industry once characterized as “recreational” is proving itself to be anything but. Consumer genetic testing is changing how we think about family, about our own health, and about the intelligibility of crimes once considered so cold they were frozen over. This is the year when we are learning the power of what our genetic information can reveal—not only to us but to our society at large. The truth has never been so accessible, even as questions abound about how best to handle it.
It’s striking that these four major milestones were reached in the same year, a fact that underscores not only the cultural phenomenon that home DNA testing has become but the momentum behind it. It will be equally fascinating to watch this phenomenon’s evolution going forward.
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