April 11, 2013
If you saw adoptee Sheridan* on the street, you might wonder -- as she does -- about her ancestral origins. You could guess a few things, but would you have guessed she has Jewish ancestry? It turns out a small percentage of her ancestry is Ashkenazi, a fact she learned recently from her 23andMe Ancestry [...]
February 15, 2013
Can 23andMe sample my dead relatives and why do you use spit to extract my DNA? Inquiring minds want to know, or at least a lot of our customers do. There really are no dumb questions and if you have something to ask, we’ve probably heard it before. 23andMe has a lot of resources for folks trying to [...]
January 24, 2013
We first met Sheridan* in the fall of 2010. As an adoptee, she was curious about her DNA and what 23andMe might be able to tell her. With the help of old friends and some new ones on 23andMe, Sheridan learned about her global origins, which include an African-American father and a mother of European descent, [...]
April 16, 2012
As the series Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. begins its 10-week run on PBS, The Spittoon will feature posts from 23andMe’s Ancestry Ambassadors featuring their own stories about using DNA to dig into ancestry. By Ann Turner, M.D. Many members of my extended family have inherited a [...]
August 19, 2011
Not all the discoveries made on 23andMe are quite as profound as Neil Schwartzman finding his half-sister and mother, but even when 23andMe’s Relative Finder links distant cousins together those connections can still be electric. Gerald Lopez, a customer who found a fourth or fifth cousin and information [...]
January 17, 2011
Do you have your father's eyes or your mother's curly hair? Do you have trouble drinking milk, or flush when you drink alcohol? Many traits such as eye color, alcohol flush, and the texture of your hair are determined---at least in part---by genetics. Learning about them also helps make genetics more real. We [...]
December 14, 2010
“Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.” That statement used to be a popular way to characterize the practice of medicine, back in the golden age of pharmaceuticals when drugs were seen as the answer to all problems. These days, we know that the picture is more complicated -- some conditions [...]
December 7, 2010
While many health conditions are complex and influenced by a combination of genetic and non-genetic factors, others follow a much simpler pattern where disruptions (or “mutations”) in a single gene can directly cause disease. These diseases are often referred to as Mendelian diseases, named after the monk [...]
December 3, 2010
Type 2 diabetes, prostate cancer, multiple sclerosis -- out of the nearly 200 reports 23andMe currently offers covering common and complex diseases, there are at least a few you have heard of. This familiarity is part of the reason why the Disease Risk reports are one of 23andMe’s most talked-about [...]
December 1, 2010
Unless you have a specific health topic in mind, you’ll most likely want to begin by browsing your health results to see what your genetics say about you. Your gateway to all things Health at 23andMe is the Health Overview which highlights some of the interesting results in each of four categories: Disease [...]
