Here at 23andMe we have an interest in all things Neanderthal, so when none other than Svante Paabo authored the book Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes we had to check it out.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-20650" alt="Svante book cover" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Svante-book-cover-197x300.jpg" width="197" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Svante-book-cover-197x300.jpg 197w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Svante-book-cover.jpg 365w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 197px) 100vw, 197px" />


Professor Paabo, the director of evolutionary genetics at the<a href="http://www.mpg.de/eva-en?section=eb-evb-g"> Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology</a> in Leipzig, Germany, was the first to decode the Neanderthal genome.
This book is the story of that Herculean effort.
Extracting ancient DNA isn’t as easy as they make it sound in Jurassic Park. Much of the book details the painstaking trial and error it took to figure out how to do so. Simply extracting the requisite amount of DNA from bones tens of thousands of years old often requires more than one bone sample. Finding samples of bones can take delicate negotiations with old guard museum curators or political hacks. And then there are the perennial problems of contamination, making getting an accurate sequence very difficult. Paabo’s feat was anything but easy.
If Paabo weren’t such a good storyteller, the book might have bogged down with descriptions of things like the different techniques of polymerase chain reaction, and all it takes to build a clean lab. But he’s a clever enough writer to to keep the reader’s attention with a fast-paced story and wonderful details.
<div id="attachment_20651" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-20651" class="size-medium wp-image-20651" alt="Max Planck Forscher Prof. Dr.Svante PÃ¤Ã¤bo entschlÃ¼sselt Neandertaler-Genom" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Image12-300x209.jpg" width="300" height="209" />Svante Paabo with a reconstructed Neandertal skull. (Copyright: Frank Vinken)</div>
One of the many great details is an odd scene played out at the Natural History Museum in London. While there looking for possible sources of ancient DNA, Paabo was utterly astonished to watch a curator lick an old bone to determine whether it had been coated in some kind of preservative or not. Paabo, who’d been in the midst of his struggle to overcome contamination in ancient samples, stared in disbelief and wondered how many other bones in the collection had been “checked” in this way.


For us here at 23andMe, we paid particular attention to another short scene Paabo describes at Cold Spring Harbor, involving one of our scientists.
It happened just days after Paabo’s groundbreaking announcement of the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2010.
After he gave his talk, he described listening with complete delight to Cory McLean, then a doctorate student at Stanford and now a senior computational biologist at 23andMe, report on his work comparing human and ape genomes, looking specifically for regions where humans differed from other apes. Although the Neanderthal sequence had been published just days before, Cory had also included the Neanderthal genome in his analysis. Knowing the Neanderthal genome sequence in those regions helped to identify genome differences unique to modern humans versus those we share with Neanderthals.
<div id="attachment_20654" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-20654" class="size-medium wp-image-20654" alt="(Copyright: Johannes Krause, Neandertal group by Atelier Daynes, Paris, France. In: Museum of the Krapina Neanderthals, Krapina, Croatia. Project and realization of the Museum: Zeljko Kovacic and Jakov Radovcic.)" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Image21-300x199.jpg" width="300" height="199" />Copyright: Johannes Krause, Neandertal group by Atelier Daynes, Paris, France. In: Museum of the Krapina Neanderthals, Krapina, Croatia. Project and realization of the Museum: Zeljko Kovacic and Jakov Radovcic.</div>
“I was so emotional about what (Cory) had done that I had to stop myself from hugging him,” Paabo said. “As far as I know he was the first person who had put our genome to use in his research.”


The publication of the Neanderthal sequence is, as University of Wisconsin-Madison paleontologist John Hawks said, “an immense gift to humanity.”
This is because it allows us to see the story of the evolution of modern humans.


“The Neanderthal genome gives us a picture of ourselves, from the outside looking in,” Hawks said. “We can see, and now learn about the essential genetic changes that make us human – the things that made our emergence as a global species possible.”

23andMe Blog

23andMe Blog Team

A Gift To Humanity

Leslie grew up with a family secret – somewhere out there she had a big brother named Michael, her father’s illegitimate son from before he married her mother.
<div id="attachment_20604" style="width: 300px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-20604" class="size-medium wp-image-20604" alt="John Lesley Scott, Jr." src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/John-Leslie-Scott-copy-290x300.jpg" width="290" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/John-Leslie-Scott-copy-290x300.jpg 290w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/John-Leslie-Scott-copy.jpg 697w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 290px) 100vw, 290px" />John Lesley Scott, Jr.</div>
As a child, Leslie made this mysterious brother her imaginary friend. And as she grew older, she became determined that one day, she would find Michael.
Meanwhile, in another part of the country, Michael had struggles of his own.
The man he thought was his father left the family when he was still a baby and married a woman he was having an affair with. Michael grew up fatherless and wondering why.
He had his doubts about the man he thought was his biological father. Then in the early 1990s, as the man he thought was his dad lay dying of cancer, Michael asked him if he was really his father. He didn’t know, so Michael asked him to take a DNA test, even though it upset many people in his family. Michael said he had to know whether the man who left him and his mother, was really his father. It turned out he wasn’t.
“I was glad to know,” he said, “but it left unanswered the question of who was.”
<h6>
Searching for Scotty</h6>

It took years of search by both Michael and Leslie and some help from 23andMe to finally answer those questions.
Back when he first learned the man he thought was his father, wasn’t, Michael went to his mother for answers, but she was little help and even tried to stop him from looking. Although Michael had a name on his birth certificate – the surname Scott – his mother had told him that it was just a friend named “Scotty.”
He took what she said at face value, but in retrospect, Michael admits it was obvious she was hiding the truth.
“People don’t casually put their names on birth certificates.”


Michael tried everything to figure out the mystery, but at some point, he said he gave up. He thought he might simply have to accept that he might never find his father.

“I wasn’t at peace with it, but I sort of had to come to terms with it,” he says.

<h6>Houston</h6>

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Michael someone was looking for him.
Leslie was hard at work. She’d found a birth certificate, which gave her a name – Michael Scott – and a birthplace – Houston, Texas.
So tried calling all the Michael Scotts in the phone book. She hired private investigators but got no leads. When she heard about 23andMe, she decided to take a chance.
“I knew it was a long shot, but I was just hoping that he was in the system,” she says.


He wasn’t.
So Leslie finally confronted her father as he lay dying after a car accident.


“I told him what I knew,” she said.
Her father didn’t remember his illegitimate son’s birth date, but he knew Michael’s mother’s last name.
She also learned that her father had only been 23 when he had the affair with Michael’s mother, then a woman of 43. At the time, he said he’d promised her that he would “stay out of their lives,” so he never tried to find his son.
Armed with a name, Leslie then decided to search for Michael’s mother instead. What she found was her obituary. Among the survivors, it listed a Michael Dougan living in Seattle, Washington.
That was her brother she thought.
“I almost threw up,” Leslie said.

<h6>
Like A Freight Train</h6>

It turned out he was an illustrator, and she was able to find a phone number online. She didn’t wait, calling him right then and there.


“I should have tried to calm down a little,” she says, “but I was like a freight train, out of control.”

&nbsp;

There was no answer, so she left a breathless message.<iframe loading="lazy" width="100%" height="450" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/139432651&#038;auto_play=false&#038;hide_related=false&#038;visual=true" frameborder="no" scrolling="no"></iframe>
Michael had heard the phone ring, and didn’t pick up, but when he listened to the message and heard the words “John Lesly Scott,” the name on his birth certificate, his heart skipped a beat. He rushed to pick up.
“I went to grab the phone, and I’m trying to figure out how to answer it, and then the call gets cut off,” he said.


For an agonizing five minutes, he tried to figure out and then realized he could use automatic redial to call back.
Leslie picked up the line.
“I was shaking,” Leslie said. “We spoke for probably three hours.”

<h6>
Missing Pages</h6>

There was no doubt in her mind that she’d found her long lost brother.
But Michael was more skeptical.
“She said, ‘you’re my brother.’ And I said, well I think I might not be. I don’t want to get your hopes up because there’s really a chance that we might not be related, and I was always told you were not.’”
To confirm their kinship, they agreed that he should take a DNA test through 23andMe, where Leslie already had tested.
“I thought, at least I’m going to get a chance to prove another negative,” said Michael, who agreed to get tested.
While they waited for the results, Michael and Leslie talked a lot on the phone, they swapped photos and arranged live-video chats.


Leslie saw in Michael’s gestures and expressions her own father. She just knew, she said.
Michael wasn’t so sure.
“No matter how many pictures we showed each other, none of them could provide the smoking gun.”

<h6>Bingo</h6>

Then it was Leslie who started to lose faith.


“I freaked out,” she recalls. “I started crying and went to bed. I thought if this is not right, I’ve destroyed this guy’s life. I just dropped a nuclear bomb in the middle of his life.”


Michael finally got his results.


“And bingo, it was right there,” he said. “I realized this was it, that it doesn’t get any clearer than this.”
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-20609" alt="Mike &#038; Leslie smiling" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Mike-Leslie-smiling-300x219.jpg" width="300" height="219" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Mike-Leslie-smiling-300x219.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Mike-Leslie-smiling.jpg 697w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
It was 2 a.m. He texted Leslie, telling her to get up and go to the computer. They talked until 5 a.m.


“It’s like finding the other half of me,” Leslie says on reflection. “We have so much that makes us connect.”


He likes spicy food; so does she. He’s an illustrator; she’s artistic. She sings the blues; he plays blues guitar. She’s a chef; he loves to cook. She has olive skin; so does he.
Leslie had found her big brother, and Michael found a sister. They both answered questions that had eaten away at them all their lives.
Michael said up until the moment the connection was confirmed by 23andMe, his search for his father had been like an unfinished mystery novel.
“You get all the way to the end and the last five pages are missing,” he said.
Now he has the ending.


“It’s like finally finding the last five pages of that novel, and feeling, ‘So that’s how it turns out!’”

23andMe Helps Brother And Sister Connect

In the best children’s stories, the parents are done away with early on.
Mom or dad – sometimes both of them – are dead and gone even before the opening “once upon a time.”
<div id="attachment_20441" style="width: 204px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-20441" class="size-medium wp-image-20441" alt="Cover of 1915 edition of J. M. Barrie's novel, first published in 1911, illustrated by F. D. Bedford." src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Peter_Pan_1915_cover-194x300.jpg" width="194" height="300" />Cover of 1915 edition of J. M. Barrie&#8217;s novel, first published in 1911, illustrated by F. D. Bedford.</div>
It’s a plot device that helps the reader make an emotional connection with the characters. It also starts the arch of the protagonist’s transformation from, say, a cinder-covered floor washer to a princess, or from puny sorcerer’s apprentice to King, or from a group of lost children into adventurers in Neverland.

<h6>Learning a Secret</h6>

As a successful children’s book editor, “Marcia Brady,” knows all about this storyteller’s tool. She’s even used it before. But what Marcia didn’t know was that the plot of her own life story had just such a twist.
In her early 30s, while Marcia was busy juggling her career and tending her young kids, she learned that the man who raised her wasn’t her biological father.
Her parents had used a sperm donor when they were told they couldn’t conceive on their own.
“I never even suspected it,” she said. “I look more like my dad than anyone else in my family.”
<h6>
 Donor Conceived Children</h6>

Marcia is not alone.
In a modern twist to the search for roots, donor kids like Marcia are turning to 23andMe for answers about their ancestry. For some the reasons to test often have less to do with finding a biological father and more to do with simply learning basic information about ancestry, medical history or finding out about whether they have siblings. They want information about themselves they can&#8217;t find any other way.
In Marcia’s case the revelation that her parents had turned to a donor to conceive, drove what turned into a years-long search into her background and family history. Even before coming to 23andMe, Marcia used the same kind of pluck and drive seen in the best characters of fiction to track down two half-sisters through a donor registry.
<h6>Turning to 23andMe</h6>
They confirmed their sisterhood with a DNA test. Then a few years later, when 23andme opened for business, she got tested.
<div id="attachment_20438" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-20438" class="size-medium wp-image-20438" alt="Cynthia Lund, left, and Kathleen LaBounty." src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Cy-Kathleen-300x206.jpg" width="300" height="206" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Cy-Kathleen-300x206.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Cy-Kathleen.jpg 648w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Cynthia Lund, left, and Kathleen LaBounty.</div>
When Marcia’s results arrived, she was shocked to find a match for a half-brother. Because he was six years younger, Marcia assumed he would be the biological child of the donor, which would lead her to the donor’s identity.
“He didn’t log into his inbox on 23andme for three months. Those were the longest three months of my life!” she said. “When he finally saw my letter he replied that same night. It turned out he was another offspring of the donor. He hadn’t known of anyone else in his situation and was really excited to learn more.”
<h6>
 Connecting with Sisters</h6>

They discovered they only lived two hours apart and hit it off from the moment they met. Two years later, a new half-sister joined their 23andme list.
“It’s very exciting!” Marcia says. “I can’t wait to see if anyone else is out there.”
Unlike those great old children’s books, Marcia’s story isn’t fraught with suffering. She loves her father, the man who raised her. In fact, she’s never told him that she now knows that he isn’t her biological father, because she didn’t want to somehow hurt his feelings.
That’s why she wants to remain anonymous.
But still the news that he wasn’t her father changed Marcia’s understanding of who she is and it raised many questions.
Who was her biological father? Would he want to know about his offspring and (ten!) grandchildren? What traits might he have passed onto her that she has in turn passed on to her own children?
She and her newfound half-siblings feel like a family now, although one with a big mystery at the core. A mystery they are determined to solve.
Marcia isn’t alone in trying to fill in the blanks in her family history. Just like adoptees have done before them, the children of parents who used “assisted reproduction” to conceive want to learn more about their biological ancestry.
But this push for more information sometimes pits the desire of the donors to remain anonymous against the rights of their children to know even the most basic facts about their background. 23andMe allows people to contact members with whom they may be related, but keep both parties identities private. It’s up to the individuals whether they want to respond.
This kind of search for ancestry has even woven its way into popular culture.
The plot of 2010’s “The Kids are All Right” and the 2013 comedy “The Delivery Man” revolve around the offspring of donors searching for their biological fathers. Also in 2013 was a documentary on MTV called “Generation Cryo” that followed a teenager’s quest to find her biological father and her half-siblings.
But for many donor kids testing is less about finding a biological father but simply learning basic information about ancestry, medical history or connecting with a biological sister or brother.
<h6>
Finding A Sister</h6>

Cynthia Lund, a 33 year-old massage therapist in Salt Lake City, said that when she signed up for 23andMe in the back of her mind she had the idea of possibly finding her biological father. But for Cynthia, who knew since her 14th birthday that she’d been conceived using a sperm donor, it was also simply a practical decision.
“I had no family health history for one side, and I wanted to know if there was anything I should be concerned about,” Cynthia said.
She subscribed to 23andMe, in part, because she wanted to know about any potential health risks. In the back of her mind she wondered if she’d learn something more about who her father was.
Instead, she found her half-sister.
“I was playing with the site’s Relative Finder when I noticed a link to ‘view your close relatives,’” Cynthia said. “There was a disclaimer that said something like ‘are you sure you want to know’ and my heart started racing, of course I want to know.”
It was overwhelming, she said. She was crying and “freaking out.”
“As soon as I composed myself I started typing a message,” she said. “It probably took me an hour. I checked every five minutes for the next several days until I finally heard back.”
It took a little over two weeks before her half-sister saw the message. Then it was her turn to “freak out,” Cynthia said.

“She and her mom freaked out just like me and my mom did,” she said.
She responded to the email and the two women, who are about two years apart, finally talked on the phone. They spent several hours sharing their life stories with each other, finding that they had more than just DNA in common, but that they had some similar interests and personality traits. A few weeks later, Cynthia took a flight from her home in Utah to see her newly found sister in San Diego.
“It’s ridiculous how much alike we are,” she said. “We definitely pass for full siblings. We look SO much alike!”
Both Cynthia and her sister were raised as a single child, so finding a sister was both exciting and a little surreal for them both.
Since their first meeting, the two have become very close. They went together to Italy for a 10-day vacation, and they now are visiting each other pretty regularly. Cynthia said they’re either exchanging phone calls, texts or emails almost daily.
“It’s so great having a biological sibling, especially when I hadn’t had that experience for my first 30 years,” she said.
“We’re definitely family! “
While Cynthia is still interested in learning about her donor dad if possible, that’s not something that her half-sister is focused on.
“I don’t want anything from him, I just want to see what he looks like and help me understand family medical history,” she said.
“It’s hard to explain but I only have this half picture of myself. 23andMe is perfect service for anyone like me who has this sort of black hole in their history and wants to know more about themselves.”
<h6>
Still Searching</h6>

Kathleen LaBounty, another donor child searching for information about her biological father, has been searching for years. Oprah and National Public Radio featured her six-year search for her biological roots and her advocacy on behalf of the donor children.
In her Herculean search she’s sent more than 600 letters to prospective fathers, all went to the same medical school in Texas from which donors were used at the fertility clinic her mother used to conceive.
A well-grounded and happy child, Kathleen said that when she was 8 years old her mother told her she’d been conceived with the help of a donor.
The first thing Kathleen did was run downstairs and hug her father, saying she felt so much love for him for making her his own.
The revelation also helped her understand some of the most obvious differences between her and members of her family. She’s short and skinny. They’re tall and burly.
“In family photos I don’t blend in well,” she said.
<h6>
 Family History</h6>

Her search for more information about her ancestry has taken on more import in part because she now has children of her own. She wants to know about her family medical history. Recently she joined 23andMe. She learned that she has Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. Raised as an agnostic but one who attended a Baptist school, this was news to her.
Many of her closest matches in 23andMe’s Relative Finder are from Russia. She connected with a third cousin, who lived just ten minutes from her home.
“He looks like Ben Stiller,” she said.
She’s been able to communicate with other distant relatives connected through 23andMe’s DNA Relative tool, which she said has helped her get a better picture of the paternal side of her ancestry.
She’s also recommended 23andMe to others who, like her, we&#8217;re looking for family. Two of those who she recommended the service to, turned out to be half-sisters, she said.
“I would love it if close relatives would eventually submit their DNA and I could connect through 23andMe, but if it never happens that’s OK at least now I know my heritage,” Kathleen said.

Lost Girls

We can’t tell you the breakout bands or best films from this year’s South By Southwest, but we can tell you that new ideas around digital health – including 23andMe’s use of big data to power research – drove a lot of the most interesting discussions on the interactive side of the festival.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-20629" alt="anne before interview copy" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/anne-before-interview-copy-199x300.jpg" width="199" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/anne-before-interview-copy-199x300.jpg 199w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/anne-before-interview-copy-768x1155.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/anne-before-interview-copy-681x1024.jpg 681w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/anne-before-interview-copy-585x880.jpg 585w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/anne-before-interview-copy-784x1180.jpg 784w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/anne-before-interview-copy.jpg 1330w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 199px) 100vw, 199px" />
23andMe’s CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcicki delivered one of the more popular keynotes. While she tried to answer most of the questions directed to her through Twitter using the #AskAnne hashtag, she ran out of time quickly. So we went back through the more than 100 queries to answer the most frequently asked questions.
<h6>What about the FDA?</h6>
The biggest question, the one that’s been dominating our work over the last few months, asked by many on Twitter was summed up by Armin Molvai (@amolavi), who asked: “Can you share and update on what’s happening with the FDA?”
Back in November, the FDA ordered 23andMe to stop returning health results to new customers, pending completion of a regulatory process, that requires submitting applications that detail the validity of the testing and science behind health results returned to customers. How long that process will take is hard to say, but Anne made clear that 23andMe is still deeply invested in seeing it through.
“My main priority is a resolution with the FDA,” she<a href="https://venturebeat.com/2014/03/12/23andme-ceo-we-need-to-return-to-delivering-health-information/"> told Venture Beat</a> writer Christina Farr after her keynote. “We’re not going to switch gears and become an ancestry company, although that’s a huge market on its own. We need to return to delivering health information.”
<h6>Working through the Process</h6>
Knowing how the FDA process has changed what 23andMe can offer new customers, Melissa Green (@mgreenvml) asked on Twitter how that will impact the company’s ongoing research.
Anne’s message on that was that not only is the company continuing to do research, but 23andMe is also tackling new areas of study. 
<iframe loading="lazy" width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/6A4wtpHZCQI" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0"></iframe>
“We have 650,000 people in our database and are being inundated with requests from academics and foreign partners,” she said. “We have more of this data than anyone else in the world.”
The mission of the company has always been about changing health care and empowering people with their genetic information. And 23andMe’s research is central to that mission, Anne said.
<h6>Research</h6>
With 23andMe people can learn about themselves while helping to power important genetic research. Most of our customers consent to research. Collectively those customers have answered more than 170 million survey questions that in turn helps fuel research that now extends to more than 230 different studies looking at 1,000 different conditions that span everything from Parkinson’s disease to motion sickness. That’s the kind of research that could not be accomplished using traditional methods
While many at the conference could easily grasp the power 23andMe’s big data to speed research, some others were concerned about privacy around that data and, “how (23andMe is) protecting this database?”
Anne’s response was that research is done using data that is made anonymous, that the company adheres to strict security protocols. And our research is overseen by an independent “Institutional Review Board” that objectively looks out for the interests of those who consent to research. In the end, Anne pointed out that customers can opt-out of research at any time, download their data and close their account.
“One of the reasons we went direct to consumer is so that you own the data,” she said. “And if you then want to share it that’s your right.”

More From SXSW #AskAnne

Thank your lucky clovers because almost everyone in the 23andMe database is connected to someone who is Irish, and plenty of others have at least a wee bit of Irish ancestry.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-20593 size-medium" title="Irish Ancestry" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Kiss-Me-Im-Irish-300x300.jpeg" alt="Kiss Me I'm Irish" width="300" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Kiss-Me-Im-Irish-300x300.jpeg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Kiss-Me-Im-Irish-150x150.jpeg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Kiss-Me-Im-Irish-768x768.jpeg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Kiss-Me-Im-Irish-880x880.jpeg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Kiss-Me-Im-Irish-271x271.jpeg 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Kiss-Me-Im-Irish-372x372.jpeg 372w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Kiss-Me-Im-Irish-574x574.jpeg 574w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Kiss-Me-Im-Irish.jpeg 960w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, 23andMe researchers looked at the aggregated and anonymous data of our customers to determine just how many had a connection, even if it was a small one, to the Emerald Isle.
What we found out was that about 87 percent of our more than 600,000 customers have at least a tiny amount of ancestry that is shared with someone of confirmed Irish descent. This doesn’t mean they have Irish ancestry, but that they share ancestry with someone who is Irish. We can do this by looking at DNA segments of a certain length that are shared with people of with confirmed Irish heritage.
For comparison’s sake in the US population about 11 percent of people report that they have Irish ancestry, according to the US Census. Boston has the highest concentration among U.S. cities with more than 20 percent listing themselves as Irish American. The total US population of more than 34 million people who report being Irish American dwarfs the 4.6 million people living in Ireland today. The total population of Ireland makes up only a very small fraction of all the people in the world today with Irish ancestry.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-20611 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Countries-of-Origin_Ireland-copy-300x203.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="203" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Countries-of-Origin_Ireland-copy-300x203.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Countries-of-Origin_Ireland-copy-768x519.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Countries-of-Origin_Ireland-copy-1024x692.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Countries-of-Origin_Ireland-copy-880x594.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Countries-of-Origin_Ireland-copy-1180x797.jpg 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Countries-of-Origin_Ireland-copy.jpg 1704w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Just in case you’re calling “blarney” on 23andMe’s estimates, it’s important to note a few things about how we derived our percentage. Because our researchers are looking at DNA segments that are very small – in this case about 7 centimorgans – that probably equates to a common ancestor with someone who is Irish within the last 10 to 12 generations. That’s way, way back.
Although our <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/23andme-makes-more-improvements-to-ancestry-features" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ancestry Composition</a> tool can tell you what percentage of your DNA comes from populations around the world, breaking down the Asian, African or European ancestry. It also can give you finer detail, but the overlapping nature of DNA means that it groups Irish and British ancestry together. To get a better idea of Irish ancestry, customers can look at our Countries of Ancestry tool. This can show a customer DNA they have in common with other people who have confirmed ancestry from various countries, including Ireland. Our researchers used aggregated and anonymous data from all of our customers to determine what the percentage of customers who have shared segments of DNA with people who have confirmed Irish ancestry.
Ultimately we think the numbers mean you don&#8217;t need to to be Irish to be connected to someone who is.

23andEire

In the early 1990s when he was on the cusp of turning 50, Paul Dodds didn’t have a midlife crisis, he had a midlife surprise.
Paul learned that the man he thought was his father wasn’t.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-20446" alt="Paul Dodds - Young Man" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Paul-Dodds-Young-Man-262x300.jpg" width="262" height="300" />
“It kind of made sense because although he was always there, he never bothered with me or my brother (he wasn’t his father either),” said Paul, about his brother who is two years older.
<h6>Searching with 23andMe</h6>
Although he’d never been very close to his dad, it never occurred to him that there might be a reason for that because as he said, “I never knew anything different.”
But the revelation propelled Paul on a two-decade-long search to find his biological father, a quest that only ended after 23andMe helped him find a half-sister and his father’s name. Now he wants to tell people about it.
“I would like to pass on the good things that have happened to me through 23andMe,” Paul said.
<h6>The War</h6>
His story starts in Wales just after the end of the Second World War. Although he didn’t know it, Paul, it turns out, was one of tens of thousands so-called “War Babies,” the offspring of liaisons between American servicemen stationed overseas during the war.
<div id="attachment_20447" style="width: 213px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-20447" class="size-medium wp-image-20447" alt="The photo of the man Paul wrongly thought was his father. " src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Paul-Dodds-4-203x300.jpg" width="203" height="300" />The photo of the man Paul wrongly thought was his father.</div>
After he was born, Paul’s mother married a sailor with the UK Merchant Navy named Len. But unbeknownst to Paul – or Paul’s older brother – Len couldn’t have children. The family lived in Cardiff. In 1968 Paul immigrated to Canada where his father had moved after leaving his mom.
“He met me at the train and spent a day with me then that was about it, said Paul, who worked as a steel fabricator.
<h6>A Surprise</h6>
More than 20 years later, doctors contacted Paul about his dad, who had died from very rare cancer. The doctors wanted to know a little bit more about his father’s life and the family’s health history. As Paul scrambled to find out whether it ran in the family, he got a jolt when talking to one of his uncles in England.
“I called my uncle in Newcastle, and when I started asking questions, he immediately said, ‘Paul, Len is not your father,’” he said. “That is how I found out.”
<h6>The Search Begins</h6>
So Paul started looking for the identity of his biological father. He also learned that he and his brother were really half-siblings so he started searching for his brother’s father as well.
“Part of the reason it became so important to find him is that it was deliberately hidden from me,” he said.
His mother gave him false leads, at one point telling Paul that his father had died when the ship he was on sunk. At other times she was simply evasive. He wasn’t sure why perhaps she didn’t know herself, Paul said.
<h6>An Old Photo</h6>
But there were two bits of information that his mother gave him that turned out to be true. His mom once told Paul he had “Jewish blood.” She’d also told Paul that his biological father had known his stepfather during the war when his stepfather had been in the British merchant navy.
But at the time none of that information helped Paul. Instead, he spent years chasing down false leads, and that went on even after his mother died. Soon after she passed away, one of Paul’s daughter’s found an old photograph of a man in a U.S. Army uniform.
<h6>Searching Records</h6>
Paul believed at the time that the man in the photo might have been his father, so he spent years figuring out the unit the man served with by looking at the insignias and ribbons on the uniform. He then tried to cross-reference that with units stationed in the area at the time of his conception. Then he winnowed down names until he thought he had the right man. There had been writing on the back of the photo, which he had analyzed. But all of that painstaking work, which included searching military records in Britain and the United States, all came to naught.
<h6>Turning to DNA</h6>
It wasn’t until last year that Paul finally got a break when he tested with 23andMe. First, he got a DNA Relative match with a first cousin, who helped him track down a woman, who they believed was his half-sister. She recently tested with 23andMe.
Both Paul and his half-sister were ecstatic about finding the connection.
Paul learned his father, Leon Rossien, had been a merchant marine who served on the USS Cristobal, a troopship. Leon was in port around VE Day in May of 1945. Paul believes he may have been conceived during the celebrations around the end of the war.
His sister filled him in on his father’s life. After the war, his biological father had been a jeweler. His father, who died in 1999 not long after Paul started looking for him, also liked to bet on horses and was married four times. Paul learned he had two other half-sisters, who passed away.
“I’ve seen some photos of him and there are some resemblances,” said Paul. “The same long chin and eyebrows.”
He hasn’t yet met his half-sister in person, but they’ve spoken several times on the phone.
“She’s excited by this,” he said.
As for Paul, he has felt a whole range of emotions.
“All these things have fallen into place at last,” he said. “Good things are happening. Thank you 23 and me.”

War Baby

At her<a href="http://schedule.sxsw.com/2014/events/event_IAP995218"> South-by-Southwest Interactive</a> keynote, 23andMe CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcicki explained that genetic information will soon be part of our everyday lives.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-20429" alt="Anne@sxsw" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Anne@sxsw-231x300.jpg" width="231" height="300" />
“Genetic information is reaching a critical mass,” Anne said.
<h6>Managing Your Health</h6>
As costs drop and as our understanding of genetics improves, the information locked in the genome will be a critical part of managing health for people. But how that information is accessed and interpreted is still being debated. Anne discussed the potential that this information has for people and for research.
Her talk<a href="http://schedule.sxsw.com/2014/events/event_IAP995218"> “The Future of Genetics in Our Everyday Lives”</a> was packed. One person on Twitter said it wasn’t just the longest line she’d seen in ten years at SXSW but the “longest line I’ve seen period.”
<h6>Prevention</h6>
During her talk and a question and answer session that followed and was moderated by journalist Kara Swisher, Anne reiterated the company’s core principles. She co-founded the company, in part, because she wanted to transform health care. Anne said she wanted to turn the industry’s paradigm on its head by creating a business built on preventing disease instead of one that profits from it. 
<iframe loading="lazy" width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/6A4wtpHZCQI" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0"></iframe>
“Genetic information is the basis for personalized medicine and it&#8217;ll help us make better decisions,&#8221; she said.
<h6>Research</h6>
23andMe allows people to contribute to research while learning about themselves. By attracting a large number of customers, the data from those participating in research is helping to accelerate the pace of discovery and give us more insight into disease.
In addition, by allowing people to join others and participate in research, 23andMe has the power to accelerate discoveries in the understanding of different diseases. The company is able to learn more about the genetic basis for disease, why some people are more likely to develop a disease than others and why some therapies work better on some people and not others.
With more than half a million people participating in research, the company has been able to do studies in a few months or years that would have taken others using traditional methods several decades.
<div id="attachment_20768" style="width: 650px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-20768" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Future-of-Genetic-Infographic-copy1-640x360.jpg" alt="Here's an ImageThink artist's summary of Anne's talk." class="size-large wp-image-20768" width="640" height="360" />Here&#8217;s an ImageThink artist&#8217;s summary of Anne&#8217;s talk.</div>

The Future of Genetics in People’s Lives

<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-20419" alt="Genetic Network SXSW" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/03042014_SXSW_Posts_GeneticNetwork.jpg" width="792" height="1224" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/03042014_SXSW_Posts_GeneticNetwork.jpg 792w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/03042014_SXSW_Posts_GeneticNetwork-194x300.jpg 194w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/03042014_SXSW_Posts_GeneticNetwork-768x1187.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/03042014_SXSW_Posts_GeneticNetwork-663x1024.jpg 663w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/03042014_SXSW_Posts_GeneticNetwork-569x880.jpg 569w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/03042014_SXSW_Posts_GeneticNetwork-764x1180.jpg 764w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 792px) 100vw, 792px" />For the tens of thousands of people at the <a href="http://sxsw.com/">South by Southwest</a> conference in Austin this week, attending is about more than just seeing new music and hearing about new ideas, it’s about making new connections.
But 23andMe researchers found that just about everybody there is already connected. In fact any two people attending the SXSW conference is connected through just one or two or three other individuals.
<h6>Interconnectedness </h6>
Why is this a revelation?
This isn’t a social connection; it’s a genetic connection. It’s not that you are connected to someone else because of who you know, it’s that you are connected to someone else because of who you are related to.
Previous theories of connectivity focused on social connections; the idea that we are all – all seven billion of us – linked to each other by six degrees of separation. These links were first written about by <a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2786545?uid=3739256&#038;uid=2&#038;uid=4&#038;sid=56200129733">Stanley Milgram </a>from experiments he did in the late 1960s. It’s a little more complicated than what Milgram theorized but he got the gist right. More recently <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/technology/between-you-and-me-4-74-degrees.html?_r=3&#038;scp=1&#038;sq=4.74&#038;st=cse">Facebook</a> and LinkedIn have shown that just four social connections could link any two people together.
<h6>Three Degrees of Separation</h6>
This theory of connectivity even spawned the game,  <a href="http://oracleofbacon.org/">“Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”</a> Kevin <a href="http://schedule.sxsw.com/2014/events/event_IAP28467">is talking in Austin</a> this week. But the theory of social connections that spawned the game doesn&#8217;t quite match how close we all really are.   23andMe can connect an attendee at SXSW to any other attendees through three or four genetic connections. To do that we would make the connection by finding someone an attendee is related to, who is related to someone who then connects them to someone else at SXSW. There may be two or three cousins that separate each attendee from someone else at the conference, but the connection the two have is made through genetics.
Looking at the <a href="http://schedule.sxsw.com/?conference=interactive">SXSW Interactive</a> portion of the conference, every one of the 30,000 of those people going has a cousin in attendance. A few may have as many as 35 first cousins, meaning that they share a grandparent.  On average everyone there has between one or two second cousins, meaning that that they each share the same great grandparent.
SXSW is about bringing people together, but they are all already closer than they know.

Three Degrees of Separation At SXSW

On Sunday you can listen in to 23andMe’s CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcicki as she delivers the keynote of the South-by-Southwest Interactive conference in Austin.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-full wp-image-17010" alt="23andMe-Anne-001" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/23andMe-Anne-001.jpg" width="165" height="236" />
Her talk <a href="http://schedule.sxsw.com/2014/events/event_IAP995218">“The Future of Genetics in Our Everyday Lives”</a> will be streamed live <a href="http://www.sxsw.com/live" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">here</a>   at 2 p.m. Central Time or noon Pacific Time. Anne’s talk will include a discussion with the audience and she’ll be taking questions from Twitter using using #AskAnne.
This promises to be a lively discussion not just about 23andMe, but genetics, big data, research and healthcare. If you can’t tune in live, we’ll be updating this post with more details about her presentation after the event. Stay tuned.

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