Genetics Commentator
speaker
30 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Genetics Commentator’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Absolutely. The danger of... the promise of DNA testing when it's used like this can be that we interpret it in a really sort of simplistic way, right? That we think, okay, DNA is destiny. But then on the other hand, you know, those of us who've grown up in, like,
like the birth family that we were born into, like it can be hard for those of us to appreciate what it feels like to live in the absence of that and what it feels like to like have someone understand you almost like on like a gut level because they share something with you that is so deep and rooted and that maybe we don't fully understand and completely explain at this point through science.
I talked to a lot of people who were seekers, and some managed to do this intentionally. Really well. And the people who described it best said that it's incredibly reductive to think about this as like a nature versus nurture thing, right? So you can have your daddy and your dad tucked you in at night.
And he sang you songs and he put you to bed and he was there and he like fathered you and he still fathers you and that's your dad, right? There's another man out there though and to him you owe half your genetic data and he's your biological father and we don't have the language for that.
Like, our actual language has not caught up with this technological era that we're in of consumer DNA testing. And so people who've successfully navigated it have managed to maintain those relationships with, say, their dad and say, like, you still matter to me so much. You'll always be my dad. I just, I also want to know about, you know, where half my DNA came from.
And that depends a lot on their relationship with their existing parents, whether they can manage that.
people, I think, are just starting to understand the degree to which this is all governed by business contracts, not by federal regulation. And that means that a company that takes your data is going to do what is best for the company, and that may not be what's best for your data. So, I mean, do I think it can be used in a positive way if it's maybe better regulated in other places? Absolutely.
And my own family's success story of finding relatives, both in Sweden and in Ukraine, which is amazing on my Jewish side, Like, you know, it could make me cry just, like, thinking about the way in which the past is not lost to us.
The power of this information in myself and the idea that I can connect with my own history, that I can see it written out, that I can trace it in the lives and faces of other people who look like me. Mind-blowing, okay? But if it's not regulated... If it's not controlled, it's starting to scare me quite a bit more than it used to.
I have to say I've deleted my data from a number of places that it used to be.
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