Ann Turner on the Me Two

In my last post I mentioned the "underwhelmed" response of VentureBeat's David Hamilton to deCODEme's demonstration genome. Genetic genealogist Ann Turner has a thoughtful response to David's piece (as a guest poster at Eye on DNA) that is well worth reading. Here's an excerpt:

I agree that the website does not make for easy pickings — it takes some thought to grasp the principles behind the reports and graphics. The whole notion of relative risk is not something many people have even thought about. But, as Kevin Kelly said in a WIRED article reviewing the Genographic Project and my book Trace Your Roots with DNA, “a basic level of genetic literacy will be essential… ” and learning about our own DNA is a great motivator.

This is a perfectly valid point - but it's going to take a lot of time before genetic literacy is widespread, and in the meantime companies like the Me Two (23AndMe and deCODEme) are going to have to make it as easy as possible for newcomers to the field to make sense of their own genomes. Based on what I've seen so far, 23AndMe is doing a better job of this.

David has now written a second article on the deCODEme system in which he criticises the limited number of genetic variants (SNPs) used for the disease risk predictions generated by the company. This doesn't seem entirely fair - to a large extent deCODEme is simply covering itself against litigation by only including SNPs with high-confidence associations, and as I said in my last post, "there just aren't enough well-validated genetic associations out there".

As for why some high-confidence SNPs are not included in the deCODEme analysis: at least in some cases this is simply because they are not included on the chip that deCODEme uses to analyse customer DNA samples, as Ann Turner (who seems to be everywhere these days) notes in the comments to David's post.