My 23andMe DNA Test Results and Other Junk

I’ve got so many projects started that I’m beginning to question what’s going on inside my head. I have a baby sweater in the works, two books part way read, an oil painting in the early stages and I’ve spent time working in my walk-in closet where I’ve barely made a dent---my goal is to try every single thing on, then be ruthless about the piles I sort the items to. I’ve also got some blog entries and a few poems in rough drafts. And then there’s the joyful day I spent poking around the 23andMe website looking at my DNA test results. I’ve got more Neanderthal gene “variants” than 70% of the 23andMe customers…oh, my! 23andMe has a forum for people to compare tests, ask questions and generally play around like people do on forums. I love forums and I found a thread about having a lot of Neanderthal genes where people were joking around about how they have to trim the hair on their toes or put Band-Aids on their knuckles from dragging them around. One woman confessed that once a month she wants to tear her husband’s arms off and suck the marrow out of his bones and now she knows why. All jokes aside, Neanderthal variants supposedly come into play with allergies and infertility issues which has my name written all over them.

Since my husband died six years ago this month, January’s have sent me into a woe-is-me, I’m a lonely widow’s tail spin. But I’m not depressed this year and I don’t feel lonely although I’m beginning to wonder if I’m subconsciously trying too hard to keep the boogieman at bay and that explains why I’m hopping from one project/task to another. Or maybe I just jumped into the deep end of the New Year’s Resolution pool and got myself overwhelmed like a kid in a candy store who can’t make up his mind what to buy with his birthday money. 

The baby sweater is easy to figure out. Both my niece’s need a bigger sweater for their gramma drawers at their cottages and I needed an excuse to evict the dog from the La-Z-Boy in the living room where he sits a hundred times more often than I do. I spend way too much time in the kitchen playing on the computer and I wanted to change that. I’ve been on a writing binge to beat all binges lately but I’m not creating any particularly interesting. I mean who really cares that I wrote about dumping a whole box of oatmeal all over the floor and I actually considered putting it back in the box to cook later? In case anyone DOES care, I did a quick calculation on how long it had been since my cleaner was at the house and I decided no amount of microwave heat was hot enough to kill twenty-five days of floor germs and there was no way I could have gotten the oatmeal back in the box under the ten second Oreo rule.

My 23andMe DNA test for health risks came back with no gene markers showing for the 54 health issues and diseases they tested for including Alzheimer’s, Macular Degeneration, breast cancer, Celiac Disease, Parkinson’s and a bunch of stuff I've never heard of and was written using a medical jargon I didn’t understand. I’d study that vocabulary and the links they provided if the 54 tests had shown some variants, but I’m happy not to have to take on that homework. On the fun side is trying to figure out how a little spit in a tube could tell them that I’m likely to consume more caffeine than the average duck in the gene pool, that I don’t sleep deep, am likely to tolerate lactose, am genetically predisposed to weigh more than average and I move around in my sleep…ALL TRUE! 

Even funnier is the fact that the test report included 27 silly but accurate traits. For example: I don’t have dimples but have “attached” shaped earlobes. They told me what hair texture I have, my toe length ratio, my finger length ratio, my eye color, the fact that I likely am not able to match a musical pitch, that I was born with lots of hair, that I don’t like cilantro and mosquitos love me, and that I prefer sweet over salty. The weirdest trait listed is they said I have dry, flaky earwax instead of wet earwax. “…the same genetic variant in the ABCC11 gene that determines the dry earwax type is also linked to lower levels of body odor.” Who knew! Isn’t that crazy. Reading my DNA results was all fun and games, considering I didn’t have any health risks on the 54 diseases and conditions pages. I was slightly worried about having the genetic marker for Alzheimer’s but I can quit wondering if my brain cells will run out of its hour glass long before I die. Yippie-Yi-Yo!

A few days before getting my test results I saw the movie, My Sister’s Keeper and if you read the book you’ll know it’s about a couple who had a daughter with leukemia who conceived another baby whose embryo was specifically picked to be a perfect donor match to her older sister. This was a fiction story that brings up the moral issue of editing human embryos but last November a Chinese scientist claimed he just did that with two babies. Until I got my DNA results back I didn’t realize how gene specific that could actually get. These babies in embryo form had their genes edited to “disable CCR5, a gene involved in allowing HIV to invade cells, which is how a virus infects a host.” Right or wrong a brave new world of medical possibilities is upon us. ©