More Than an Ancestry Test

Guest: Sheldon Krimsky, PhD, Lenore Stern Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, Tufts University and Adjunct Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health, Tufts University School of Medicine, and 35-year member of Council for Responsible Genetics Have you taken one of these family history DNA tests where you send a vial of your saliva for analysis? I did one last year and was told 72 percent of my ancestry comes from Great Britain. What puzzled me was that Eastern Europe only made up 2 percent of my ethnicity, since I have several sets of great-great-grandparents who immigrated to the US directly from Czechoslovakia. I would have thought that would make for more than 2-percent of my DNA. I’ve heard that if I sent my saliva to another testing company, the results would probably be a bit different. So how reliable are these tests, really? Consumer Guide to Genetic Tests