Family Values, Traitwell, Genealogy and Genetics
Why you should consider Traitwell.com for your family's genetic needs.
This post is about the work we do at Traitwell and why it’s important for the wider public. You can peruse our free apps on our website.
Like many Americans who have lived far away from their parents I find the talk of “family values” both reassuring and out of reach with contemporary realities. “Americans are lonely people,” says my Turkish friend and he’s right. Americans are lonely people and I, too, am a lonely person. I’ve been lonely my whole life, even and perhaps especially, when I’m in the company of others.
But my loneliness doesn’t deny an underlying reality: we are all, each of us, connected to each other through genetics. Even my predisposition to solitude is itself genetic.
The very same technology that is helping us solve murders through genomic genealogy, will ultimately help us take better care of one another’s health.
You recall going into the doctors and having them ask you about your family history of disease.
You sit there, pen in hand, and try to remember when really all you really want to do is just see the damn doctor. If you’re estranged from your family, or adopted, forget about it. But in the end, you’re just taking guesses. And besides, anything you tell your doctor can and will be used against you by your insurer in the form of higher health care prices. You have every reason to lie to your doctor. The conversation goes a bit like this: How often do you smoke? Oh never! Do you drink? Only one glass! Do you exercise? All the time! Garbage information produces a garbage result.
Wouldn’t it be nice to know everything about your genetics?
Imagine you could safely keep your family’s genetic predispositions alongside your own. Think of it as a kind of Ancestry.com-like product. You can link up with your other family members as they go through their health journey. You can add other information about other family members too and control permissions on who saw what.
Yes, as CEO of Traitwell, I believe that there’s going to be a future where family members collect their family DNA and use it to better their family health.
We’re starting with the recently deceased by partnering with a major funeral home. Over time we hope that people donate their DNA to help find faster cures, which is precisely why all of Traitwell’s apps are totally free.
Who knows? Maybe genetics can bring us together and rebuild family and later civic trust.
Like a lot of people, my complicated relationship with my family led to a workaholism that’s probably more than a little unhealthy. They say you “forged your own path.” “You’re that self made man,” they say. It isn’t true, of course, but we are culturally obliged to lie about it. We need to believe that people rise up by themselves when nepo babies populate our feeds and dance across our TV screens on every sort of programs.
This past January marked the anniversary — if one can call it that — of my mother’s diagnosis with breast cancer. I was eight and my mother 38 when she was diagnosed. She’s still with us but so, too, is the instability that cancer brought into my childhood. I think about it often. Every bump could be just the hypochondriac in me. Or it could be something else.
Futurist and Michigan State professor Steve Hsu wrote a blogpost awhile ago focusing on disease risk predicted using inexpensive genotyping. He writes:
There are now 10-20 disease conditions for which we can identify, e.g., the top 1% outliers with 5-10x normal risk for the disease. The papers reporting these results have almost all appeared within the last year or so!
On the last slide I give a simple cost-benefit analysis of population wide genotyping and conclude that the net benefit is already positive given the tools we have. The numbers used are per capita. The UK NHS is already headed in this direction.
I use breast cancer as the example on the slide, but since the same genotype can be used for 10+ disease risks (including diabetes, atrial fibrillation, hypothyroidism, etc.) the net benefit is potentially much larger than what is obtained from breast cancer alone. The point is that G is really small compared to the potential benefit.
Details of breast cancer calculation below. I am sure one can do much better, but it provides a quick back of the envelope estimate of the numbers.
Spend $100 per person to genotype all women in the population. Identify those with top 1% risk score. About 33% of these individuals will get breast cancer. Treat the risk outliers by giving them, e.g., regular mammograms starting a decade earlier than usual (~$100 annual mammogram x 10y = $1k). In the slide I assume the average cost of the intervention / treatment is $1k and the average benefit is $30k. All of the high risk women (1%) get the intervention, but only the 33% percent that get breast cancer (or some subset of that group) benefit from early detection. This paper estimates that early detection of breast cancer saves typically tens of thousands of dollars per individual, so my numbers are not crazy.
Hopefully we are moving in that direction but let’s move faster. As if to note the human dimensions here a female friend writes to me:
I don’t have cancer but because of the family history of breast cancer I’ll have a genetic counselor at u of chicago and they will do a little study / review.
Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone got this level of care?
To be sure, each of us has this thing we wrestle with — an affliction, a cross to bear, a pathology, [insert your standard religious metaphor] that is in large measure genetics. We never feel as if we are adequate as we struggle under this burden. For me it’s the social domain. I will never be in any danger of winning husband, boyfriend, son or father of the year.
Our society is lacking intergenerational trust.
Americans are a lonely people. Our boomer parents happily refuse to be our childcare and we are happy to ship them off to the retirement community which may or may not treat them well. Turnabout is fair play, after all. But it’s not right.
We know that we haven’t done as good a job caring for one another as we might. But what if we could?
There is always a new, new thing. If our experience of the tech world has taught us anything there’s a lot of hype. Genetics, though, is one of those things where the hype is well justified.
Why should you support Traitwell over other services? We will earn and keep your trust.
Well, we’re free if you’ve already get partially sequenced by 23andMe.com and Ancestry.com.
Indeed we call on 23andMe.com and Ancestry.com to make their API freely available. Why haven’t they? We’ve been mulling suing 23andMe.com and Ancestry.com under an interoperability standard and hope it doesn’t come to that. We are especially concerned about the intelligence value of genealogical websites and the Chinese capital which backs them.
Did you know that 23andme.com is losing $90m a quarter? It helps if you understand that Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein were early investors in 23andMe.com. 23AndMe has a partnership with GlaxoSmithKline, which has had real problems.
Again, from Wikipedia:
In 2006, in the United States GSK settled the largest tax dispute in IRS history, agreeing to pay US$3.1 billion. At issue were Zantac and other products sold in 1989–2005. The case revolved around intracompany transfer pricing—determining the share of profit attributable to the US subsidiaries of GSK and subject to tax by the IRS.
The UK's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) opened a criminal inquiry in 2014 into GSK's sales practices, using powers granted by the Bribery Act 2010. The SFO said it was collaborating with Chinese authorities to investigate bringing charges in the UK related to GSK's activities in China, Europe and the Middle East. Also as of 2014, the US Department of Justice was investigating GSK with reference to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
We don’t want to be the bitch of Big Pharma. We want to put Big Pharma out of business by getting you to care more about your and your family’s genetics. It’s why we offered a pharmacogenomics app for free so you can make better decisions.
One of the problems with Ancestry.com is its foreign ownership structure and its CEO’s ties to Sheryl Sandberg, whose espionage connections are only now being understood. Deborah Liu ran Facebook Marketplaces and it had a lot of problems helping to criminals launder money and target vulnerable people.
We think it’s not enough to be better than your competitors. It’s important to explain who we are and what we believe and it’s important to give people a real choice.