Genealogy, Genetics and Family Health History Considerations
How family trees, sequencing, and AI can help us tease out our challenging medical matters
The autopsy for my uncle Dwight has finally come in — heart attack.
Apparently he was dead before he hit the ground, which, all things considered, is a rather great way to go, especially when you’re in your early eighties.
In dying of a heart attack he is not exactly unique in my family. My great-grandmother and great-grandfather — Uncle Dwight’s grandmother and grandfather — died of heart matters, also in their mid to late 80s.
My extended family doesn’t talk much and they rely upon me to ferry information to one another. We don’t do family reunions and many of my relatives haven’t spoken to one another in decades. WASPs, I know.
But we did all manage to get a hold of one another regarding Uncle Dwight’s passing.
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A recent article by Sarah Zhang in the Likud mouthpiece, The Atlantic, notes that the prevalence of incest is much higher than we might suspect. For what it’s worth I tend to agree.
My company Traitwell.com offered a consanguinity (aka inbreeding) predictor a few years ago.
And we wrote about incest and inbreeding here as well.
Zhang goes into the support groups which have formed around incest matters.
Now I have my reservations about using a failed actress — CeCe Moore — to be the face of genomic genealogy, especially when her husband Lennart Martison is a scammer associated with some weird diamond hustle. Does no one do background checks anymore? I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable talking about my family on Facebook with total strangers but here we are, I guess. Brave New World and all that.
There’s a future in which people organize together around genomics. You could even imagine a genomic Reddit or Facebook — provided, of course, you get sequenced first.
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Some major health system will eventually figure out that it’s cheaper to sequence everyone than to deal with all that administrative paper work every time. Or, more likely, the government will figure that the hot potato insurance game of constantly churning patients doesn’t serve the country’s best interests.
Here’s how to think about the future of health care.
You go into the doctor’s office and they offer to sequence you in much the same way that they offer to do your lab work. Maybe the state picks up the tab. Maybe you pay for it à la carte. Maybe you offer a discount on your next medical bill for participation. Maybe you mandate participation because of the public health benefits outweigh whatever contrived privacy arguments. Maybe — and I think this is more likely — the insurance forces you to get genetically sequenced so as to ward off the medical liability issues with potentially adverse prescriptions.
Given the cuts to the health care system lately it’s likely it’s the nurse practitioner or the physician’s assistant who administers the spit kit. Maybe she will take your picture.
Once your spit kit is registered, the sample is sent off to a Traitwell lab and stored under the same protections Google Cloud uses for state secrets.
The way to make this practice go viral is by allowing family members to comment on the cause of death of past deceased family members, or to share family health history in much the same way that Ancestry currently does.
Once you sequenced enough people you could even build an actual AI that worked for them. We’ve written about that, too.
The Washington Post detailed a recent effort to use DNA tests to test for extreme opioid addiction risk — and the pushback from the FDA’s oh no squad.
We’ve only been talking about that matter since November ‘21!
Here’s a piece we wrote about it in March ‘22.
Slowly but surely we’re moving into the genomic age.