The Promise and Peril of Mass Sequencing: 23AndMe Uses Genomics To Identify Living Descendants of Slavery
When will genomics be used for reparations? For espionage? For partisan politics?
I direct your attention, dear reader, to a piece that appeared recently in Nature. (Ancient DNA reveals the living descendants of enslaved people through 23andMe)
Starting in the 1770s, hundreds of enslaved and free African Americans lived and worked at an industrial iron forge in Maryland. Dozens died at the Catoctin Furnace, their remains and lives largely forgotten until 1979, when part of the site was excavated to make way for a highway.
Now, in a landmark study, researchers have analysed DNA from more than two dozen people who were buried at the Catoctin Furnace and used that information to identify tens of thousands of living descendants whose data were in a consumer genetics database.
The study1, published on 3 August in Science, could open the floodgates to linking the genomes of historical people to their present-day descendants — some direct, but most very distant. This approach could be especially resonant for African Americans and members of other populations around the world who trace some of their ancestry to enslaved people, say researchers.
“Each time we are able to find an enslaved ancestor, we are defeating the purpose of slavery. The purpose of slavery was to rob us of that information,” says Henry Louis Gates Jr, a scholar of African and African American studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was part of the effort. “This is a major development in the history of the use of genetics to trace ancestry.”
None of the Catoctin Furnace descendants identified in the study — customers of the personal genetics company 23andMe in South San Francisco, California, who had consented to the use of their data in research — have yet been informed of their connections. Providing this information raises important ethical questions, say scientists.
I, too, have grave concerns about the use of this information particularly when we know that 23andMe and Harvard University are so compromised by foreign actors.
Though I’m somewhat grateful to see such an event vindicate my views that genomic information will be used in the reparations debate there are a lot of questions that this genomic action presupposes.
How soon before the trial lawyers use it to identify the still largely intact slave fortunes that persist to our present day — and begin to make claims against them?
Will foreign actors have access to 23andMe’s data? If not, why not? Is 23andMe’s security really up to snuff?
In my view, it’s far past time for America and her allies to nationalize 23andMe and Ancestry.com particularly as the use of this information is being used in more and more contexts.
We need American labs run by American-aligned powers doing this sort of work and I’m planning to build just those lab at Traitwell.com. If you’re able to help I’ll need about $10-$25 million to build two labs.
The turn around time for whole genomic sequencing is scandalously long — 8 weeks and $500+! If ever there were a moment to push forward with a national lab system that moment is now.
I also note that here’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. once again not sequencing Barack Obama, his friend.
You can see Gates’s compromise in an interview he gave.
Could it be because the Affordable Care Act — the only accomplishment of the Obama presidency — is crumbling under mounting costs? President Biden wisely pursued that Inflation Reduction Act to drive down pharmaceutical costs but that wasn’t enough.
I’ve long been of the view that the the ACA was really about enshrining mob control over the health care industry — we spend more money on hospitals than on the defense budget! — and not regulating health care in the public good.
Insurance markets require new information to avoid becoming oligopolies — and they require government oversight. Genomics and the intelligence community can provide that oversight.
We’re seeing this with Illumina, the world’s largest genomic sequencer, which needs to get with the program with the U.S. government after its foreign-compromise under its former CEO and chairman.
You’ll notice that there will continue to be short attacks on Carl Icahn — the SEC and the Southern District of New York are investigating him. Ultimately I suspect that this’ll get sorted.
Were I Icahn, I’d cut a deal with the Feds using genomic sequencing. Perhaps he could use the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai as a test case? I’d be willing to advise.
Genomic sequencing would reveal an awful lot of the fraud going on within health care while simultaneously giving patients the ability to see what’s lurking in their DNA.
The solution is to require the hospitals to massively sequence the population as a condition of their receiving federal money.
But I ask again: Why didn’t Barack Obama get sequenced when he worked so closely with Illumina?
Could it be because he was worried about what would come out about his father?
After all, didn’t his lawyer tell his biographer “not to ask about his father”?
President Joe Biden, by acknowledging his seventh grandchild, confirmed that his presidency wasn’t going to be about malarkey.