Why did you stop saliva genetic testing?

With the deepening of people's understanding of genetic testing, more and more people begin to carry out genetic testing. However, people gradually found that the sampling of modern genetic testing is very simple, and only a little saliva is needed for testing. Many people doubt whether this test is reliable. Let me introduce it to you.

Saliva test "genetic code" is accused of not letting white-collar workers and boyfriend Mr. Li spend 1947 yuan to buy a genetic test product. Can be detected by saliva. According to the instructions, they need to collect their first saliva in the morning, then put it in a saliva collector and send it back to the merchant. On April 17, they received a text message saying that the genetic test results had come out. But the result is ridiculous, very different from myself. "Experts say that the current level of consumer-grade genetic testing is unlikely to be used to predict children's talents, and scientific research has just started. The research data of the correlation between the two is not enough to support the statistical causality.

Please think twice before you do saliva genetic testing, place an order and pay online, receive the sampling box within two days, and mail it to the genetic testing company after saliva collection. Within a month, you will get the analysis report of your ancestral source. In the report, you can see the composition of your lineage, and even see the migration and evolution of your family or ancestors.

In the past, it took thousands or even tens of thousands of genetic tests, and now it is beginning to popularize Huimin. The service fees of most consumer-grade genetic testing companies (DTC) have been reduced to 499 yuan, and there are more than 200 genetic testing institutions in China alone.

Craig Venter, an academician of the American Academy of Sciences and a "science geek", published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) this week, saying that consumer-grade genetic testing is very likely to have privacy risks.

Once the testing organization obtains your DNA sequence, you can know the skin color, pupil and even voice of the owner of the DNA sequence through machine learning algorithm.

On 20 14, the National Health and Family Planning Commission and the US Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) jointly stopped the genetic testing service. In the United States, the only consumer-grade genetic testing company recognized by the federal government is only 23andMe. Therefore, the business of most genetic testing companies is actually in a gray area.

When 23andMe cooperates with pharmaceutical companies to conduct basic research on diseases based on a large number of consumers' genetic data, it ensures that consumers' genetic information is anonymous and will not reveal privacy.

However, these promises are false and unreliable, and he called for more comprehensive measures to regulate personal privacy in genetic testing. Although the company "Human Longevity Company", as its co-founder, is also involved in the gene sequencing business, collecting a large amount of genome data.

They collected 1, 06 1 samples for training, and established the relationship between genetic information and facial features, voice and so on. And build a model to predict the three-dimensional facial structure, age, height, weight, skin color, pupil color and voice behind DNA.

The researchers selected the images and genetic information of 10 volunteers from different races, scrambled them, and then matched them with computers. The results show that the correct matching rate of the computer is 80%. However, if the subjects come from the same race, such as European or African descent, the correct matching rate will drop to 50%.

The researchers said that the current algorithm is only based on the training of more than 1000 samples, and with the increase of samples, the accuracy will be improved.

The chief scientist of the American DNA testing company and the assistant professor of computer science at Columbia University unceremoniously questioned the "main mistake" of the paper, thinking that it did not actually use the markers in the whole genome information to identify people, but only made a prediction based on the demographic average.

Although the speculation based on the algorithm is inconclusive, it is an indisputable fact that human genes contain a lot of private information. Once genetic privacy is not guaranteed, consumers will get more terrible consequences than telephone number disclosure.