Dear Folks,

Some of you may have heard Carl Zimmer interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air on June 11th. If not, you may want to. Carl Zimmer is a science columnist who has written about genetic sequencing and genetic testing (tracing ancestry). He makes an analogy that the current accuracy of genetic testing is roughly equivalent to telescopes in the 1700s. You could see much better than with the naked eye, but far away objects were still fuzzy and hard to define. The same is probably true with the results provided by commercial genetic testing: the overall results may be accurate, but the smaller ethnic percentages are best guesses with the information at hand. He added that samples submitted for the same individual to different labs yielded different percentages but didn't specify how much variance there was between the labs. Nevertheless, as with any new technology, the process with be fine tuned and refined, resulting in much more accurate ancestry data in the near future.

Love,
Jack