23 Skidoo

23 Skidoo

You can always tell when a cartoon character is about to run off-screen. The music speeds up and then ends with some flourish. I always think of Snagglepuss saying with an affected accent, “exit, stage left!” And off he would go with the waggle of a leg and yo-dee-do-do. Since the turn of the last century, both 23 and skidoo or skedaddle, meant to get out while the getting was good.

23 is also the number of chromosome pairs in the human genome. Hence the name 23and Me for the first direct-to-consumer genetic testing service using saliva as the testing medium. It started offering partial testing in 2007, was named Time’s Invention of the Year in 2008, and has not looked back since. Now if you pay $395 you get an endless number of reports from health to ancestry to connections to relatives. You get to see where you come from, who you’re related to and what you are genetically pre-disposed towards. This is a big advancement from the early National Geographic tests that showed where your primordial ancestors traveled to get to the place of residence of your most recent progenitors. Those were fun in imagining your early man ancestor traveling out of East Africa, into the Fertile Crescent and up into the Steppes of Middle Asia. From there, they either headed back towards Europe over the Black Sea or down to the Subcontinent of India (and perhaps eventually as far as Australia over land bridges now called Indonesia) or overland into China and Siberia. We now understand that most of the Western Hemisphere was populated by the Baring Sea route coming from Siberia, from whence the headed southward.

There you have the migratory history of your family and mankind. What else could you need? It turns out quite a bit. Enter 23and Me. In early 2017 my wife and I must have been bored, so we rustled up all the spit we could muster and put it in test tubes that we sealed and sent away to Mountainview, California, the city in Silicon Valley from which all good technology things come. You might say we 23 skidooed our 23and Me tests for analysis. I think that means that we are relatively early adopters, we are not terribly concerned about privacy (what could be more private than your highly unique and personal genomic profile?), and we are not easily scared by the truth about ourselves. That’s quite a bit of bravado in this day and age, but I suspect we mostly didn’t think most of this through altogether. Only now in hindsight does it seem filled with bravado. At the time it was mostly driven by a combination of curiosity and novelty.

I remember getting back the results in a few months. The good news was that the health information was all pretty positive. I was a bit more immune to the great ills of cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimers and male pattern baldness than my wife, but we both stacked up as genetically healthy. My 100-year-old mother had given me a prior clue that such might be the case, but it’s always nice to see it scientifically affirmed.

The best part of the test results for me was that it said I had the musculature of an “elite performance athlete.” That alone was worth the $395 to me. I dined out on that little factoid for a few months. People have applied many adjectives to me over the years, but I don’t recall anyone calling me an elite performance athlete. Maybe if I carried 150 pounds less on my 6’5” frame I could make that claim and have it believed. Just knowing that capability is under there somewhere is very reassuring to me. The “I could do that if I wanted to” line is pretty powerful or at least good humor. It might explain why I was able to surprise people and excel at sports like skiing and squash, where size was not an overwhelming impediment to excellence. Mostly, it’s just a fun personal attribute to pull out at various times in hearty conversations.

After that died down, I didn’t have much added use for my 23and Me data and reports. The unexamined self may be wasted, but the over-examined self comes close. How much navel contemplation can possibly be good for you?

Then, tonight my daughter came over and wanted to discuss her 23and Me results. There was nothing bad in her report, but she was confused by the ancestral background. She thought she was Czech on he mother’s side and Czech/Italian on my side. She came out 100% European, but the mix including Germanic and other Southern European blends was confusing to her. She was also curious about her family connections. I walked her through my thoughts about all that, which was easily explainable based on my known historical lineage knowledge. Then she asked me the big question, why was I not on her family list if I had done 23and Me. That’s when that “exit stage left” music starts to play.

I went back into my email files and found my 23and Me results transmittal email. I clicked through and opened up a report which had evolved into a much more colorful and interesting report. I didn’t see any family connections and my daughter then showed me how to toggle that element on. There was a drumroll moment of truth while 23and Me processed the results of my family connections from their database and calculated the degree of connections.

Voila! My daughter came up on the top of a list of 1,137 relatives. She and I are 48.9% genetically connected. Below her is my half-sister (easy to identify from the profile), with whom I am 25% genetically connected. Those statistics both seem to make sense to me. All the relatives below that went down into single digit connections. Indeed, I barely recognized any of those names. I have no need to go chase down any of those relations, but I am glad my daughter felt fulfilled with her own self-discovery process.

My guess is that I won’t call up my 23and Me reports again until another child or close relative goes off on a similar search of their ancestry. I know enough and am as reassured as I care to be. I suppose that 23and Me might give some a desire to 23 Skidoo if the results aren’t perfect, but in our family case, the best we could muster was, “Heavens to Murgatroyd!”