DNA Testing, Good and Bad Now that we live in the age of DNA testing some of the results are making people unhappy. A person said to be a White Supremacist had a shocking result when his DNA testing came back. The result showed he was 14 percent Sub-Saharan African. What a blow this had to be to someone like that. Of course, criminals are not happy when the police take their DNA and it proves they were at the scene of a crime. The people I always felt bad for were those locked up before DNA evidence and when DNA testing was done, it proved they were not the ones who committed the crime. There is this rush to have DNA testing done so one can find out their heritage. When you think of it, it is a real rip off. You pay for the test, one of these heritage tracing companies does it, and then the company sells the results and gets more money and now your DNA results are public. It just seems there is something so wrong about this. I would never do this. As a matter of fact, I was never big into tracing my family back that far, but I know a lot of people who are. There are some experts who claim you may be reading results wrong because the results need additional interpretation. For one thing some claim DNA tests are not always accurate. I know test results can be mixed up. I remember when a friend of mine went for his annual checkup which was composed of several tests and took a couple of hours. It is important to know he was white and Irish only for the reason to illustrate how wrong the results were. The test results given to him said he has sickle cell anemia. It turned out some poor black woman’s results had his name on them. Mistakes happen more frequently than we like to admit. That is why hospitals now mark the parts of the body to be worked on with markers. This happened because too many times the wrong body part was removed. DNA results can really cause some surprises and some of them can be shocking. Take a case where someone finds out later in life their parents were not really their parents and the people are deceased so there is no way of asking them what happened. Sometimes people in this situation spend the rest of their lives trying to find out who their real parents were and eventually die without ever knowing. This can be traumatic. One man decided to get his DNA tested. He had been told his parents died when he was very young. The man was now 50 years old. He had been adopted shortly after he was born. He was adopted in Vietnam. His adopted father was an officer in the U.S. Army. It was believed his mother who was Vietnamese died. His biological father was also listed as deceased. When he got his DNA results, he got a message from a stranger in his email. He had gotten a notice someone else had matching DNA. Eventually he reunited with both his father and mother who were both still alive. Sometimes, DNA results can destroy a marriage. When a man decided to have his family’s DNA tested the results which came back were shocking. You never know what they might show and, in this case, it showed the child he thought was his, was not. There was no consoling him and he filed for divorce. You can imagine how the child felt losing who she thought was her father for her whole life. I would hope before he got divorced, he would have gotten a second DNA test in case the first DNA report was in error. Can you imagine if he didn’t and got divorced on erroneous results? A woman decided to take a DNA test. She knew she was adopted. She decided to find out more about her background. She found more than she expected when her results arrived. The test results revealed she had a sister she never knew about. Here is an even more incredible thing to ponder. After they contacted each other, they found out they both had the same hobby, both have tattoos on their ankles and both have the same taste in movies. The sister was raised by her biological mother which must have hurt when she found that out. One guy who decided to have a DNA test found out he had a half-brother. The two hit it off and became very close. Sometimes this happens after finding out something like this. When the half-brother died somehow it was discovered he was not really related. I don’t know if a second DNA test had been conducted, but the supposed half-brother was really just a stranger who also believed the original DNA results. It may seem funny on its face, but many people are having their lives changed by their DNA reports. Some families want to keep their backgrounds secret for whatever reason and I think if that is what they want, it should be. With all the modern technology available this is getting harder and harder to do. Some families may have prior members who were infamous. Take the Hitler family for example who moved to this country. Hitler’s nephew moved to America to get away from Adolph and joined the navy. He moved to Long Island, N.Y. and died in 1987. He had changed his name to William Stuart-Houston from William Hitler. He had four children and I am sure they don’t want people associating them with Adolph Hitler. Some have criminal relatives through no fault of their own and in this day of social media they don’t want that to get all over the media. If you have things in your family you want to keep secret which are connected to people, you should not get a DNA test. You wouldn’t want the company doing the DNA test notifying someone else they are related to you, you don’t know. On this note I have to wonder how many families were destroyed this way? One of the things it is said a DNA test result can give you is your risk for getting certain diseases. For example, it can show your risk of getting Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s Disease and breast cancer. This fact alone could break up a relationship. If you found out you had a good chance of getting Alzheimer’s disease you might decide to break it off with someone to save them pain. DNA tests have their uses, but they are not for everyone.
|
