Libby Copeland

A deeply reported look at the rise of home genetic testing and the seismic shock it has had on individual lives You swab your cheek or spit into a vial, then send it away to a lab somewhere. Weeks later you get a report that might tell you where your ancestors came from or if you carry certain genetic risks. Or the report could reveal a long-buried family secret and upend your entire sense of identity. Soon a lark becomes an obsession, an incessant desire to find answers to questions at the core of your being, like "Who am I?" and "Where did I come from?" Welcome to the age of home genetic testing. In The Lost Family, journalist Libby Copeland investigates what happens when we embark on a vast social experiment with little understanding of the ramifications. Copeland explores the culture of genealogy buffs, the science of DNA, and the business of companies like Ancestry and 23andMe, all while tracing the story of one woman, her unusual results, and a relentless methodical drive for answers that becomes a thoroughly modern genetic detective story. The Lost Family delves into the many lives that have been irrevocably changed by home DNA tests--a technology that represents the end of family secrets. There are the adoptees who've used the tests to find their birth parents; donor-conceived adults who suddenly discover they have more than fifty siblings; hundreds of thousands of Americans who discover their fathers aren't biologically related to them, a phenomenon so common it is known as a "non-paternity event"; and individuals who are left to grapple with their conceptions of race and ethnicity when their true ancestral histories are discovered. Throughout these accounts, Copeland explores the impulse toward genetic essentialism and raises the question of how much our genes should get to tell us about who we are. With more than thirty million people having undergone home DNA testing, the answer to that question is more important than ever. Gripping and masterfully told, The Lost Family is a spectacular book on a big, timely subject.

How DNA Testing Is Uncovering Secrets, Reuniting Relatives, and Upending Who We Are

The Lost Family

Jonnie

Journalist Kristen V. Brown has thought a lot about big data and unintended consequences. In 2015, she covered the hack of the website Ashley Madison, an online dating service geared at people who wanted to cheat on their partners. "Life is short. Have an affair," the site's slogan went. Brown wanted to know how the hack and subsequent exposure of the site's users' personal information had changed their lives, so she interviewed more than one hundred people impacted by it and learned about divorces, blackmail, and suicides. It's easy to assume that if you don't cheat on your spouse, you don't need to worry about this sort of thing, and that if you do cheat, well, you deserve what you get. But Brown thought the incident had broader implications. She was fascinated by a concept from Georgetown Law professor Paul Ohm that we are all at the mercy of the massive troves of data that businesses collect and keep on us, and that somewhere amid all that information, every one of us has a devastating secret. Ohm called this eventual, interconnected treasure trove of information the "database of ruin," and he urged in a 2012 Harvard Business Review article, Please don't build this.

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