23andMe offers ridicu­lously low cost, private geno­typing to just about anyone. They take your spit and use it to test your DNA for hundreds of thousands of single nucleotide poly­mor­phisms (SNPs). Many of these SNPs are reliable predictors of gene sequence, and 23andMe can tell you tons of inter­esting stuff about tote traits, disease risk, heredity, and more! I’ve found out all sorts of really inter­esting stuff, like the fact that my father’s father’s mother, who was half Cherokee, could not have actually been my great-​​​​grandmother, or that I have a rela­tively rare inability to produce an enzyme called adenosine monophos­phate deaminase, [ . . . ]

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