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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday April 05 2018, @11:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-not-like-you-thought dept.

There are many reasons to avoid the plethora of direct-to-consumer DNA tests on the market these days. Recent data suggests that many may produce alarming false positives for disease risks, while others that claim to predict things like athletic abilities and wine preferences are simply dubious. Another, perhaps less-common concern is that an at-home genetic analysis may unveil completely unexpected, deeply disturbing information that you just can’t prepare for.

That was the case for Washington state’s Kelli Rowlette (née Fowler), who took a DNA test with the popular site Ancestry.com back in July 2017.

Rowlette was likely expecting to discover new details about her distant ancestors, but she instead learned that her DNA sample matched that of a doctor in Idaho. The Ancestry.com analysis predicted a “parent-child” relationship. Befuddled and in disbelief, Rowlette relayed the findings to her parents, Sally Ashby and Howard Fowler. According to a lawsuit the family filed in the US District Court of Idaho, she told her parents she was disappointed that the results were so unreliable.

But little did she know that her parents—who previously lived in Idaho—had trouble conceiving her and, in 1980, underwent an unusual fertility procedure with a doctor near their Idaho Falls home. The name of that doctor was Gerald E. Mortimer—who happened to have a DNA sample with Ancestry.com that matched Rowlette’s.


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday April 06 2018, @02:50PM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday April 06 2018, @02:50PM (#663436) Homepage
    I arrive at the same conclusion. It's all "there's a chance" until the wave function's collapsed. Unfortunately it's so damn easy to find out the true paternity, it really wasn't that much of a puzzle.

    A coin is tossed, but not revealed - what's the probability that it's heads? Half? Nope, it's either one or zero, depending on whether it's heads up or not! This argument tends to get lots of people's knickers in a twist, which is good, as it's deliberately paradoxical.
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  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday April 07 2018, @03:56AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Saturday April 07 2018, @03:56AM (#663660) Homepage

    You screwed up your analogy there. The probability is half, until it is measured, then the wave function collapses. Yes, even thought the coin has already been flipped and "technically" isn't oscillating on the table.

    This is literally the entire point of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment.

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