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HughPickens.com [hughpickens.com] writes:

For years, Senator Elizabeth Warren has described herself as being of Native American heritage, a belief based on "family stories" but which didn't appear to be bolstered by any actual evidence. Scott Brown revived the dispute this week, when, acting as a surrogate for Donald Trump, he defended the presumptive Republican nominee's use of the name "Pocahontas" to describe Warren and called on Warren to undergo a DNA Test to prove her ethnicity [nbcnews.com]. Now Philip Bump writes at the Washington Post that Nanibaa' Garrison, a bioethicist and assistant professor of pediatrics at Seattle Children's Hospital, says that Brown's suggestion of DNA testing really wouldn't do any good [washingtonpost.com]. "It's really difficult to say that a DNA test would be able to identify how much Native American ancestry a person has," Garrison says. That's because determinations of ancestry are based on "ancestry-informative markers" -- genetic flags that offer probabilities of the likelihood of certain ancestries. Most of those markers, AIMs, are "based on global populations that are outside of the U.S.," says Garrison, "primarily people of European descent, people of Asian descent and people of African descent." The problem is that DNA snippets, or markers, are inconsistent [slate.com]. Sometimes they are passed on and sometimes they are not, and whether they are or aren’t is random. A large percentage of Native Americans may share certain genetic markers. But many Native Americans may lack the same marker, and many non–Native Americans may carry it by coincidence. Even a test that was fine-tuned to pick out Native American identity might not find any on Warren's genes, because the requisite markers simply may not have made the cut over multiple generations. "It would be impossible to go back that far," Garrison says.

But Brown's suggestion raises an interesting question. Should candidates for the highest office in the land disclose their own DNA [wsj.com], like tax returns or lists of campaign contributors, as voters seek new ways to weigh a leader's medical and mental fitness for public office. During the 20th century, 14 of 19 U.S. presidents suffered significant illnesses while in the White House [livescience.com], from Woodrow Wilson's incapacitating stroke to Ronald Reagan's colon cancer, says Harvard health policy analyst Aaron Kesselheim. More often than not, he says, the ailing presidents and their physicians withheld the medical data that would have allowed the public to judge the true extent of their condition and, more importantly, how it affected their decision-making ability. "I would be shocked if Americans and people in other countries don't want this type of data" about political candidates, says Harvard University genomics expert George Church. "It is not like we are collecting horoscope data or tea-leaf data. These are real facts, just as real as bank accounts and the influence of political action committees or family members."

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