Kind: captions
Language: en
a family secret
exposed if my father
wasn't my biological father who was
something
very very important was kept from me a
hidden legacy
revealed somewhere in slavery that
20 might have been integrated with our
dna
and that might not have been voluntary
a life-threatening illness prevented
they quite possibly saved my life
and a decades-old murder finally solved
without my dna it would have been dead
in the water
just a few of the millions of stories
launched by one of the most popular
and promising new technologies
consumer dna testing
with a swab or a bit of spit
some 30 million of us have turned over
our most personal information hoping to
discover what's hidden inside us
but what do the tests really deliver
spain torch full norway
how good is the science and how are the
tests changing our lives
i just couldn't believe it i was on the
phone with my older sister
in search of clues the secrets in our
dna
right now on nova
[Music]
it's a promise many of us just can't
resist
[Music]
send in your dna and unlock secrets
about
family ancestry
and even help it's rare that something
comes along
that is truly new and this is something
that's truly new
but just how reliable are consumer dna
tests
and their scientific looking ancestry
percentages
should we worry about our privacy
what are the unforeseen consequences
when we reveal
the secrets in our dna
[Music]
in the suburbs of olympia washington one
woman finds out
just how unpredictable those
consequences can be
chelsea rustad who works as an i.t
specialist
is an avid family historian in 2015
she takes a test with the biggest of the
direct to consumer companies
ancestry dna people end up doing it
often times because i just want to learn
about
my ancestral background but then
something else pops up that
they really were not expecting at all
and that's exactly what this was for me
the test results suggest that chelsea is
mostly of norwegian and german ancestry
then because she's also curious to find
new relatives
she downloads her raw file from ancestry
and uploads it to a free website called
jed match
it's a place where anyone can search for
matches no matter what company they
tested with
jed match shows chelsea everyone else on
the site who shares dna with her
it's kind of humbling and interesting to
see those interconnections to realize
the the sheer number of people that we
share some percentage of dna with and
don't even realize it on ged match
chelsea sees an aunt whom she knows but
no new close relatives
she logs off and doesn't check the site
again
three years go by and then
on the evening of may 17 2018
chelsea gets some unexpected visitors
i look through the people and see that
there are two cops
waiting outside there and when i opened
the door
they introduced themselves as
investigators who are
looking into a homicide that was a cold
case
from 31 years ago they've come to her
door
as a result of that dna file she posted
on jed match to her amazement
they tell her that her dna has
led them to a suspect
it was just really a lot to take in and
really shocking every step of what they
explained to me is a horror story
chelsea's hopeful search for relatives
has taken a dark turn
into the hunt for a killer
someone she's related to
though her story is unusual it shows
that consumer dna companies
can fulfill one of their biggest
promises extremely well
connecting us to our relatives
direct to consumer or dtc
dna testing is a billion dollar business
made possible by the simple rules of
heredity
we inherit our dna from both of our
parents
50 from mom 50 from dad
and they inherited from their parents
and their parents of course inherited it
from their parents
our parents each contribute about 50 to
our dna
and the same is true for them and their
parents
so the amount of dna we inherit from any
ancestor
drops by half with each proceeding
generation
we also share dna with anyone who shares
a common ancestor with us
siblings half siblings first cousins
second cousins and so on
[Music]
the way that the dtcs determine those
relationships
is by comparing people's dna the amount
that is shared is measured in a unit
called centimorgans
the more cenomorgans two people share
the closer they are
related and the fewer centimorgans they
share the more distantly related they
are
but with the dtcs a relationship to
someone
can always be determined just by
counting centimorgans
because the numbers fall within ranges
you might share the same number with a
cousin and a great uncle for example
just because you have an amount of
shared dna doesn't mean you actually
know
for sure what that person's relationship
is it's just a probability
a spectrum of possible relationships
[Music]
june smith lives in new jersey not far
from philadelphia
in 2018 she takes a consumer dna test
hoping to solve a long-standing mystery
she spent years searching for her roots
when june was 16 growing up in
philadelphia
the woman she knew as her mother
revealed a secret
she said your mother was a white woman
when i said a white woman which was
totally shocking to me
her biological mother's name was anne
d'amico
june has never learned the identity of
her father
when june takes her test with ancestry
dna
she checks the box asking to be linked
to any customers
with whom she shares dna
though she knows anne has died there's
someone else she
desperately wants to find
while digging into anne's life story
june learned that she'd given birth
to another biracial daughter who had a
different father
a girl named joan moser june's older
half-sister
i set out to search for her and i would
go on websites
i would do all kinds of people searches
looking for joe moser
but we could never come up with her
one day june receives a message on her
ancestry page
telling her she has a new match with a
close relative
a woman named sigrid gilchrist
she'd also grown up in philadelphia the
only child of a black couple
active in the civil rights movement
but at 16 sigrid learned a long hidden
truth from her mother
she told me i was adopted that my mother
was italian
and my father was black it was crushing
i had no idea in the years that followed
sigrid never connected with any of her
biological relatives
until by pure chance right around the
time that june tests with ancestry
cigarette does too ancestry reports that
the two women
who share 1641 centimorgans
may be first cousins
but june can't help wondering might
sigrid be someone
even closer
the two women agree to talk on the phone
she said i have three questions to ask
you i said
okay i said were you adopted
she said i was i said
are you biracial she said i
am i said would your birth mother name
happen to be antamika
i said yes that was her name my
biological mother
she said are you joan moser and then i
said
that was the name of my birth
certificate i said oh my god
you're my sister you're not my cousin
we cried and i just couldn't believe it
i was on the phone with my older sister
it was just like we've known each other
forever
one-on-one spirit feeling that you can't
describe
finally my sister gave me a sense of
belonging
[Music]
it gave me a sense of saying hey
you know we got the same blood but i do
see me
yes for the chin yeah
it's good having an older sister i don't
like being older but it's okay
i love having a younger sister
she understands yeah
people like sigrid and june can be
connected by the dtcs
thanks to an amazing recent discovery
about dna
we've known for a long time that the dna
molecule
which we carry in almost every cell in
our body
contains the code that directs our lives
the code is carried in chemical building
blocks
called bases known as a
c g and t they form
pairs to create the familiar ladder-like
structure of dna
it takes a whopping 3 billion of those
base pairs
to make up our complete genome
but since 2003 when scientists first
read through
all of those base pairs they've
discovered a surprising fact
about more than 99 of them so if you
look at any two people
the vast vast majority of their dna is
exactly the same
because all of the things that keep you
alive i mean all of that has to be the
same it can't change
otherwise it doesn't work but there are
places in our dna that do vary
some of them are called single
nucleotide
polymorphisms or snips
there are spots where most of us have
one kind of base pair
but some of us have another
so instead of trying to identify all
three billion of a customer's base
payers
the dtcs do something that's cheaper
and faster they only check out a
customer's snips
usually about 700 000 of them
and comparing people's snips is an
efficient way to
see if they're related because when
their snips match up
all the dna in between the steps is
usually identical too
and matching dna segments are the
telltale signs
of a family relationship by
looking at the amount of shared dna
direct-to-consumer tests can give a
quite accurate picture
of relationships between individuals
family tree dna in houston is one of the
four
biggest dtc's like many of them
the linchpin of its operation is its
technology for reading snips
and this is it a small piece of glass
called a snip chip it contains
hundreds of thousands of tiny beads
each one holds a short piece of dna
called a probe
and we put an individual's dna on the
chip
and the part of an individual's dna that
matches
the little probe they will bind together
once bound the identity of the snip is
revealed by a fluorescent dye
for example if you have an a
you'll see green if you have a g
you'll see red
[Music]
the snip data enables the lab to see how
much dna is shared
by customers who've opted for family
matching
the company website shows them their
list of matches
it will show everyone that you're
related to
and the estimated relationship
but sometimes that match list can reveal
a painful truth this
anonymity and taking these secrets to
the grave with the advent of dna testing
it really doesn't exist anymore
that's what danny shapiro was shocked to
discover
a novelist and memoirist she's written
about growing up in an
orthodox jewish family in new jersey and
about her parents
irene and paul i was very very bonded
with my dad
much more so than with my mom he worked
on the floor of the new york stock
exchange and
i would meet him for lunch sometimes and
he would come out
and he would just like fling his arms
open
just like hiya darling give me this huge
hug
it's gonna make me cry i loved my father
from childhood on this jewish daughter
draws
comments you don't look jewish you can't
possibly be jewish
there's no way you're jewish did your
mother have an affair with the swedish
milkman
shapiro your married name i could go on
one day in 2016 her husband
michael marin decides to take a dna test
from ancestry without thinking about it
much
dany decides to take one two
she knows that both of her parents are
of ashkenazi
or eastern european jewish descent
several weeks later they get their
results
we open them and he's like huh according
to this you're about 50 50
eastern european ashkenazi and the rest
is
all western european french irish
english swedish german
my only response was oh well they must
have made a mistake
it was only a few days later my husband
came in and he said you have a first
cousin
on your ancestry.com page the first
cousin who we don't know
we don't we don't know this first cousin
in search of clues
danny turns to someone she sure is a
blood relative
i have a much older half-sister from a
first marriage of my dad's
i recall that number of years ago she
had done i think 23andme
and i sent her an email and i said do
you have your results
from from the dna test you did
and she did and she sent them to me
danny gives the half-sister's file to
her husband
using jed match he checks to see how
much dna
she and danny share and discovers the
truth
he said you're not sisters and
i said not not half sisters because
that's what we
were and he said no kind of sisters
you're not related
and so that was the moment for me when
all of the pieces
began to just click into place where i
thought well
if he's not one of our fathers he's not
my father
something very very important was kept
from me
and it felt to me like my identity was
in pieces
her parents are both deceased but she
remembers her mother once saying she had
a hard time getting
pregnant and mentioning a fertility
clinic
in philadelphia danny and her husband
tracked down the first
cousin who popped up on ancestry
his uncle turns out to be danny's
biological father a retired doctor
he'd gone to medical school in
philadelphia and had been
a sperm donor at the clinic
she searches the internet and sees a
video of him giving a talk
i knew what i was seeing and i remember
getting up and walking into the bathroom
and looking at my face in the mirror
for the first time after seeing him
and understanding my face for the first
time in my life
danny feels compelled to write a new
book about family
identity and her own experience it's
title
inheritance my book is dedicated to my
father
and sometimes someone will say to me
which father
i'm like are you kidding my mother
wanted to
bear a child and i think it
must really not have been easy for my
father to have gotten to this place
where he was
willing to genetically replace himself
that's what that is it's saying
one of us is going to be the biological
parent of this child and one of us
is not and no one's ever going to know
except for us
danny is far from alone according to one
estimate
some one million people have discovered
from consumer dna tests
that the man who raised them is not
their biological father
or that they have a half sibling they
never knew about
and there are even darker secrets that
sometimes come to light
in washington state in 2018
the secret that chelsea rust dad's dna
helps to reveal
could be the key to cracking a 31 year
old
cold case it's really upsetting
very distressing to think about only a
monster could
do such things to people
[Applause]
on november 18 1987
two young canadians jay cooke 20 years
old
and his girlfriend tanya van kylenburg
18 leave their hometown
a suburb of victoria british columbia
heading to seattle to run an errand for
jay's dad
six days later tanya's partially clothed
body
is found by the side of this road in
skagit county washington
she's been shot in the head and there's
evidence of rape
two days after that some 65 miles away
in snohomish county
beneath this bridge hunters find jay's
body
he's been strangled with twine and dog
collars
his head beaten with rocks we had
two young totally innocent kids
that got kidnapped and brutally murdered
during the investigation police recover
potentially precious evidence from
tanya's body
the assailant's dna
they will run it through a lab procedure
that is still the gold standard for
proving identity with dna
it zeros in on just 20 or so places in
the genome
where a short string of letters for
example
g-a-t-a just keeps on repeating
they're called short tandem repeats or
strs and scientists can count the number
of times
they repeat and those counts
vary person to person just like the
ridge lines on a fingerprint
it's a very powerful technique because
with enough locations
you can do an identity match with very
high probability
because of these slight differences one
person to the next
but like a crime scene fingerprint a
crime scene str profile
is only useful if it matches one that's
already in the possession of law
enforcement
for decades the profile in this case
doesn't match
anyone known to the police
the case goes cold
until the day when chelsea rust dad
uploads a dna file to jed match
where it becomes a clue that will
eventually lead the police
to a major break in the case
chelsea's experience will make headlines
but most dna test takers just want to
know
what are my roots a seemingly
simple question that often leads to its
own set of mysteries
don't open anything until we ask you to
these 14 people
are about to experience dna ancestry
testing
for themselves because they're so many
kids i'm growing up with
who are all in the same situation we
don't know our heritage
we could probably safely assume that our
ancestors ancestors had something to do
with like slavery and things like that
but we don't really know where we came
from
cherry richardson is taking part in a
research study
at westchester university in
pennsylvania
so we have a research protocol by which
we collect data for this particular
project
the study is run by two communications
professors
bessie lawton and anita foman
the question they're asking is how does
dna testing
affect our understanding of who we are
and also
our ability to understand what makes us
different and after we receive the
results we bring you together
the whole idea is to listen to each
other and talk with one another
anita was inspired to start the project
because of her experiences
as a diversity trainer i thought looking
at our dna
was a really interesting way to approach
this whole conversation
about race and diversity in a way that
was not going to make people defensive
and that has happened we don't identify
ourselves with africa
we just say we're black you know we
literally separated from that which we
came from
in a previous test with ancestry taekwon
golden was told
his roots were 80 west african and 20
british they got everybody in today's
test with family tree dna
he hopes to learn more my suspicions
might
lead me to say um somewhere in slavery
20 might have came in and have been
integrated with our dna and that might
not have been voluntary
i think as an african-american it's it's
a tough thing to grapple with
when you think about the origin of your
caucasian or white ancestry that often
happened
due to rape and mistreatment but it is
part of your history
so you have to confront it on some level
and
understand it it's part of how you got
here i don't want to hide from the truth
no matter how bad it could be
now it's time to collect dna you can
turn it around a little bit to capture
more
and ship the samples off to houston
so how do dtcs like family tree dna
come up with a breakdown of your
ancestry
it's a process that also centers around
snips
those places in our dna that most
frequently vary between
people
[Music]
the company compares your snips with
those of people in what are called
reference groups people alive today
whose dna has been tested
and who share patterns of snips that
scientists have found to be typical for
the region in which they live
those patterns are compiled into a
database
but how well does it represent test
takers
they're telling you this is your
background based on our database
well if something's not in their
database they can't tell you that it's
in your background
the dtcs have less data about people of
african and asian descent
than they do about people of european
descent
most of the genetic testing that has
been done
has been done on north atlantic
europeans
so our reference databases are biased
why don't we all just take a minute and
open your results
and take a look at the map for the first
time
family tree dna has given nick pasvanis
whose parents trace their ancestors to
greece germany
england and scotland a detailed
breakdown i am
45 southeastern european which is about
what i expected
um i've always felt like i was just a
general european mutt
and that's pretty much what the map
shows so
i was wondering when i got it like if it
would say if i was black
and i am 94 west african so
yeah i'm pretty black but cherry
richardson's african bubble
provides little detail
hannah and viola wong who were both born
in china
have even bigger bubbles
i mean i have just these giant bubbles
and they're like you're super asian
like i kind of already knew that so
basically people have huge bubbles
are considered the minorities
and it's unfortunate because it
perpetuates a kind of eurocentrism
that has tainted our scholarship
that is a foundation for notions
false notions of white supremacy and it
highlights the disparities
that are currently prevalent throughout
science
and particularly in genetics there's
also 23 percent
southeast with italy and greece
highlighted which
was never on our radar but there's
another problem with the way dtcs
calculate
ancestry 64 the dna of people who lived
in a place long ago
your ancestors may be different from the
dna of the people
in the reference groups who live there
today
that's because for centuries people
and their dna have been moving around
the globe
you really have to get over the hurdle
of static thinking
about human populations that there are
irish genes and italian genes and
and nigerian genes and zimbabwean genes
and that's just not the way that human
evolution works
because static feeds into the racist
paradigm
feeds into the me versus you you know
us versus them
and yet it is true that certain snip
patterns
are more prevalent in some places than
others
there are several clues that can link
you back to
areas and specific regions where your
ancestors evolved
the companies are doing the best they
can with the data that they have
and that's why all the dna testing
companies are trying to add
more discrete populations to their
database
so that when they don't assign
your population perfectly they're as
close
as they possibly can be
bessie and anita are finding that
whatever their flaws
dna ancestry tests by making people
think about their roots
can help them to better appreciate human
diversity
the north of africa middle east the
western europe but it was it makes
people think of
their stories in relation to other
people in the whole story of human
migration most people have
felt this to be a positive experience
taekwon golden's results from family
tree dna
are very close to those he received from
ancestry
can't ignore it now the whole like
ireland and uk part of the dna
yeah let me ask do you think you're as
authentically black as she is
i don't think it makes a difference they
sat there
and had a conversation about race
that was fun and exciting and joining
and if that can happen more and more
what are the possibilities
[Music]
but as difficult as determining ancestry
may be
the toughest challenge the dtcs are
taking on
may be assessing our genetic disease
risks
because when it comes to the accuracy of
those tests
the stakes couldn't be higher
we all face the risk of developing
life-threatening diseases
but some of us face a greater risk
because of variations in our genes
deviations from the precise sequence of
a's
c's g's and t's that form the genetic
code for making proteins
the critical molecules that keep our
bodies working
it is hard to believe that a single
letter change could affect a human being
so profoundly among this huge string of
three billion letters
but then you get those critical places
where if you've made that specific
change
the protein simply doesn't work anymore
several of the dtcs now offer testing
for genetic health risks
but how reliable are they most of those
tests
look only at selected snips and ignore
the rest of the genome
where other risks may be lurking
risks that they will inevitably miss
one example 23andme's controversial
test for breast cancer risk it looks at
two genes
called brca or roca genes
they code for proteins that control cell
growth
but certain base pair variations derail
the bronco genes
and make some cancers such as pancreatic
prostate and especially ovarian and
breast cancer
more likely scientists have documented
close to 4
000 such variations 23andme sells a snip
test
that looks for three of them they're
among the variations that put women
at very high risk for breast cancer
each can be reliably detected by snip
testing
and each is 10 times more common in
women who have ashkenazi jewish ancestry
jessica alghazzi a 52-year-old
entertainment lawyer in los angeles has
three ashkenazi grandparents
in 2018 she takes the 23andme braca test
having no idea it will change her life
one day when she's playing golf she gets
an email
i get the results as i'm sitting on a
golf course in a golf cart and i looked
down and like
oh my god i can't believe this
23andme reports that she has a broncho-1
variation
that makes it highly likely she will
develop ovarian or breast cancer
a second test by a dna lab that
specializes in broca testing
confirms it although she is cancer free
for now
she makes a decision my
gynecologist said you know jess you got
to do something
now you'll have your ovaries and tubes
removed and
you need to have a double mastectomy
right away and so i'm just grateful that
i was able to
find out in time to do something before
i got sick
i'm eternally grateful to the folks at
23andme for giving me that opportunity
they quite possibly saved my life
but most women who have bronco
variations
don't have any of the three that 23andme
test for
[Music]
women like pamela munster she happens to
be an oncologist in san francisco
who specializes in breast cancer i have
the
one gene she has no ashkenazi jewish
ancestry in 2010
pamela takes 23andme's bracha
do you test herself what i learned is
that i didn't have much of a breast
cancer risk and by
23andmes reckon my breast cancer risk
was actually quite low
but in 2012 pamela is diagnosed with
breast cancer
the way that my cancer looked under the
microscope
i had this sense that this breast cancer
was associated with a brachial mutation
to confirm her hunch pamela has her dna
tested
by what's known as a clinical lab the
kind doctors use
they don't just look at scattered snips
they look at every single base pair in
genes
a process known as sequencing
they go through the entire bracket gene
and they remember these are like 80 000
base pairs and they can tell you if the
letter there is a letter not there
pamela turns out to be right
she does have a broncha2 mutation but
it's not
any of the three variants 23andme tests
for
it's one of the thousands of others
if i just want to know who i'm related
to
23andme ancestry are very good tests
if you want to know do you carry a
bracha gene and are you at risk for
breast cancer i think
draining three and me is not an ideal
test
but 23andme says that its broca test
has alerted some 3000 people to their
cancer risk
and that choosing these three variants
makes sense
because they confer such high risks
what these variations mean for someone's
risks is very very well understood
the studies that have shown near nearly
half of people
carrying one of these variants don't
realize it so it's great for those
people
who were not even thinking they were
carrying that mutation
to pick it up with direct-to-consumer
testing it's not a good thing if those
people
think they have been exhaustively tested
because they have not
and there are also concerns about how
test takers data is used
in 2018 23andme agrees to share
anonymized information
about millions of his customers with
glaxosmithkline
to use in the development of new drugs
23andme says some 80 of his customers
have given consent
for their data to be used in research
most have also filled in health
questionnaires enabling
valuable links to be made between their
genes and their health histories
the potential of what you can do with
that information is just astounding
but while the possible rewards of the
deal seem clear
to some it raises ethical questions
you're actually paying your money to
give your data to a company
um and then it will be capitalized on
potentially
without benefit to you when you're
dealing with such a new technology i
think the full
implications can't possibly be
understood by consumers because things
are just
too new so how safe is the data of
23andme's
12 million customers
we do not sell data we do not share
your data with any insurance company or
any employer
hard stock without your consent
federal law prohibits most employers
from using genetic data to make
workplace decisions
and prohibits health insurers from using
it to change or deny coverage
but disability and life insurance
companies are free to use it
while 23 and me and family tree dna
talked with nova about these issues
ancestry dna
declined to participate in this film
the risks inherent in new technologies
often become obvious
only in hindsight chelsea rustad
could never have predicted that her dna
test
might lead the police to a dangerous
murder suspect
they found him using a new investigative
technique
that springs directly from the rise of
consumer testing
it's called genetic genealogy
and before it was used to solve crimes
it was used by people looking for their
birth parents
one of its pioneers is a retired patent
lawyer named barbara ray venter
i really backed into this whole thing
because i was doing uh unknown parentage
type work with adoptees for adoptees
dna has been huge because for them to
try
and figure out who their both relatives
were just using paper
very very difficult barbara starts by
connecting the adoptee to the people in
their dna match list
then by digging through records she
finds more relatives
the goal find an ancestor who links
everyone together
and points directly to the birth parent
in 2017 barbara is asked by
investigators in california
to try to solve a different kind of
mystery
one of the nation's most notorious cold
cases
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the so-called golden state killer was
suspected of committing at least
13 murders and more than 50 rapes
during the 1970s and 80s
police have long had his dna but have
no idea who he is barbara agrees to help
from the crime scene dna a snip profile
is made
and then uploaded to jed match
using the relatives who pop up barbara
creates a family tree
and eventually zeros in on a man
named joseph deangelo a one-time
policeman
deangelo had never been under suspicion
police collect his dna and run an str
test
the result a perfect match with the dna
of the golden state killer
murder in the first degree that charge
sir how do you plead
in june 2020 joseph deangelo pleads
guilty
to 13 counts of murder guilty he is
sentenced to life
in prison at the time of deangelo's
arrest
detective jim scharf is amazed to learn
what's been accomplished
using genetic genealogy
he quickly thinks about tanya and jay
he reaches out to a computer scientist
he's been working with
in virginia steve armentrout
so do i need to hardwire the number in
here or am i doing a calculation steve's
company
parabon nanolabs has developed methods
and software for sifting through
hundreds of thousands of snips
we first have to get dna from the crime
scene
into a format that can be used for
uploading
jim gave us the ok on a thursday
on friday we are uploading to gedmatch
steve has teamed up with a genetic
genealogist in california
cc moore on saturday morning
i rolled out a bed before i even put my
contact in
and flipped open my laptop to see if we
had that match list
and we did gedmatch
shows two people who each share around
three percent
with the unknown suspect
so to have two people that shared about
three percent of their dna or
enough to be a second cousin with the
suspect did feel like getting struck by
lightning
second cousins will share a set of great
grandparents
and that's not that far back in the tree
in genealogy
i can almost always get back to
someone's great-grandparents
one of cc's two top matches is chelsea
rustad
the other is a cousin who's never been
publicly identified
they both share dna with the suspect
but don't share any with each other that
meant
that they represented different branches
of the suspect's family tree
i really lucked out i found an obituary
from a woman who was carrying the
surname that i had just seen
in the other matches family tree so that
told me
we have a woman from this tree and a man
from this tree
who have married and hopefully had
children
cece knows that if they did those
children would carry a mix of dna
very similar to that of the suspect
the couple had four children we got
really lucky
that there was only one male in this
family because the genetic
genealogy was pointing at one person and
only one person
and that was william earl talbot ii
at the time of the murders talbot lived
a few miles from the bridge
where jay cook's body was found
now he is 55 a truck driver
the police follow him
they want his dna to see if it
matches the dna from the crime scene
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one day they get lucky
a drinking cup falls out of his truck
jim scharf brings the cup to the
washington state patrol crime lab
for str testing
lab supervisor lisa collins asks him to
wait
soon she returns lisa turned and handed
me the report and said
jim it's him there's a match
and i couldn't believe it my
eyes teared up i yelled out a scream
this is wonderful we finally got this
guy
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on may 17 2018 william earl talbot
ii is arrested on a charge of
first-degree murder
for a 31-year-old crime
he's a man who was identified not
because he took a dna test
but because a relative did someone he'd
never
even met in june 2019
the jury delivers his verdict by the
defendant william earl talbott iii
talbot is the first suspect identified
by genetic genealogy
ever to be convicted by a jury
he is soon sentenced to two consecutive
life terms
in prison it has been reiterated to me
so many times by investigators that
they wouldn't have come this far without
my dna
it would have been dead in the water
since talbot's conviction
the parabon team has used genetic
genealogy
to identify more than a hundred criminal
suspects
but just being named by a genealogist
isn't enough to get a person arrested
we have to get confirmation dna using
str testing before
we have probable cause to make an arrest
even so to critics the use of genetic
genealogy
by law enforcement raises privacy
questions
do we want to catch people who have
committed heinous crimes
absolutely yes but what dna profiles are
being trolled through
what failed attempts to find suspects
are we not hearing about
and the data violations and privacy
violations that happen along the way
the genetic genealogy team at parabond
says the fears
are exaggerated people have control
over whether their dna is used in these
investigations
simply taking a dna test at 23andme at
ancestry
your dna is in their private database
but there's little regulation and
policies
vary in 2019 family tree dna
apologized for letting the fbi searches
database
for people who share dna with crime
scene samples
without customers permission family tree
dna and gedmatch
both now say they only do so with
explicit permission
and another worry consumer dna companies
like any that collect data are
vulnerable to hackers
yet the risks are clearly not deterring
everyone no one is forcing
anyone to take a dna test if your
paranoia and fear of big brother
is greater than your interest in
reading the medical and history book
written into yourselves that i think
that you should not test
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there's beauty in you know understanding
where you're from and then searching for
that
the consumer dna phenomenon is changing
many people's lives
by revealing the secrets that lie hidden
deep inside ourselves
but arts benefits worth its cost
and risks do i want to know that i'm at
risk for alzheimer's when there's
absolutely nothing
i can do about it maybe not
with these dna tests as popular as they
are the chances
are that everyone who has had a secret
of this nature kept from them is gonna
find out
our hearts and our minds don't
fully how to grapple with what we're
being asked to grapple with
i think the surge in dna testing
over the last 20 years has opened
people's minds to the possibility
that they share more with other people
than what they thought they did that one
percent
that makes us different is really just
the beautiful diversity in the natural
world
and it's not that one genotype or genome
is better than another
it's just they're beautifully different
the more we are tested the more we see
how connected we are to each other
and perhaps if we see that we're
connected to each other
we'll treat each other a little bit
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better
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