Has anyone done one of these and learned anything interesting about their background or medical risk? I decided to do 23 and Me, should get my results by the end of the week. I believe the slight risk of big brother finding out about my genome is worth the significant upside of learning about genetic predispositions I may have to certain diseases.

I would never willingly give my dna to anyone.

it's all fun n games till someone hacks 23 and me and starts cloning you!

they will never get mine, don't care where I am from and I know where I am goin. nuff said.

I have zero interest in the process or the results.

What's your fear exactly Bob?

I thought long and hard about it. You have to give consent on how it's used. If they misuse it you'd have all sorts of legal recourse. For me it came down to risk analysis. Learning my medical risk has huge upside potentially, the odds they miss use it seems very small to me.

I'd be way more worried if I had a Facebook account.

You're paying money to have someone tell you what five minutes visiting with the family would. My line is prone to heart problems, diabetes, lactose intolerance, and we're immune to poison ivy. If we smoke, we'll get lung cancer and that'll take us out. You don't need to spend hard earned money and give people your dna to tell you that.

at the very least, I'm part English, french, German, Swedish and american indian.

That's really not true Kattelyn, there is a vast amount of genetic information a medical doctor would have zero clue about without running the exact same test. For instance, my grandfather had Alzheimer's, there are genetic markers associated with that. I may or may not have those gene. I'll know shortly.

Somethings are better not found out.

Everyone looks at it differently I guess. There are very few things you can get that you can't do something about. If I can do something about it to live a longer healthier life I'll absolutely do it. I want to stay healthy and active as long as possible.

Yeah wait until you can not get health insurance because you have a chance of some long term health scare one of those test say you could have.

I suppose that could happen. I don't think it will. If it did happen I'd sue the pants off everyone involved. Maybe I'd wind up rich enough to not need to worry about health insurance. As stated, it's a risk/reward analysis.

We all have probabilities of things that run in our genetic lines. People with native blood have a higher rate of diabetes and lactose intolerance than European stock. I am not absolutely certain that the immunity to poison ivy comes with the package, but there's a much higher propensity for it in my family than in other groups. How much good will it actually do if you are told "Yes, you have the genetic marker that makes you susceptible to Alzheimers" would you change how you live? Would you be living in dread and looking for signs?

It's kinda like the question "Do you want to know when you're going to die."

I'm afraid if they test mine it'll make headlines that they found the missing link.