My Genetic Test

I ordered a WeGene kit in 2021, back when the idea of using genetics in my social science research was just a curiosity. The kit cost less than dinner and generated more argument than a decade of family reunions. The saliva went out in the mail and the results came back in a couple of weeks, but it would be years before I could truly understand them. Genetically, I came back mostly “Northern Han.” I was born in Zhejiang, south of Shanghai, to grandparents who will tell you, with more confidence than any interval I’ll ever construct, that they are local Southerners through and through. It also told me I have a genetic predisposition to be a morning person. I read that at 2am.

Almost everything I’ve worked on since is a response to that report. The ancestry estimate wasn’t wrong so much as it was answering a different question than the one I asked: these tests measure genetic similarity to a set of reference populations, so the answer is only ever as good as the references and the labels attached to them. Creating those labels is hard, because genomics has shown that human populations mixed and moved far more than the pre-genomic era assumed. Much of my research now goes into building ancestry measures and being transparent about exactly this. The trait predictions had a different problem. Polygenic scores are built overwhelmingly from European-ancestry samples, and their accuracy decays with genetic distance from that training data.

So I have my genotype, a lasting habit of methodological humility, and a long-term goal: to someday help produce the science that would let me compute polygenic scores for myself that actually mean something. My grandparents remain unconvinced, and I’ve come around to thinking they may have a point.