Alzheimer's--Variant Not Detected

Falling away from herThe most common impression of 23 & Me, the genetic lab that tests private individual’s DNA for a fee, is that it’s a service for exploring one’s ancestral roots with a potential for revealing long-lost relatives…or totally unknown relatives. More naïve and fanciful customers might even be looking to find a link to the royalty they’ve always believed was part of their lineage. I’ve written on this aspect of 23 & Me previously. With zero expectation for such a thing, I even found my link to "royalty". Apparently on my father’s side I am descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages, king of much of what we know as Ireland in the 4thcentury. I’m guessing from his name and what I know of monarchial history, he was just a very successful thug. So I’m unimpressed.There’s another aspect to 23 & Me findings—its health reports--that may not be as colorful, but every bit as revealing and impactful as the ancestral reports. These reports range from the trivial to the deadly serious. In the trivial category I was amused to learn that I did not suffer from misophonia, a hatred of chewing sounds. And I was relieved to learn that a old pal John Douglas was not crazy for refusing to eat cilantro because he maintains that it tastes like soap. “Cilantro Taste Aversion” is a real thing…a trait I’m happy to say I do not share with John.    In the deadly serious category, 23 & Me can predict with relative certainty one’s vulnerability to a handful of frightening diseases, chiefly Parkinson’s, cancer in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, and Alzheimer’s. I should say that I got more than my money’s worth from my report when it gave me a clean bill of health on all three of those…or in the scientific and legally qualified language of 23 & Me: Variants not detected. I was especially pleased at the Alzheimer’s news because my greatest fear in life-- much more than death--is and always has been losing my mind. I’d rather die in a plane crash than lose my wits (you didn’t hear me say that, God). Most fortunately I’ve been spared any first-hand experience with Alzheimer’s. The closest I’ve gotten to it is watching my all-time film goddess, Julie Christie, deteriorate in her most heartbreaking role in Away from Her. So this report gave me enormous relief over the anxiety that would build up every time I walked into the pantry and forgot why. That's a problem…but in the world of Alzheimer’s sufferers it’s what might be called a first world problem.However, one cannot consume all this DNA-generated data without losing one’s mind to Twilight Zone or sci-fi thinking about it. In both scholarly and entertainment literature as well as TV and movies there has been speculation for decades as to what will happen when such genetic information becomes widely available. Will insurance companies get the green light from bought-and-paid-for politicians to raise rates or cut coverage for those with a genetic variant for Parkinson’s? Will scientists, often accused of playing God, be able to isolate certain disease-bearing genes and help us “breed” our way out of them? Between those two highly controversial alternatives, both bound to tear society apart even more than it is, what happens on a more intimate and immediate level? A couple I once knew suddenly found themselves in living hell when he developed melanoma. Over the course of his losing, two-year battle against the inevitable, she faithfully stood by him, caring and loving every step of the way. After he died and she fell in love with another man, one of the first things she did was take him off to be fully tested for melanoma. She was determined never to relive the awful experience. And who can blame her? Love may conquer all, but when it comes to sickness and death it’s probably a much closer and painful contest than we like to think.As genetic testing becomes more commonplace, how much will it become part of the courting and mate selection process? If you lost a parent to Alzheimer’s and lived through the pain of that, how likely are you to enter into a long-term relationship with someone whose report comes back: Variant detected?  Brave new world is no longer a cliché or mere cultural reference point; ordinary, low-cost DNA testing is making it a profoundly expanding reality.