Hey, appreciate the thorough review. I strive to be extra careful when putting out evidence-based info, as that is the sole purpose of the channel. You raised a few issues that you were "disappointed" by... 1- Cold cases solved using 23andMe...Here is the title of the Good Morning America segment to the specific story- "23andMe DNA test links woman to unsolved murder | GMA" 2- You disagree that they had gotten "family trees". Those are the words of the company to press: "23andMe also confirmed that another group of about 1.4 million people who opted-in to DNA Relatives also “had their Family Tree profile information accessed,” 3- You dislike that I didn't mention the benefits of using tests to find relatives. That wasn't the purpose of the video. It highlighted the risks and potential false health promises that were valuable to note when deciding to send over your DNA. That being said, appreciate your work, and love seeing experts on the platform to help keep us all at the top of our game!
Thank you for watching and responding! I do have a few points to what you mentioned: 1 - 23andMe does not work with Law Enforcement and does not even have an upload feature for their database. The article you linked by GMA is not very strong support for your point, especially because a lot of follow-up articles reached out to 23andMe who confirmed that they do not allow Law Enforcement access and they weren't utilized for that case. There are a lot of misconceptions about what LE can access when it comes to Investigative Genetic Genealogy and the biggest misconception is often that LE has access to Ancestry DNA, MyHeritage, and/or 23andMe, something media gets wrong quite often. The only genetic databases that give LE access are FamilyTreeDNA, GEDmatch, and MitoYDNA 2 - I am not disagreeing with the fact that they had obtained some family information, that is true. I am disagreeing with your phrase that "hackers basically got access to your entire family tree". This may come down to how we define "entire family tree", but to me that indicates these Hackers could see everything - your parents, siblings, children, nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles, birth dates, locations, and everything I would expect to find in a family tree. What they would have been able to access is not even close to that. 3 - I can certainly understand where you are coming from with the purpose of your video being on the health aspects and risks, but I personally feel it is well within the scope of the video to mention beneficial reasons why people might take the test, especially since you are recommending whether or not to take these tests. I honestly think this would have been a close to perfect video on the topic of DNA testing risks if you had just briefly mentioned that there are benefits for the ancestral aspect. Thank you again for commenting! And if you ever want someone to help you build your family tree, please hit me up. I specialize in Jewish ancestry and especially Ukrainian Jewish origins.
Your point 3 is that your video was only about negatives, and that you didnt intend to acknowledge the other side's POV when arguing that we should "stop buying home genetic tests"? That's bizarre man.
As someone who loves you both, Mike, I was also disappointed by point #3. You made it sound like the ethnicity estimates were the main point of the tests, when they're just a fun quirky bonus. The most reliable part is DNA matches from relatives and you totally skipped over that. I really appreciate you talking about the risks, because there are definitely some, but by not going into the reasons people get these tests IMO you made us all sound a bit like idiots doing it for superficial reasons. Some of us are passionate about genealogy and we put a lot of thought measuring benefits against risks. And that is even more true for people who don't know their biological family at all and finally have a chance to!
Also I would love a collab where Jarrett helps building Mike's tree, but from this exchange I'm not really sure that's something Mike would be interested in haha.
I just watched this video last weekend and I was really looking forward to a reaction from you. I think that Doctor Mike should have informed himself better before doing this video. Thank you very much for the reaction.
I just discovered your channel and have watched several of your vids with interest. I love learning new things. You’ve re-sparked my interest in fleshing out my husband’s tree and my maternal grandfather’s side. My folks, my husband, and our daughter have all taken the Ancestry DNA test back in 2018. Various family historians have fleshed out my maternal grandmother’s side and my paternal side, so we’re pretty good there. The problem has come trying to jump the pond and track my maternal grandfather’s side. His father came here from Cornwall in around 1881 or so. We have the family stories of what siblings grandpa had then that his father came here and a couple of years late a brother joined him. I’m pretty sure I found the immediate family in Cornwall, the issue was not having access to all the census data. Long story short, I’m wondering if we should take the MyHeritage test to help find genetic matches, or if maybe uploading to GEDmatch would be better? My husband’s story is even harder. His folks immigrated here from Germany via Canada. We have a few names and a little info, but there are no “first hand” family members left.
Since your family tested with Ancestry, you can download your raw DNA to then upload to GEDmatch, MyHeritage, and Family Tree DNA. I don't know how recently you tried building out your Cornwall ancestry but there are a lot of Cornwall records now available through the internet, a lot of which is free to access - www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Cornwall,_England_Online_Genealogy_Records
No! Without a test we wouldn’t have found out that my sisters step daughter is distantly related to us. Appears to be through her mother and my mother.
I did my DNA test many years ago. Mainly to knock down the block walls on my tree. If my DNA helps ID a dangerous criminal-Hooray! If an adoptee finds their family-yeah . If my DNA names a DOE -wonderful. But my medical says I don’t like cilantro-true, I don’t plan- true. And other fun stuff
Assuming you live in North America, the National Society of Genetic Counselors (NSGC) has a feature on their website to search over 3000 genetic counselors in the US and Canada - findageneticcounselor.nsgc.org/?reload=timezone.
NO NO I found out that my auntie did not die in the Russian slaughter of the Polish population in what was Poland now Belarus. I found cousins and other family so I suggest he retracts his silly sentiments.
Yes. According to Wikipedia, he was born in Russia (then still part of the USSR) to a Ukrainian Jewish father and an ethnically Russian mother. His surname (Varshavski) probably indicates some remote connection with Warsaw, Poland.
@@soniaspf9705 I've been watching Dr Mike for years and he's always been open about being born in Russia and moving to the US as a kid, that's something he mentions quite frequently. I agree Wikipedia is not always perfectly trustworthy, but in this case there's really no reason to doubt it.
@ProfessionalGenealogistReacts There is another video that i watched recently of which, you perhaps can make a Reacting Video. It's the channel "History Tea Time with Lindsay Holiday" and here last video is about Genetic and famous kings/sultans & emperors, who we all +/- in some way maybe distant are related, because of the possible potential descendants nowadays in modern days like the famous Dschingis Khan oder Charlemagne.
Would have made more sense if he'd titled the video "Why you should stop buying 23andMe" or some clickbaity variation of that. He's not discussed other testing companies with different policies. He could have at least acknowledged the health benefits for adoptees or donor conceived children, who can connect with genetic family members and learn about their known health history from family members directly. The main takeaways from his video is that you should make sure you're informed about what you're opting into when doing genetic tests, but most importantly - use a password manager and DON'T reuse passwords! It leaves you vulnerable to data breaches, which is scary when it happens to you.
as a child of a cheater i know i have halfsiblings, i know i have a few, but did he father more out of wedlock then me, for that i do understand the dnd dating thing, but luckly for me aroace, so i don't have to worry about dating family, my mother did learn she had befriended a person who is like my 4th cousin that we both had ended up in the same place far away from the origin place, so the fear is real that if i was to date suddenly family. that being said i am also no contact with the ones that was born in wedlock so i also have no desire to do a family three cos nah they were not great people
I don't think this was from the DNA testing companies though, so if governments are going to allow your genetic data to be sold then there's nothing you can do about it anyway, so I'm not sure what your point is, apart from that it can happen anyway and laws need to be put in place to prevent it.
They tried to. Campaigners with family doctors alerted the public what the government was up to, so the public told their family doctors they didn't give consent for them to share data. So the government was busy trying to change the law. Then covid hit.
His video should have focused (been titled) on the poor choices, and disservice, 23andMe has done. Ancestry, FamilyTreeDNA, MyHeritage shouldn't be lumped in. Besides that, he got at least one important topic totally wrong which was that 23andMe has nothing to do with police. 👎🏼 I expect better from physicians than what he put out in the world.
I don't like Dr. Mike since 2022. He isn't careful with information and facts. He said when the war began that his family migrated from Russia because jews were discriminated here. But he was child and he is from Ukranian part of USSR. I'm same age as him and lived all my life in Moscow. Half of my teachers and half of my class were jews and there were no problems. So I think he easily uses unverified information for hype.
If you are from different parts of the USSR then how do you know how a minority group was treated there? I have been treated differently in different parts of countries as a resident and tourist.
Actress Mila Kunis is another person from a Ukrainian Jewish family who migrated to the US with her family when she was about 7 yrs old. They, too, had to escape from the then-USSR because they were discriminated against as Jews. Sorry, but the proof is in the testimonies of the vast number of Jews from the former USSR who were desperate to get out because of discrimination.
His video was so frustrating. But wither way, I will never understand why a lot of people seem to be so concerned with their privacy that they'd rather have violent crimes go unsolved then risk someone finding out who their 3rd cousins are. And i did the health tests on 23 and me quite a while ago, and even back in the early days there were a ton of disclaimers about the health data's accuracy, usefulness, and effects on mental health.
I strongly object to the statement that your DNA “is who you are.” That’s absolutely false. A person is a combination of biological *and social* factors. Social factors are so powerful that they can alter genetic expression, and these mutations can sometimes be passed to offspring in a process known as epigenetic. The environmental factors that influence us from cradle to grave are equally as strong as inherited factors, and make up a big part of who we each are. While genetics can reveal identity in many cases, that’s different from saying it’s “who you are.” As well, ethnicity is a socio-cultural factor, not a biological one, despite companies’ claims. They overstep, and aside from helping locate geographic locality in some instances, the estimates are often mistaken - and they don’t account for occurrences of migration, adoption, etc. DNA companies have no right to identify people by ethnicity, yet they’ve managed to get compliance from vast numbers of people. It’s simply wrong. BTW Ancestry’s “traits” feature is wrong, in my case at least, on a large percentage of their predicted traits, and so far don’t allow for the person to comment or correct. For example, contrary to the predictions, I don’t have dimples, I love coriander/cilantro, and I don’t drink coffee or large amounts of caffeine.
Hey, appreciate the thorough review. I strive to be extra careful when putting out evidence-based info, as that is the sole purpose of the channel. You raised a few issues that you were "disappointed" by...
1- Cold cases solved using 23andMe...Here is the title of the Good Morning America segment to the specific story- "23andMe DNA test links woman to unsolved murder | GMA"
2- You disagree that they had gotten "family trees". Those are the words of the company to press: "23andMe also confirmed that another group of about 1.4 million people who opted-in to DNA Relatives also “had their Family Tree profile information accessed,”
3- You dislike that I didn't mention the benefits of using tests to find relatives. That wasn't the purpose of the video. It highlighted the risks and potential false health promises that were valuable to note when deciding to send over your DNA.
That being said, appreciate your work, and love seeing experts on the platform to help keep us all at the top of our game!
Thank you for watching and responding! I do have a few points to what you mentioned:
1 - 23andMe does not work with Law Enforcement and does not even have an upload feature for their database. The article you linked by GMA is not very strong support for your point, especially because a lot of follow-up articles reached out to 23andMe who confirmed that they do not allow Law Enforcement access and they weren't utilized for that case. There are a lot of misconceptions about what LE can access when it comes to Investigative Genetic Genealogy and the biggest misconception is often that LE has access to Ancestry DNA, MyHeritage, and/or 23andMe, something media gets wrong quite often. The only genetic databases that give LE access are FamilyTreeDNA, GEDmatch, and MitoYDNA
2 - I am not disagreeing with the fact that they had obtained some family information, that is true. I am disagreeing with your phrase that "hackers basically got access to your entire family tree". This may come down to how we define "entire family tree", but to me that indicates these Hackers could see everything - your parents, siblings, children, nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles, birth dates, locations, and everything I would expect to find in a family tree. What they would have been able to access is not even close to that.
3 - I can certainly understand where you are coming from with the purpose of your video being on the health aspects and risks, but I personally feel it is well within the scope of the video to mention beneficial reasons why people might take the test, especially since you are recommending whether or not to take these tests. I honestly think this would have been a close to perfect video on the topic of DNA testing risks if you had just briefly mentioned that there are benefits for the ancestral aspect.
Thank you again for commenting! And if you ever want someone to help you build your family tree, please hit me up. I specialize in Jewish ancestry and especially Ukrainian Jewish origins.
Your point 3 is that your video was only about negatives, and that you didnt intend to acknowledge the other side's POV when arguing that we should "stop buying home genetic tests"? That's bizarre man.
As someone who loves you both, Mike, I was also disappointed by point #3. You made it sound like the ethnicity estimates were the main point of the tests, when they're just a fun quirky bonus. The most reliable part is DNA matches from relatives and you totally skipped over that. I really appreciate you talking about the risks, because there are definitely some, but by not going into the reasons people get these tests IMO you made us all sound a bit like idiots doing it for superficial reasons. Some of us are passionate about genealogy and we put a lot of thought measuring benefits against risks. And that is even more true for people who don't know their biological family at all and finally have a chance to!
Also I would love a collab where Jarrett helps building Mike's tree, but from this exchange I'm not really sure that's something Mike would be interested in haha.
As an adoptee Ancestry and 23andme help me find Bio family including siblings, cousin, and in turn aunts and grandparents ❤
I just watched this video last weekend and I was really looking forward to a reaction from you. I think that Doctor Mike should have informed himself better before doing this video. Thank you very much for the reaction.
I just discovered your channel and have watched several of your vids with interest. I love learning new things. You’ve re-sparked my interest in fleshing out my husband’s tree and my maternal grandfather’s side. My folks, my husband, and our daughter have all taken the Ancestry DNA test back in 2018. Various family historians have fleshed out my maternal grandmother’s side and my paternal side, so we’re pretty good there. The problem has come trying to jump the pond and track my maternal grandfather’s side. His father came here from Cornwall in around 1881 or so. We have the family stories of what siblings grandpa had then that his father came here and a couple of years late a brother joined him. I’m pretty sure I found the immediate family in Cornwall, the issue was not having access to all the census data. Long story short, I’m wondering if we should take the MyHeritage test to help find genetic matches, or if maybe uploading to GEDmatch would be better? My husband’s story is even harder. His folks immigrated here from Germany via Canada. We have a few names and a little info, but there are no “first hand” family members left.
Since your family tested with Ancestry, you can download your raw DNA to then upload to GEDmatch, MyHeritage, and Family Tree DNA. I don't know how recently you tried building out your Cornwall ancestry but there are a lot of Cornwall records now available through the internet, a lot of which is free to access - www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Cornwall,_England_Online_Genealogy_Records
@ProfessionalGenealogistReacts thank you! I will look into that.
No! Without a test we wouldn’t have found out that my sisters step daughter is distantly related to us. Appears to be through her mother and my mother.
Thanks for doing this. There is so much misinformation about this topic, on UA-cam, because it lends itself well to clickbait.
I did my DNA test many years ago. Mainly to knock down the block walls on my tree. If my DNA helps ID a dangerous criminal-Hooray! If an adoptee finds their family-yeah . If my DNA names a DOE -wonderful. But my medical says I don’t like cilantro-true, I don’t plan- true. And other fun stuff
How do I find a geneticist?
Assuming you live in North America, the National Society of Genetic Counselors (NSGC) has a feature on their website to search over 3000 genetic counselors in the US and Canada - findageneticcounselor.nsgc.org/?reload=timezone.
@@ProfessionalGenealogistReactsthank you!!!
NO NO I found out that my auntie did not die in the Russian slaughter of the Polish population in what was Poland now Belarus. I found cousins and other family so I suggest he retracts his silly sentiments.
IIRC, Dr Mike was born in Russia and came here when he was about 6.
Yes. According to Wikipedia, he was born in Russia (then still part of the USSR) to a Ukrainian Jewish father and an ethnically Russian mother.
His surname (Varshavski) probably indicates some remote connection with Warsaw, Poland.
@@GazilionPT I am sorry but I trust Wikipedia as far as I could through a grand piano
@@soniaspf9705 How well sourced is that piano?
@@soniaspf9705 I've been watching Dr Mike for years and he's always been open about being born in Russia and moving to the US as a kid, that's something he mentions quite frequently. I agree Wikipedia is not always perfectly trustworthy, but in this case there's really no reason to doubt it.
@ProfessionalGenealogistReacts There is another video that i watched recently of which, you perhaps can make a Reacting Video. It's the channel "History Tea Time with Lindsay Holiday" and here last video is about Genetic and famous kings/sultans & emperors, who we all +/- in some way maybe distant are related, because of the possible potential descendants nowadays in modern days like the famous Dschingis Khan oder Charlemagne.
Would have made more sense if he'd titled the video "Why you should stop buying 23andMe" or some clickbaity variation of that. He's not discussed other testing companies with different policies. He could have at least acknowledged the health benefits for adoptees or donor conceived children, who can connect with genetic family members and learn about their known health history from family members directly.
The main takeaways from his video is that you should make sure you're informed about what you're opting into when doing genetic tests, but most importantly - use a password manager and DON'T reuse passwords! It leaves you vulnerable to data breaches, which is scary when it happens to you.
as a child of a cheater i know i have halfsiblings, i know i have a few, but did he father more out of wedlock then me, for that i do understand the dnd dating thing, but luckly for me aroace, so i don't have to worry about dating family, my mother did learn she had befriended a person who is like my 4th cousin that we both had ended up in the same place far away from the origin place, so the fear is real that if i was to date suddenly family.
that being said i am also no contact with the ones that was born in wedlock so i also have no desire to do a family three cos nah they were not great people
When I lived in the UK (until 2019) the then Conservative government sold our health and medical /genetic data to a US medical insurance company !
I don't think this was from the DNA testing companies though, so if governments are going to allow your genetic data to be sold then there's nothing you can do about it anyway, so I'm not sure what your point is, apart from that it can happen anyway and laws need to be put in place to prevent it.
They tried to.
Campaigners with family doctors alerted the public what the government was up to, so the public told their family doctors they didn't give consent for them to share data.
So the government was busy trying to change the law. Then covid hit.
His video should have focused (been titled) on the poor choices, and disservice, 23andMe has done. Ancestry, FamilyTreeDNA, MyHeritage shouldn't be lumped in.
Besides that, he got at least one important topic totally wrong which was that 23andMe has nothing to do with police. 👎🏼 I expect better from physicians than what he put out in the world.
I used to watch Dr Mike. He’s too clickbait lately even if he may make an interesting point that appears to have data behind it.
I don't like Dr. Mike since 2022. He isn't careful with information and facts. He said when the war began that his family migrated from Russia because jews were discriminated here. But he was child and he is from Ukranian part of USSR. I'm same age as him and lived all my life in Moscow. Half of my teachers and half of my class were jews and there were no problems. So I think he easily uses unverified information for hype.
If you are from different parts of the USSR then how do you know how a minority group was treated there?
I have been treated differently in different parts of countries as a resident and tourist.
Actress Mila Kunis is another person from a Ukrainian Jewish family who migrated to the US with her family when she was about 7 yrs old. They, too, had to escape from the then-USSR because they were discriminated against as Jews. Sorry, but the proof is in the testimonies of the vast number of Jews from the former USSR who were desperate to get out because of discrimination.
His video was so frustrating.
But wither way, I will never understand why a lot of people seem to be so concerned with their privacy that they'd rather have violent crimes go unsolved then risk someone finding out who their 3rd cousins are.
And i did the health tests on 23 and me quite a while ago, and even back in the early days there were a ton of disclaimers about the health data's accuracy, usefulness, and effects on mental health.
I strongly object to the statement that your DNA “is who you are.” That’s absolutely false.
A person is a combination of biological *and social* factors. Social factors are so powerful that they can alter genetic expression, and these mutations can sometimes be passed to offspring in a process known as epigenetic. The environmental factors that influence us from cradle to grave are equally as strong as inherited factors, and make up a big part of who we each are.
While genetics can reveal identity in many cases, that’s different from saying it’s “who you are.”
As well, ethnicity is a socio-cultural factor, not a biological one, despite companies’ claims. They overstep, and aside from helping locate geographic locality in some instances, the estimates are often mistaken - and they don’t account for occurrences of migration, adoption, etc. DNA companies have no right to identify people by ethnicity, yet they’ve managed to get compliance from vast numbers of people. It’s simply wrong.
BTW Ancestry’s “traits” feature is wrong, in my case at least, on a large percentage of their predicted traits, and so far don’t allow for the person to comment or correct. For example, contrary to the predictions, I don’t have dimples, I love coriander/cilantro, and I don’t drink coffee or large amounts of caffeine.
"DNA companies have no right to identify people by ethnicity, yet they’ve managed to get compliance from vast numbers of people. It’s simply wrong. "
"the estimates are often mistaken - and they don’t account for occurrences of migration, adoption, etc."