Anomaly Coaching

Story time:

Last summer, I thought it might be fun to have my DNA analyzed. Two companies, 23andMe and Ancestry.com, had popped up again and again in my social feeds, so I decided to join the party and see if I could blame my penchant for salty food on my genes. And as a journalist, I was just naturally curious.

So like 26 million other people, I ordered a testing kit online, spat into a tube, and sent my saliva off to Silicon Valley. Any concerns I had were around privacy. I checked all of the boxes to keep my results as secret as possible and went back to my normal life.

Privacy, it turned out, was the least of my worries.

I had just gotten home from the gym when I opened the email from 23andMe, saying a report was ready for me to read. That click changed my life forever: To my utter shock, the results showed that I have a mutation in a gene called BRCA1, which puts me at a huge risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. I broke into tears.

At first, I didn’t believe what I was seeing. My father’s sister died of breast cancer when she was 37, but her mother (my grandmother) and her sisters all lived long healthy lives. My aunt’s death was always talked about as an unforeseeable tragedy, not a family legacy. I knew that being an Ashkenazi Jew (100%, according to 23andMe) put me at a higher risk of BRCA but at 1 in 40 that’s still only 2.5% of my tribe.

Full story: https://www.statnews.com/2019/08/08/23andme-genetic-test-revealed-high-cancer-risk/

Decision

People under estimate it. Benjamin Desrali once said that nothing can resist the human will that will stake its existence on a Single purpose. Humans can see the finish before it’s already here.