Comment by bsimpson
3 days ago
Tangent, but some people I know have been downloading their genomes from 23andme and asking Gemini via Antigravity to analyze it. "If you don't die of heart disease by 50, you'll probably live to be 100."
I wonder how accurate it is.
23&Me data is simply not accurate enough to make reasonable predictions about health outcomes.
I have a whole genome and nothing Google has built has been able to do anything useful with it, medically speaking. I could use DeepVariant to re-map all the raw reads, it would only slightly increase the accuracy of the estimate of my genome sequence. When I met with genetic counselors, they analyzed my genome and told me I had no known markers for any disease (and they also told me they Google all the unique variants that show up in the report).
(for what it's worth, I literally went to work at Google to improve their medical/health/genomics research, and after working on it a few years I concluded that the entire genomics field is about 90% fantasy. If you want actionable data, there are a small number of well-regulated tests that can help in a limited set of circumstances, but those aren't whole genome tests).
As accurate as our knowledge of genetics, which is not very outside of the identified set of pathological genes associated with hereditary disorders.
Your genome is very complex and we don’t have a model of how every gene interacts with every other and how they’re affected by your environment. Geneticists are working on it, but it’s not here yet.
And remember that 23andMe, Ancestry, and most other services only sequence around 1% of your genome.
I'd guess it's much less accurate than that.
Part of genetics is pattern matching, and last time I checked I still can't find a model that can correctly solve hard Sudokus (well, assuming you don't pick a coding model that writes a Sudoku solver.. maybe some of them are trying to do genetics by doing correct algorithms), a trivial job if you write a program that is designed to do it.
Are you asking for you in particular? It's certainly not accurate in general that anyone that made it to 50 is likely to live to 100.
One I heard was if you make it to 80 you have a 50% chance to make it to 90. If you make it to 90 you have a 50% chance to make it to 95. From 95 to 97.5 again 50% chance. That for the general population, in a 1st world country though, not any individual.
The assessment he got was "you have supergenerian genes, but also this one that's really sensitive to heart disease. If you can keep you plaque in check, you're almost invincible (to other popular causes of mortality)."
It cited whatever gene it said he had that made that so.
Our understanding of genomic data is in its infancy. These people are idiots who don't know what they don't know.