Still, anyone deciding whether or not to pay roughly $1,000 for this analysis is getting what’s available now, so it seemed only fair to review deCODEme’s initial offering from the perspective of an interested lay person. That raised a number of questions for me, not least among them the usefulness of providing so many disease-risk predictions based on only one or two SNPs (a subject I’ve just revisited in a follow-up post). And while I was certainly aware that non-immediate relatives such as nephews and aunts only share an average of 25 percent of their DNA, I suspect most people aren’t, which calls into question exactly how useful they’ll find the “Compare Me” feature if they’re looking at friends and other non-relatives.

In any case, thanks to both Hsien-Hsien and Dr. Turner for their comments.