Occasionally Emergent

[steepholm]

I was out of commission for most of the last week with a fever. It's gone now, thanks to antibiotics, but I'm still very much in new-born Bambi mode, and can't take on much without the need to go and have a lie down or stare disinterestedly at a wall. In that sense, the World Cup arrived with impeccable timing.

I'm old enough to have been brought up to think of my normal body temperature as 98.4F. I gather that this is now 98.6F, for reasons unknown, but the UK has in any case long since moved to Celsius, where it's 37C. I don't have much sense of what a high temperature looks like in Celsius, though, so when I saw mine was 39C I didn't know whether to be alarmed or not. More recently I translated it into real money and saw that it was over 102F. No wonder I felt ill.

Anyway, in other news, I've occasionally been tempted by those DNA kits, as you might expect given my extensive family history tag, but have been naturally wary of handing over my DNA to a commercial company. Has any of you ever done it? Was it worth it? What do you see as the pros and cons? All advice gratefully received.

Perhaps because of my weakened state I'm currently tempted again. The Butlers themselves are relatively easy to track back quite a long way, but of course they make up only a small percentage of my genetic portfolio. As far as I know my ancestry is entirely from this island as far back as the late seventeenth century, when Jean René Giberne and Marie Le Mennet came over from France, but of course I don't know much. So, I'm curious (and have one or two pet theories I'd like to test).

Comments

[cmcmck]

I don't know it you are friended to _gwendraith_ but I know she has done the DNA stuff.

Sorry to hear you've been poorly. Have you balanced your hormonal intake out of interest? It can be a sign of a little too little.

[steepholm]

I didn't know that! I'll look into it - thanks.

[cmcmck]

Possibly worth an appointment with an endocrinologist.

[redbird]

For what it's worth, growing up in the 1960s and 1970s (in the US), I was taught that 98.6F was normal; as an adult, I've learned both that body temperature varies a bit with time of day, and that different people have different normal temperatures.

[steepholm]

I wonder if it may be a trans-Atlantic thing? The first person I came across who quoted 98.6F was also American. Unless I dreamed 98.4F entirely? Hopefully some other UK oldies will be able to settle that for us.

[cmcmck]

You are right that it used to be considered to be 98.4F

[calimac]

98.6 F is considered "normal" in the US, but as at that scale the numbers are very sensitive (including the decimal, it's about one-twentieth of a degree C), some variation is entirely normal, and many people normally test low. But two whole degrees C is a very large rise, and it's right to be alarmed.

B's whole family took the test and pressured me into it. I didn't learn anything I didn't already know, and I then had to fight off e-mails from the company offering to share this or do that.

There was an interesting criminal case here involving ancestry testing recently. A rapist-murderer active decades ago and long disappeared had completely evaded the police. Many suspects, but all purely speculative. So the investigators sent some of the preserved DNA (which had never matched any criminal databases) to an ancestry site. They didn't think they'd find the culprit, but they might find his relatives, and they did. This enabled them to narrow it down to two chronological/geographic possibles, neither of them previously thought likely suspects, on the basis of which the investigators got a warrant for surreptitious collecting of their live DNA, and they got the guy. He was a retired cop.

[steepholm]

The temperature's down now, thank goodness, but I spent two shivery days telling myself to get on with my work, which I wouldn't have done had I possessed a Fahrenheit thermometer.

That's a neat story, and slightly inclines me to go ahead on the ground that it may help flush out my criminal relatives.

[ironymaiden]

How interesting. For me, that story confirmed my fears of commercial DNA testing and has kept me from trying it.

And as I write this, it implies that I have something nefarious to hide, where really I want to keep away from actuaries.

[steepholm]

It took me a minute to process this (actuaries in my head are always so mild mannered!), but do you mean that if your information fell into the hands of actuaries you might find your insurance premiums rising?

[ironymaiden]

correct. not just higher premiums, but being denied coverage entirely. since i live in the US it's not just about life insurance but about health insurance. actuaries even play a part in issuing loans.

[thistleingrey]

I've done a spit test, which confirmed that my mother's family = geographically where I thought they were, in very general terms, and that my father's father's origins are to either side (not only the side I knew) of a particular mountain range. Then again, I don't know the names of any of my great-grandparents (plus, three of my grandparents migrated variously and the fourth was legally a bastard), so we start from very different situations!

[steepholm]

Well, I've now succumbed, so I'll let you know what happens on mine!

[ethelmay]

I've done it, and sent the results to a company called Promethease as well (for extremely quick'n'dirty medical analysis that involves comparing bits of DNA to a database of research on DNA -- best suited for those who don't mind wading into the thickets of how this study shows you have an elevated risk of X, another shows a lowered risk of X, this shows a fivefold increase in the risk of Y, but don't worry too much as 30% of the population has that risk and the condition is still rare, that kind of thing).

One thing I have often wondered about is how far it's possible to differ in how closely one is related to one's siblings. The average, of course, is 50%, but depending on how the genes shuffle during meiosis, you can wind up with a higher or lower percentage. My oldest brother and I turn out to be 43.6% related. (An XX/XY sibling pair are likely to be less closely related than XX/XX or XY/XY pairs.)

My ancestry came out much as I expected (British and Irish ["Scottish" doesn't show up as such in their categorization], French/German, Scandinavian, broadly Northwestern European, a tiny bit of possible Eastern European). I was rather hoping to find Ashkenazi ancestry, but apparently not. I have not come across any unexpected close relatives, either.

[steepholm]

I fully expect mine to come out as expected too, but you never know. I have a tendency to keloids, which has occasionally made me wonder whether I might have African ancestry, for example - though perhaps that's a little fanciful. Like you I've wondered about the possibility of Jewish ancestors - when I was a teenager that discovery would have thrilled me - but if they're there I've no idea where they'd have come from. More than likely I'm just British, with traces elsewhere in Northern and Western Europe, but we shall see!