You Are Human, Right?

In New Scientist, Peter Aldhous recounts that Blaine Bettinger emailed him to ask about his DNA profile: "This is a strange question, but are you sure this is Homo sapiens?" Sometimes, when looking at his DecodeMe data, Aldhous's mitochondrial DNA marker would appear to have undergone a "bizarre mangling." Other times, though, it matched his 23andMe data. The problem, Aldhous discovered, came from a bug in Decode's database software. "That's sobering, because enthusiasts for health information technology envisage a future in which computer systems like Decode's will query databases holding people's DNA profiles to help doctors make decisions on which drugs to prescribe, and at what doses," Aldhous writes. Decode told Aldhous that it is looking into the problem.