The craze to know the secrets held by your DNA has hit home. One of my daughters expressed a Christmas wish for the popular kit that promises the answers to the riddles of your heredity. The instructions direct you to spit into a tube and then mail your specimen to the testing facility. In six weeks or so, you receive a report detailing the percentages of the various ethnicities and nationalities revealed therein. Because my daughter hoped so much for this gift, she received one company's kit from her parents and another brand from her fiancé. She has sent her samples off for analysis, and the results are certain to fascinate. I am curious to see if the results from the two competitors match each other.
The DNA's revelation may surprise us: I know a woman who thought she was of pure Danish heritage all her life. She sent her tube off in the mail and discovered that less than half of her DNA hails from Denmark. Apparently, she has ancestors from other European nations, as well as some Jewish blood that she knew nothing about until now. Does this change her life in any way? I don't know her well enough to find out. But I imagine that results like these would make you wonder if someone high in the branches of the family tree was adopted, or if some great-great-grandmother had an amorous tryst of which she never spoke. It's the stuff of novels.
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