Some DNA ancestry services akin to ‘genetic astrology’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21687013

referencing a Sense About Science document by, amongst others, Prof David Balding and Prof Mark Thomas of University College London …

The BBC have a priceless quote from Steve Jones:

“On a long trudge through history – two parents, four [great-]grandparents, and so on – very soon everyone runs out of ancestors and has to share them.

“As a result, almost every Briton is a descendant of Viking hordes, Roman legions, African migrants, Indian Brahmins, or anyone else they fancy.”

You ask two very important questions/points which go to the heart of the whole affair:

a) “What the hell is going on here?” That’s pretty much the tenor of the email that David Balding sent to Jim Wilson and Gianpierro Cavalleri (without the “hell” bit at any rate). What was going on? Their business partner Alistair Moffat had been publically spouting nonsense dressed up as science, and using it to flog what appeared to be a commercial venture dressed up as a “massively subsidized” “DNA project”. How could they be associated with such a thing? It really was shocking. And it was important, because there were issues of scientific integrity here. The majority of geneticists who have entered into this debate have agreed with this assessment and these concerns.

b) “I don’t think you’ve given Wilson (and Moffat) a fair shake”. That’s the other shocking aspect of all this. Wilson and Cavalleri (to whom the email was addressed) were given an eminently fair shake – the opportunity and indeed the expectation that they would respond to Balding’s email and explain themselves. Instead, they responded with threats of legal action.

I continue to hope that Wilson and Cavalleri (and indeed Moffat) will use this blog, or indeed any other appropriate avenue, to explain themselves. Like David Balding and most other respondents on this page, I consider Jim Wilson’s comments to be a partial explanation at best. Will they work with Alistair Moffat to improve his understanding of the material he regularly presents as the implied “expert” on radio and elsewhere? Will they ensure that they do not wittingly or unwittingly over-sell what personal genetic ancestry testing can deliver? Will they accept that promoting their business as a “massively subsidized” “DNA project” that people can “sign up to” is at best misleading, and undertake to promote their business more appropriately in the future? These are not minor issues.

I assume you don’t really love the way my post started. You Brits and your sarcasm. Sadly, you have rather demonstrated the points I was trying to make though, which was broadly a) what the hell is going on here?! and b) I don’t think you’ve given Wilson (and Moffat) a fair shake. Firstly, I told you I was unsure of the report (it was from someone who wasn’t there and who very likely heard it from someone else who wasn’t there). Secondly, and crucially, I qualified my “denouncing” with “If true…”. Odd how you manage to spot Balding and Thomas’s rather grudging qualifications… why do you miss my upfront ones?

Anyway, the fact that the story exists in this from, and managed to jump from genetics all the way over to people I used to work with, does suggest that not everyone found it a gratifying sight to see a junior colleague asked utterly irrelevant questions in the formal Q&A after his talk. Do you think that might have an impact on him making such talks in the future? Would that constitute stifling debate? Could they not just ask the questions afterwards if they really wanted to know the answers? Or was this about something else?

As for my “defense” of Wilson and Moffat, I was trying put some objectivity about the two accounts of what happened, the other side has been more than amply represented. Even then, I’ve criticized Moffat and the BBC, although I suppose I’ve not attacked Wilson (I think he has a silly haircut – there, will that do?) And of course there are people who are more informed about this than me: I knew nothing of any of this, from the core subject matter to this particular incident, until last week (was quite clear about that, I thought). But I imagine plenty of the other posters are similarly uninformed, although I see they are not attacked.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by your response but somehow I am. Europeans do have more of a tendency to be suspicious of companies or profit-making, especially academics. Although, it didn’t stop them putting their noses in the trough though: I worked for a UK biotech before retiring back to the States. I suppose you’d say my age and Americanism is what makes me more susceptible to the snake oil that is “phylogeography”. You may well be right.

Wilson at least is a colleague of yours, does he not deserve to be heard out in good faith? Do you know for a fact that the decision to threaten action was his? If not, does this mean I should mock people who work at Apple for their many, many, many unethical practices? For instance, ridiculing him about the Newsweek/Time edition doesn’t seem to me like giving him a fair hearing, especially when it’s clear he’s not making a scientific point but demonstrating the public’s interest in the topic.

He comes across, in his writing, this post and on TV as a decent chap. I’ve seen nothing here to alter that view. But twice people have posted snippets of these infamous emails, both times they state there’s nothing wrong with them, yet both twice they don’t just post them in full.

Anyhow, I’m off home this weekend, was only back in the UK to see some old friends. Love to say it’s been fun…

There are indeed two sides to every debate. Some are more informed than others. I love the way you start your defence of Wilson and Moffat by noting “it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has reliable data about why BritainsDNA threatened to sue”, and then end it by denouncing as “disgraceful behaviour” a piece of ninth degree hearsay that “Balding and Thomas effectively heckled Wilson at a recent lecture, attempting to derail his presentation”. Pot calling the kettle black?

I am in the fortunate position of not having to theorize and not having to rely on hearsay. I was one of the two colleagues cc’d on the original emails from Thomas and Balding to Wilson and Cavalleri that led to these threats of legal action, so I know exactly what these emails contained. I was also at the Wilson lecture you referred to.

Regarding the lecture, neither Thomas nor Balding heckled Jim during his presentation, so there was no attempt to derail it or to “silence academic debate”. What they did do was ask Jim about the BritainsDNA affair during the Q&A at the end, asking him to respond to the twin issues of honesty (was BritainsDNA subsidized or not?) and scientific respectability (how can one be taken seriously as a scientist if one does not distance oneself from the palpable nonsense spouted by Moffat during his Today interview?). However, the Chair over-ruled these questions, arguing that the meeting was not the appropriate scientific forum for them to be asked. So if anyone was being silenced, it was in fact Thomas and Balding. And incidentally, I’m pretty sure that it was as a direct consequence of this that all these blog posts have now come into being – in an attempt to create the appropriate scientific forum.

Regarding the emails and the consequent threat to sue, the issue was over the following sentence from David Balding: “I, naturally enough, suspected that this [Moffat’s interview on the Today program] was a shameless duping of the BBC into promoting a fraudulent commercial enterprise that peddles genetic nonsense for profit, and was even more shocked to see your names [Jim Wilson and Gianpierro Cavalleri] prominently promoting this business”. The other issue was the fact that I and another colleague were cc’d on the email, thus making it “public”.

I’m not a lawyer. I would note however that David says “I … suspected that this was … promoting a fraudulent commercial enterprise”, and he also says this was a natural reaction to listening to Moffat’s interview. I think that would be my natural reaction to listening to Moffat’s interview as well. That doesn’t mean to say I think BritainsDNA is fraudulent. This would simply be my natural first reaction to hearing Moffat’s guff on Radio 4.

I agree with David Pirie that one should never say never. There may even be people out there who would argue that Alistair Moffat presented a thoughtful, well-reasoned, well-researched, balanced and fair interview on that fateful Today show back in 2012. The interview is still there (http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9736000/9736128.stm) so people can decide for themselves. I would note however that not a single blog or comment has espoused that view, so I think it would be fair to place it in the “Queen of Sheba was from Mars” category.

It is also possible (never say never) that this threat of legal action might eventually be translated into actual legal action. Perhaps people are now in a better position to decide for themselves whether their legal case is strong enough. Personally, I’m prepared to eat my hat if it does.

My final observation on all this is the following. The reason that Jim gives for pursuing legal action was to curtail the negative impact that Thomas and Balding’s comments might have on his company, I guess on the assumption that I and my other colleague would go around bad-mouthing BritainsDNA based on the contents of their email. Well, the fact is that this is the first time I’ve publically spoken out on all of this, and my colleague has been equally reticent. Nor have I even done much private speaking on the subject. The irony of this situation, and one familiar to many a politician, is that it wasn’t the original story that has fuelled the flames of public opprobrium. It was the attempted cover-up – Moffat et al’s decision to threaten legal action – that has done so. They’ve made their bed, now they must lie in it.

Didn’t know that, but I’m not entirely convinced: the story is written by James Gillespie who doesn’t seem to be a science journalist. http://journalisted.com/james-gillespie.

Anyway, as I see I’ve become the resident malcontent, I’ll leave after this post. If I hadn’t checked the notify replies by email box I doubt I’d ever have come back to this site…

One of the things that piqued by curiosity, I guess, was I noticed that many people jumped to conclusions after Vincent Plagnol’s initial post. I thought that was odd on a science blog, to slightly modify Holmes, it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has reliable data about why BritainsDNA threatened to sue. Surely Wilson and Moffat deserved the assumption of good faith until demonstrated otherwise?

Obviously I have the advantage of both not being involved in the field and seeing both sides before I came to any firm conclusions. A number of things seems pretty clear to me and I’ll post them here.

The fight over the word subsidise is odd. Balding and Thomas give a dictionary definition (always a sign of charlatanism in my view) to back up their “most serious point”. So just to confirm my own charlatanism, here’s the relevant definition from the OED: “To support by grants of money; spec. (a) (of a state, public body, company, etc.) to contribute towards the running costs of (an organization, activity, commodity, etc.), esp. in order to keep prices low for the consumer; (b) to provide funding to help maintain (a person or his or her lifestyle, etc.).” From what I understand, these genetic tests cost a lot of money to set up. If they put up the capital to put that infrastructure in place and that then allowed for cheaper testing, that would back Moffat’s usage. Is it an odd way of putting it? Yes. It is potentially misleading? Maybe. Is it categorically wrong? No. Is it sufficient to imply fraud? Certainly not.

In addition, raising this as this their main problem with the interview clearly determines that they were making implications of bad faith and not engaging in an academic discussion.

Even this from Balding and Thomas’s post is odd: “ … you will not report or state as a matter of undisputed fact that our clients’ science is ‘wrong’ or untrue.” Scientists shouldn’t be doing this anyway, especially almost everyone here has not actually seen their science!

Scientists are not the guardians of truth, nor should they ever put themselves in that position (for their own sake as much as anyone elses). Science has absolutely nothing to say about truth (although one could argue that it is the *pursuit* of truth). I see another blogger who posted on this gets this: DC’s Improbable Science is perfectly named. For a scientist, claims are neither true or false, they are supported or not, likely or not, backed by evidence or not. If you want to pontificate about truth, go be the Pope. I hear there’s a vacancy.

It is “possible” that the Queen of Sheba was from Mars and Mr Cohen was from Venus and they replaced all the mitachrodial and Y DNA with their magic space wands. It’s just not probable. All science can say about this claim is that it’s unsupported by the current evidence and we have very good reasons for believing that didn’t happen. But you can’t say with certainty that it’s untrue.

A number of other things about the content of Balding and Thomas’s post strike me as troubling, particularly this: “In the interests of your business and the careers of you and Gianpiero, you should come clean with an explicit retraction”. The thing about their business is fine, but according to their UCL profiles both of them are senior, established professors. This could well be interpreted as a threat to undermine their careers (Wilson certainly is young and much their junior): the academic system is predicated on assumption of good faith, so two senior professors could easily subvert the system without leaving any trace by just being technically correct but unenthusiastic in, say, reviews.

I have also just heard, about ninth hand if that’s worth anything, that Balding and Thomas effectively heckled Wilson at a recent lecture, attempting to derail his presentation. The lecture apparently had nothing to do with BritainsDNA. If that’s true, I find it disgraceful behaviour and certainly a more clear an attempt to silence academic debate than anything else here.

Two sides to everything, yadadada.

http://www.genomesunzipped.org/tag/cheltenham-science-festival

and Mark is now Head of Communications at the Wellcome Trust, which funds quite a few GNZ contributors.

There’s obviously something special about the mitochondrial and Y DNA for a lay person like me: they are massive, contiguous stretches of DNA that were directly passed down to me by my ancestors, whereas the rest is all jumbled up such that I probably don’t have much that recognisably my great great great great great great grandfathers first chromosome.

Anyhow, I’ve now read Moffat and Wilson’s book, which was a good read for the non-expert. They make a decent team: Wilson is clearly a gifted communicator of science (the Izzards show demonstrated that), and I entirely agree that BritiansDNA should make more use of him instead. Moffat writes with passion about history.

In the end the book got me to get my own DNA checked, looking forward to the results, although I went with Family Tree DNA as that seemed the better deal overall.

Don’t get me wrong, I agree that the BBC was probably wrong to broadcast it and absolutely we should hold it to account when its standards slip (as in this case). It just wasn’t a big deal in the grand scheme (read Bad Pharma for something to get hot under the collar about).

But does it not strike you as odd that *only* The Sunday Times picked up the story? So either TST reads this blog (does that sounds likely?) or someone with an axe to grind directed their attention to it.

Now, the question is whether any of the academics named cooperated with TST story. This story has only one point: to attack the BBC. Murdoch is not remotely interested in improving the BBC, he wants it dissolved so we can all watch Fox News UK. To improve the BBC, you go to the Guardian or the like.

To collaborate with that agenda over some academic handbags is what I find so disturbing.

I would be very surprised if anyone who blogs for GNZ is anti-BBC. E.g. like every red-blooded Englishman I am eternally ready to go to the wall for the Beeb – no-one here is “colluding” with anyone.

The BBC is a public body tasked with providing broadcasting in the public interest (and without profit motif), and that is exactly why we hold it to a higher standard than we would, say, Sky News. There is no point in having the BBC if it is just going to sacrifice accuracy and integrity in the name of a flashy-sounding story or on the back of a personal friendship (the private sector is perfectly good at doing both of those things for a fraction of the cost). There is no point allowing the BBC to slip into the press gutter in the name of “protecting” it.

I listened to the Today show clip and I agree that the BBC probably shouldn’t have broadcast it, especially given the relationship between this Moffat chap and Jim Naughtie, I really don’t see what the problem is. I’ve heard far worse science from actual scientists much less historians! Take Vincent Plagnol’s article, for example: even I know there weren’t trillions of people walking around 200 years ago and he’s a geneticist…

What compelled my to post, though, is something considerably more sinister: the potential collusion between public funded academics and anti-BBC agenda of the Murdoch press (The Sunday Times). To me, that is far more disturbing that a fluff piece on Radio 4. If we think the BBC is bad now, wait until its gone and all we’ve got is Sky News…