The news on March 24, 2025, that the company 23andMe had filed for bankruptcy protection so that it could sell itself sent customers scrambling to delete their DNA data. The firm’s IT system crashed, overloaded by desperate traffic. Though basic services have been restored, volume problems are ongoing. The time it takes to receive a two-factor identification code in order to log in is best measured not in seconds but on a 24-hour clock, and the “customer care site” for support has been logjammed into silence.
And well might people panic. The attorneys general of New York, California, Arizona and South Carolina have already advised patrons to purge their information, and there will be more officials giving this advice.
23andMe has amassed a vast store of highly sensitive information. This data is its commodity, the biggest asset of a business now in bankruptcy proceedings. The huge worry is where these highly personal details will end up. 23andMe has promised that it will uphold protections laid down in its “privacy policy.” But it also openly admits in the “data sharing” section that “If we are involved in a bankruptcy, merger, acquisition, reorganization, or sale of assets, your Personal Information may be accessed, sold or transferred as part of that transaction.” And it also leaves the door open for the company to make subsequent changes to its “privacy policy,” which they have already made moves to do.
Health insurers’ desks? Employers’ desks? Where will this information end up and what future decisions will it affect for customers and their families? That is the concern. Even users who have successfully deleted their data are skeptical about whether the company has truly removed it. Has the material been excised, or just ghosted until the deal is done?
But DNA banking has always been dangerous. The strange thing is that it’s taken this long for the jeopardies and consequences to reveal themselves to the masses of people now desperately seeking to withdraw their deposits.
For me, the lid on DNA was lifted seven years ago at an intimate dinner party in the gentrified Hamilton Heights of West Harlem, New York. We took the subway there from our hotel along corridors of jostling commuters. The January night was clear with a stinging wind as we walked cautiously down the steep icy street to Carleen’s riverside apartment. I was researching for a book on two gay celebrity chiefs and she was one of their closest friends. There was just me and my partner, and Carleen had invited a close friend.
The subject came up, as things do when you are fishing for commonalities. I remember thinking at the end of the dinner guest’s story about the turmoil of exploring someone’s DNA, “Lucky that’s not me.” But the great pathology of human optimism is just that thought; that because it hasn’t happened to you yet, it never will. In fact, the lid of Pandora’s box had already been opened and a timer had been set to go off.
The dinner story began with a discussion about 23andMe. I had only recently purchased a kit and taken their home DNA test. Even I saw it as an indulgence. I look like my mother; I think like my father. My immediate genetic history was self-evident. What I was looking for was buried deeper in my DNA. I wanted to know what parts of the globe my ancestors had lived in before coming to New Zealand in 1842. My curiosity was purely academic, I thought.
But that wasn’t the case for Carleen’s other dinner guest. As it turned out, Rose (a pseudonym) was a pioneer mom. In the earliest days of in vitro fertilization, when a woman’s womb was the Wild West of unregulated possibility, Rose was a 40-something single woman who wanted a child. So she attended a high-profile fertility clinic and became pregnant using donor sperm. There were few restrictions in the late 1970s and 1980s, other than cost. Like many women attending the same clinic, Rose was given to believe that the sperm she would receive was from a medical student. The implication was that this was an isolated gesture by a trainee doctor to assist patients who were unable to get pregnant without using donor sperm.
The procedure for Rose was successful and she gave birth to a cherished little baby girl. Her daughter grew up happy and academically able, excelling at school and later college. As advances in DNA technology soared exponentially, Rose’s daughter became curious about the missing piece in the puzzle of her parentage.
23andMe was an obvious platform to explore. Established in 2006, it was the first company globally to offer a universal autosomal DNA test. An autosome is any chromosome other than a sex chromosome. 23andMe’s saliva-based test kit was such a ground-breaking innovation that it was Time magazine’s invention of the year in 2008.
After Rose’s daughter took the test, she waited for the results to arrive — and arrive they did. First there was one half sibling, then more and more half brothers and sisters emerged, like a carriage filling up on the underground. As her half family grew, she reached out to a half sibling that had been in touch with many of her DNA family.
There were hugely differing reactions to the news when they were told. Some people were pleased to know they had multiple half siblings. Others contacted — or who took the DNA test themselves — didn’t even know they were the outcome of an in vitro fertilization program, which could potentially involve a donated egg and sperm. They had been brought up believing both parents were their biological parents, and the shock was immense. Family trees were pruned or expanded and genealogical histories rewritten. The incendiary information blew some families apart.
But 23andMe’s revelations did not end there. The reason why the DNA test linked so many half siblings is that the sperm donor was not some magnanimous medical student, but the director of the fertility clinic himself. He had promised clients like Rose that the donor would be anonymous, and their contribution to the sperm bank an occasional if not singular event. This was reassuring, because it reduced the possibility of two half siblings, unknown to each other, connecting sexually in the future.
According to Genomelink, 0.5% of all men living today carry Genghis Khan’s Y chromosome, 750 years after his death. This amounts to approximately 20 million men. All are distant relatives — or, potentially, direct descendants — of a warrior king who, in a single lifetime, built one of the largest empires in the history of the world. While this assertion is based on inexact science, Genghis Khan was certainly a powerhouse sperm bank. And it seems that some fertility practitioners in the United States in the 1970s and ‘80s had similar ambitions to populate the world.
Rose’s doctor was not the only specialist who used his own sperm to fertilize the ova of multiple women. In fact, there was a flurry of cases. According to Mary Whitfill Roeloffs, writing for Forbes in December 2023, there have been at least 50 doctors accused of “fertility fraud” across the U.S. There will no doubt be more. Already named in lawsuits are Merle Berger, a former professor at Harvard Medical School; Christopher Herndon from the University of Washington; David Claypool based in Spokane, Washington; Vermont’s John Boyd Coates III and Morris Wortman of Rochester, New York.
One of the most flagrant betrayals was allegedly perpetrated by Berger who, according to NBC News in December 2023, promised his patient that the sperm came from a donor “who resembled her husband, who did not know her, and whom she did not know.” At another clinic, patients were invited to choose the biographical profile that best fit the type of donor they wanted for their child. The profiles were fake.
Quantities can only be estimated, but court cases across the U.S. cite figures ranging from tens to hundreds of children in the cases of individual specialists. Dr. Donald Cline of Indianapolis, for example, fathered at least 94 children at his clinic through artificial insemination. The danger here is that the more half siblings you have in a population, the greater the chance that they will encounter each other without realizing the relationship.
Our New York dinner conversation occurred at the beginning of 2018, when the “fertility fraud” phenomenon was just unfolding. The number of doctors involved was beginning to stack up. Rose’s daughter was at the start of her DNA journey — and so, unknowingly, was I.
That night, the temperature outside had dropped so much that Carleen insisted on calling an Uber. We climbed in the car and drove back through the glistening late-night streets of New York City, our heads buzzing with the night’s dinner conversation.
Back in New Zealand, I received regular DNA relative notifications from 23andMe, but they never got much better than distant cousins, and I began to lose interest. That is, until my first cousin once removed, the granddaughter of my aunt Doris, visited from Australia. Heather is a forensic detective in Melbourne, so I assumed she might be interested. Also, I had this nagging curiosity spurred on by the revelations of my New York dinner party. Like Rose’s daughter, there was a possible family mystery to be solved. Patricia, my mother, was 23 years younger than Doris, her sister and only other sibling. The woman I knew as my grandmother, Olive, was 47 years old when she supposedly gave birth to my mother. My mother had grown up being teased at school that her mother Olive was really her grandmother, an assertion the family had emphatically denied. After many debates and discussions on the topic in my family, we had grown to accept the official story as the truth.
The idea of Heather taking a 23andMe DNA test languished. It was during the universal lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic, when everyone was more confined, that Heather emailed me to say she was taking the test. The boredom of being home alone had gotten to her. DNA results were taking longer to process because of the pandemic, so I waited, at times struggling to find the patience.
Then, one day, at 5:30 a.m., the news arrived. A small, inconsequential sound on my phone awakened me: a chime announcing a new text, this one from 23andMe. It would turn my mother’s life — and the family’s narrative — upside down.
“You have new DNA relatives,” it stated. I clicked on it immediately, without even getting out of bed.
What it revealed was that Heather was not my cousin once removed, but simply my first cousin, of the same generation. We shared grandparents. In DNA terms, this meant that my mother’s “sister” was in fact her mother. Doris, the woman my mother believed to be her sister, had actually given birth to her at the age of 23. My mother had been raised by her grandmother as if she were her mother.
There was a further twist. The man who impregnated Doris was her boyfriend at the time, and they married some years after my mother was born. The couple went on to have three more children: a second daughter and two sons, including Heather’s father. My mother grew up believing they were her niece and nephews, when in fact they were her full siblings.
In terms of the actual hardware of her life, my mother had been raised as an only child in relative poverty by an elderly widow, while her full siblings were brought up separately by their parents in an affluent nuclear family.
It was still about 5:30 a.m., and I was processing the news. By 7 a.m., I had no idea what I was going to do with it, so I rang my brother.
“You won’t believe it,” I began, and the whole astonishing story tumbled out. We agonized all that day over what to do. Our mother was 85 years old. The nation was in lockdown and she lived on another island, 463 miles away. Getting there was impossible.
Besides, I wanted another test. How could I be sure the results were correct? By 6 p.m. that night, I rang my brother again. He expressed his serious reservations about telling our mother. But, in the meantime, he and others had rung around the family spreading the news. By dinnertime, my mother was the only person in her immediate family who didn’t know the truth about who her parents were.
Pandora’s box is a chest full of troubles and woes, and all of them were released that night. I rang my mother thinking the 23andMe results could be right, but my purpose in contacting her was to explain what had happened and, I figured, to assuage her anxieties by promising that I would arrange for a follow-up DNA test with another member of the family, just to double-check.
I was unprepared for her reaction. When I first posited the idea to my mom that her sister and brother-in-law might be her parents, she emitted a cry something similar, I imagine, to the death rattle of the dinosaurs when they saw the comet coming. She never doubted the results for a second and never forgave me for telling her. Inadvertently, I had turned her existence upside down and confirmed her worst fears.
Her life had been a lie, she felt, one kept by a coterie of probably six or so people. She had been born at home and her grandparents were named on her birth certificate. Her birth mother Doris had lived to nearly 100 years old and had never told her. But Doris inexplicably wept during my mother’s visits in the last months of her life. The irony is that my mother’s birth parents had lived through a world war, the arrival of the contraception pill and the era of LSD, free love and flower power. They were there for the second wave of feminism, the end of capital punishment, the legalization of abortion and the passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Act. New Zealand, along with the Western world, had shifted on its axis in relation to lifestyle, politics and beliefs, yet my mother’s birth parents and their coterie of keepers had refused to give up their secret.
My mom would only live another 18 months before she died in a rest home of COVID-19. Fortunately, over those months, she had the chance to spend time with and embrace the idea that her niece and nephews were in fact her full siblings. It is truly unfortunate, though, that she never made peace with me, the messenger.
As a professional biographer and historian — sometimes of true crime intrigue — my own ordeal of late-in-life revelation left me wondering about the many, much more public mysteries that have been solved using gene technology. Between 1989 and 2020, according to the Innocence Project, for example, there have been 375 prisoner exonerations. One of the best-known is Craig Coley, who was freed after serving 38 years of a jail sentence for the murder of his ex-partner and her 4-year-old son. DNA testing showed that Coley could not have been the perpetrator, and he was released at 71 years old, with a compensation payment of $21 million. DNA has also brought long-overdue solutions to crime cases that have been languishing for decades in storage vaults and archives. It is estimated that over 650 cold cases in the U.S. have been solved using genome sequencing.
Among the most high-profile arrests generated by a forensic genealogy search is that of the Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo (also known as the Night Stalker). According to DNASolves.com, in 2018, DeAngelo was arrested and charged with 13 counts of murder, 51 sexual assaults and 120 burglaries. His first murder dates back to 1975.
To find DeAngelo, investigators used information stored on public genealogy databases. A testing laboratory isolated his genetic profile and linked it across crime scenes to get a picture of the geographical scope of his offending. Then they used not just CODIS (the official Combined DNA Index System) but genetic information stored with direct-to-consumer companies such as GEDMatch, Family TreeDNA and 23andMe to establish a link to their suspect sample. In DeAngelo’s case, there was no direct genetic hit. So it became a matter of finding partial matches and building a family tree based on an analysis of identity by descent (IBD) using segments of shared ancestral DNA to establish the relationship. The DNA results were then checked against things such as gender, age, address and place of work, to get a clearer picture of the potential offender. A prime suspect can be identified from relations as far removed as third cousins.
When investigators reached this point in DeAngelo’s case, it was a process of comparing his genetic profile with DNA left at multiple crimes. The complication was that there was no legal obligation for him to provide a sample. Detectives, therefore, went in pursuit of items that might provide a profile — things such as discarded napkins, utensils and razors. DeAngelo was arrested in August 2018 and charged with a series of kidnappings and abductions. A plea deal taking the death sentence off the table resulted in his confession to the vast number of crimes for which he was eventually convicted.
Cold cases involving Johns and Janes Doe (the unidentified remains of female and male subjects) have also been closed using forensic genealogy. In 1998, the skeleton of a woman was found in Independence, Missouri. Her remains became known as the Jackson County Jane Doe. For years, Jackson Jane’s identity remained unknown. In 2024, her case was referred to Othram, an organization specializing in advanced forensic DNA testing, to see if an identity for the woman could be found using IBD. A DNA profile was extracted from her remains. Genetic links were made through Othram and the mystery woman was identified as Marie Antoinette Young, born on Dec. 1, 1922. After she went missing, Marie’s family took the independent action of hiring a private investigator to search for her for many years.
But perhaps one of the most remarkable instances of DNA delivering a result has to be the cold case murder of Anna Jean Kane in 1988. Her body was discovered on the berm of a country road in Perry Township, Berks County, Pennsylvania. Over the years, there were many leads that failed to deliver a result. In 1990, a letter relating to the homicide was sent to the local newspaper, signed “concerned citizen.” On reviewing its contents, investigators realized the letter was most likely sent by Kane’s killer, because it contained detailed elements of the crime not disclosed to the public. When genetic genealogy technology became a viable tool in the investigation, crime scene samples from Kane’s body and DNA from saliva on the envelope were sent to a forensic laboratory, with the outcome that, in 2022, Scott Grim was identified as Kane’s murderer.
Sadly, Grim had remained at large for three decades before dying in 2018, just four years before justice could be served. However, the naming of Kane’s killer gave her family peace of mind and the closure they had waited so long to receive.
While 20th-century crime fiction had its famous detective heroes like Hercule Poirot, DNA must be the even greater sleuth of 21st-century true crime. DNA is inside us, coded in our cells and on almost everything we touch. It is invisible and ethereal as well as immutable and concrete. It is the blueprint of who and what we are. And that is why DNA as corporate property in bankruptcy proceedings is so dangerous.
Genetic genealogy unlocks secrets. It can identify birth parents and prove (or disprove) paternity. It can exonerate prisoners and lock up criminals who have slipped through decades of detection efforts. It can identify bones and link them to the lost and missing. It answers questions and solves mysteries. It is a truth-teller that refutes lies. But, in the wrong hands, it is explosive. Banked and commodified, it is perhaps the greatest and most profound breach of personal privacy the world has ever faced.
On a personal level, the real damage for me was done by the consequences of testing, not 23andMe’s recent bankruptcy news. My mother struggled with the cruelty of her family’s deception, and I carry the weight of responsibility for having told her. When you get your DNA notification, it’s hard to believe that something so matter-of-fact could be so volatile. DNA tests should come with a billboard-sized warning. Because once you take the test, there is no turning back. If what you learn is life-changing or unwanted, there is no putting those facts back in the box and closing the lid. And maybe there can be no guarantee, either, that those facts will ever be expunged from the corporate record. You have possibly, as I did, unleashed the furies. Your only comfort is the realization that the urge to fabricate is human, but so is the need to know the truth, and no amount of money can justify the transfer of ownership of something so profound.
Sign up to our mailing list to receive our stories in your inbox.