 We're giving a lecture one time a month. Okay, so... I'm sorry. Okay, we are live. We are live on Facebook. There is your... I'm just taking a photograph. Live on Facebook. I'm going to give that to you. It's like the Oscars. Okay, and up here, and if Debbie and Michelle can take their places, and if John Keary can come up to the front, please, and take a place on the expert panel. You must have to try your best. So, we're going to have an expert panel session now, and we're just going to ask the experts some questions. We might even just chat amongst ourselves. We're live on Facebook, and you can see everybody there, I think. I'll shift the camera slightly in a moment. But does anybody have any questions for the expert panel? And you can ask any questions you like. You can have any comments you like. And I am going to kick it off by asking you each in turn what would you like to see in five years' time in terms of genetic genealogy and Catherine, because you have the microphone you will start off, I should really refer to you as Caitlin. Caitlin Stark. So, Caitlin, where would you like to see genetic genealogy in five years' time? Well, I have, I'm Caitlin Stark, and I do have two copies of the Warrior gene, which for those of you that know me should not surprise you. I think in five years' time I would like to see the $1,000 genome that actually costs less than the $1,000, but actually debut and be more widespread. That is what I'm waiting for. They have been saying for years that the $1,000 genome which you know is like full genome testing is going to come out. And there was a company that debuted it and it was very limited in scope and I don't even think it was a full genome but that's what I would like to see within five years' time is that test to come out. Great. So, for me, in five years' time, what I'd really like to see is the combination of all the databases. I'd like to see everything combined so that we can, as citizen scientists, that we can get and access the results from everybody that's in the databases. Donna. And once we had that, I'd actually like to see a little bit of the data in the database. Once we had that, I'd actually like to see a way of being able to manage all our matches in a better way. Once I download them, I use spreadsheets to manage all my matches but I think the sites need to do something about a way to flag matches, have better note systems and really be able to message the data a lot more on the site rather than us having to do it off-site. There's lots of things I'd like to see that go to some databases, you know, 20. That's a combination of databases would be fantastic but just seeing an awful lot more people perhaps at least using GenMatch would help on that. I'd also like to see more people doing Y testing and big Y coming down in price to being something that is more affordable and more looked at by those that perhaps overlook it at the moment. Better ways to manage our data as it, you know, gets as we have more and more and more data to manage, ways of managing it is going to be so important. Thanks, Michelle. I'd like to see a massive boost in the size of the databases and in particular growth outside the US because the US is where most of the growth has taken place. I'd like to see 100 million people or 1 billion people in the database at this time and those people testing from the UK, from Ireland, from France, from Germany and expanding into other markets like India and Asia where there's not so much DNA testing these days and Africa as well. There's huge scope of the expansion of DNA testing across the whole of the world so that it's not so US centric as it is at the moment. And John Cleary. I growth everything that they've all said. I think I would say whole genome testing is in its way so I would like to see a situation where people will do one test, get all the relevant markers and information which they will need from that one test so they're not going to be asked to upgrade again and again. But I think one thing perhaps I would add to what the others have said is having new platforms comfortable and easy for testers to read their own data. So at the moment there are platforms which are very suitable for technical analysis and people who can work with big data to extract information and knowledge from that. But I think we also in a means where a tester can look at the data in a very good and easy to understand visual graphical layout and understand and see what there is there and not feel attested and know what this means. So I think the kind of visual platform for people to read their own data is also very important, especially towards whole genome testing. Well those are some great ideas and I think if we've got everything that you wished for in five years time then the world would be a very happy place and we'd be working twice as hard. If the DNA tests do come down in price say to below 100 dollars for whole genome sequencing if we do start sharing the information if we do start testing people all around the world how is that going to happen? Because even 100 dollars is still going to be very very high price to pay for a lot of different countries. So Debbie you talked about testing Africa, India the less developing countries of the world how would you see how is it going to happen? Is it going to be individuals in these countries or do we need some sort of intervention on a government level? Or institutional level? I think some countries probably ended a global initiative recently to get samples with four people with four grandparents born in but they were only looking at people living in the open I think I'd love to see some of the companies doing more sampling in all these countries where we have. I think the 23andMe African Roots project which aims to recruit about 10,000 people who have four African grandparents born within the same 30 to 50 kilometer region so it's very similar to what we've done actually with the people of the British Isles project the Irish DNA Atlas project I think it's laudable they're trying to do the same sort of thing with the Roots into the future African DNA project but what's the current status of it? Because I have not seen anything advertised about it since it launched about three or four years ago they aren't supposed to be rolling out an update to the answers to the competition and people were actually reporting on Facebook I think it was yesterday or the day before that they were getting new results and I was told that was rolling out because I saw some results recently from somebody from Ghana who was very disappointed and I looked at the database they didn't even have any results from people from Nigeria so he was coming out 75% Nigerian which was complete nonsense so all the tests are geared for people of European origin so the companies if they want to expand in different markets they need to get their refrigerants even like living DNA which is fine scale breakdowns and we could test some of the African origin but they don't get any regional breakdowns at all and they get the country wrong so I think Ancestry is the one that does best in that regard at the moment because they break Western Africa into six crops which is better than just the one block you get with Family Tree DNA and I think also with 23 of me you're still currently just one big block in South Saharan Africa hopefully that will change as they start analyzing and incorporating the African DNA roots project data into their reference panel but we still wait to see if that's going to be the case but it is changing I think several people made the point that they'd like to see the databases of people in three or four years time we're going to see major changes I work with a few Irish adoptees including some mixed race Irish adoptees, African father and Irish mother and I actually found the African father the African family of one of the mixed race adoptees so now what we are waiting to do or hoping to do is contact the African family many of which are still living in Africa so it is possible and this will change a lot of things for mixed race adoptees especially but also for people who have African ancestry now Michelle you I think mentioned you'd like to see more people in the databases what do you think is going to happen to genetic genealogy when there are 40 million people in the databases? I think that we're going to see a lot more surprises adoptees are going to find it easier to find out where they came from easier to work out NPEs and unknown parentage etc because most of the time when someone tests you're going to be able to find a first a second cousin that you're going to be able to work from and get the answer hope, what I really hope is that more emphasis is put on cousin matching and less on ethnicity it's probably not going to happen but I would love those 30 40 million people to understand that they're going to get cousin matching and to be on board with that and to want to work with that I think that that would be a huge thing for genealogy in general not just genetic genealogy if more people who tested were wanted to build trees and wanted to get involved in that side of it but of course you can't be right to test for whatever reason they want to test but I think that there's just a lack of information at the moment on what you get and on the fact that the cousin matching is there and what may happen with the cousin matching so yeah I think that it will be a huge benefit for genealogy and for the kind of people that the kind of cases that I work on in terms of adoptees and unknown parentage and what Debbie is saying is a really really important point about more diverse databases and more people in other countries testing and that's something I would really love to see too I have two cases where it's an Indian father that we're looking for and in one there's just absolutely nothing you know in the first sort of five pages of matches on any of the sites I can pinpoint every single match is on the mother's side and the mother is Scottish Irish you know there's nothing on the Indian side that I can do anything with on the other there is one recently close match that I think is around a second cousin once removed match and on the Indian side but these are immigrants to the United States and that at the moment is the only way for you know India or countries like that that we are going to find close enough relations to work out a mystery so what we really need are people in India testing and people in different countries testing in order to work that out that would be my hope as the databases expand great and does anyone on the panel think there's any particular challenges associated with having a database of 40 million people I think it will actually just make life easier I mean I'm finding that somebody says oh you're lucky when you get a match if you can find it straight away who that match is and you can find that the more work I do the luckier I get so if we're getting lots and lots of matches we're able to place them when a new match comes in I got a new match yesterday and I solved it in five minutes so I was literally getting up for a cup of coffee before I moved over here got a new match solved it because of all the shared matches that I'd already solved and she just slotted right in so I think it might make things easier but you know then we get more MPEs more adaptives and are we not actually exactly as we would think we are I was wondering though we always have the perennial problem of privacy or of discussion about privacy, security, confidentiality do you think that's going to change that at all or are we still going to have the same kind of discussions in five years time as we're having now about privacy or is the size of the database going to create new risks in terms of privacy and maybe civil liberty groups saying we want this shut down yes I do feel like privacy issue is going to become more of a concern and also more secure I think that mainly because so many governments are concerned about it insurance companies are concerned about it and in my own particular case I have a privacy issue where I you know the person just does not want it known a scandalous thing that they did not want known and so I just kept that to myself I have not even shared it with the rest of our family so privacy is a really big and it is going to continue to be a concern and I think we are going to see our governments try to incorporate laws to protect people so in five years time it's going to be so and I think what we have seen ourselves of the course of these last five years these last ten years is that the standards and the regulation and the restrictions around DNA testing are getting tighter and tighter and tighter all the time and a lot of that is for self-regulation so a lot of the companies like Ancestry they are self-regulating we have in Europe of course now the new GDPR coming in fairly soon which will booster the privacy laws across every industry not just genetic genealogy and that is making the companies change their terms and conditions their privacy statements and so on but Catherine do you think self-regulation of the genetic genealogy industry is going to be enough in the future? I don't know if it will be enough maybe it will be a combination of the two I do appreciate all the work by the genealogists in Europe who have been working on standards for the GDPR for ISOC to recommend the GDPR debuts in May of this year so we have been working on a review of standards and I appreciate it immensely I think we will see more in the future of governments taking a proactive approach hopefully they will do things like follow California's example in the United States in 2008 President Bush signed into law the genetic information and non-discrimination act which protects people from having their DNA used against them for insurance and employment purposes however California has expanded upon that I wish the other 49 states would follow California's example and it is just such a simple thing Alex Padilla who is now our secretary of state when he was a senator he added the words genetic information to the things we discriminated against so California has one of the strongest protection rules like that so I think in both countries and in individual states etc etc that we will see much more of that Of course taking the American example there was a movement to try and repeal the Gena law in America can you tell us a little bit about that and what your reaction to it was I it actually happened right quickly after Trump was sworn into office there was a group of legislators that wanted to repeal it and I think in part it was backed by business and commerce because that's where a lot of it has come from in the past because employers want to be able to not harass someone if they think that it's going to cost them basically to put it in a nutshell initially my own thought was the way that legislation is in the US sometimes it takes a long time for a bill to come into being and some of them don't even make it to the floor so I had a very wait and see attitude but it's actually still ticking along so I saw it may eventually need to counteract that another one too is that recently came out in the news is Senator Chuck Schumer who's from New York wants the Federal Trade Commission FTC to come in and I guess given opinion or I'm not entirely sure what he's calling for but he wants more how should I say standards yeah it's well it could be regulation could be legislation but it's not really specific in the media so we don't know yet what he's asking for but as it goes along like that I think we'll see more of it so genetic genealogists and especially I saw it as trying to be very proactive and coming up with standards and things like that to address these things that's why I said proactive because we're doing it in advance and not being reactive that's great to hear because I think one of the things that turns people off DNA testing is will this be used against me would it tell me a medical risk will my insurance companies get hold of the information which is going to be a perennial concern we're always going to have that one of the other things that was said to be recently though is that it can actually be used for good in the sense that if employers have your genetic information they can actually advise you on screening programs they can actually maximize your optimise your health behaviours so that is one possible advantage of having employers have access to genetic information the big question is would they use it responsibly and that is always going to be the big issue the only one I know currently that's possibly doing that would be Kaiser Permanente it's a HMO health medical organisation based primarily in California and several years ago Kaiser did put out the call for people to submit their genetic data so that they could research it but I know some people refused to do it and did not want to participate because they didn't get the results back so Kaiser was maybe a little proprietary with it and you know seeing what is in people's data and not sharing the results with them like you would get if you had done a 23 and B test so anyhow because they are an HMO and it's a health maintenance organisation they perhaps would be a proactive employer in that respect but that's the only one I can cite John, do you have any idea what's happening in the UK in terms of medical insurance and genetic information non-disclosure? I don't know I'm trying to think what may be different in the future when many millions more people test I for one would want my employer to have any access to my whole genome apart from anything else if there were things in that genome that would predict the likelihood of me going down with a particular disease or condition at a certain age that might make my employer be able towards me in ways that I would want them to be able towards me so I think that's one of the big privacy issues which we face and I suppose that would be one that would be significant if a lot more genetic data would be put into a public databases I'm also trying to think through what it is that we object to in terms of insurance companies and the problem there of course is that even if you're older and you're so interested in getting life insurance for yourself you may have genes that your children or your nieces or nephews who are younger may have and that may be information that an insurance company could begin to use against their price in life insurance or other kinds of products so I don't know how we're going to deal with this and I think ultimately there was a tension between our desire as genealogists to have public access to data and to know what chromosomes would match if there was people with arm and that does depend on selling public platforms like GEDMATCH in which you can put anyone's number once you have that number and see if they match anything with you and whether you know it or not and that's very convenient if you're researching your genealogy but ultimately with a database of 30, 40 million or whatever it's going to be there are definitely dangers there and I really could put my number if I knew it and find out what alligals I had in particular places and so, yeah, there are big implications I don't really know how we're going to handle those It's a very, very good point because of course a lot of people post their GEDMATCH kit numbers on Facebook and they are usually in closed groups so there's a degree of protection because of that but I've seen it in some public groups as well so people need to be aware of the risks and need to be aware of the challenges and take the appropriate protective behavior Any questions from the audience? We have Susan I just want to say that I belong to Kaiser and one of the reasons I did it was because by the time I was ready to reproduce my father had been dead for 25 years so they'd gotten rid of his so I would have wanted to know what risk factors I had and so that's why I did it was not just for myself, but for my curiosity but also for my own children Do Kaiser, are you sure that you've got results with you? Not yet, no I haven't tried I just saw it as a benefit for my children Interest in China and Japan Michelle? Yeah, that's a good question I know in China they're not strictly speaking allowed to send their DNA out of the country but that is not necessarily the case because I've got someone in my project who's actually an ex-pat living in China and his results arrived They don't have their own companies? There is a company in China Regine who they started the Chinese equivalent of 23 in me Don't know of any Japanese company There may well be but the Chinese are spending an absolute fortune state funding genetic search BGI, they're spending more than anyone else I was just going to echo what you're saying I think they're spending massive amounts I think they're the biggest customers for the sequencing instrument producers and they see it as a strategic asset and they're trying to compile a large set of database that may not be public for us but I think it's very active I'm sure the sample count is probably exceeding ours but they're not publicizing and I think it's very strong that China is going to take the lead in genetics over the course of the next decade or so Is the lab actually in China? They're doing lots of research in China so they're doing sequencing in China and they've got a huge complex Great, any other questions or comments? Do the expert panel want to ask me any questions? Fine Well in that case Do you want to Well my question for you is the same question you started out for us What do you want to see in five years? That's what I was going to say Well I mean I would echo everything that was said on the panel I think what I would like to see in five years may be something that wasn't really voiced specifically would be make it easier for beginners to know what tech we're talking about That would be something that's really really important and it's something that I can see people nodding in the audience Something that a lot of people say it's really interesting to hear you guys and I only understand 10% but it's really fascinating what you're actually doing and it's true because we have the most fascinating hobby the most fascinating citizen science projects in the world and I think finding ways that are more accessible for beginners would be a great benefit to everybody So that's what I would like to see in five years time So we've run out of time I'm going to kneel for this last bit so that they can see me on Facebook We've run out of time It's been great to be here in the Titanic Centre in Belfast but hopefully the first time of many Thanks to everybody who's stuck it out for the entire two days of the conference Thanks to everybody on Facebook who've been watching us and thanks very much to our expert panel and all our speakers Please give them a very warm round of applause Thank you We want to give a big round of applause to Maurice We shall see We shall see Ciao folks See you again if I can turn this off I need my glasses Yeah Grand That seems to have worked To answer your question I'm freaking the fact that you live stream and upload all the videos you do the most to actually help people to understand Interesting That's kind of you to say True You do a lot to educate and you do it freely That's true It's just also a matter of they have to have the incentive to want to learn That's true as well It's always great because we always have more newbies here I had three today come up to me and tell me they enjoyed my talk yesterday That's really good I haven't had anyone insulted You haven't insulted anybody else? No, I mean mother are getting myself insulted That's good It was too complicated Yeah, hi That was really interesting Sorry I missed your talk I understand that we might be able to see some of these lectures Anything that we've missed on Facebook if we join the ISOG Genetic Genealogy Ireland If you search on Facebook for Genetic Genealogy Ireland I'll join you up I'm Joan and I'll be asking you and so will India at the back We've We saw mostly everything What is your What's your Facebook? Oh, Joan something Oh, you don't use your surname Oh yes I do Joan Riddell Anything to Gail Riddell Yeah, I'm on her group I think I come from I don't have a face I'm usually up early Joan Riddell worth school self-employed That's not it That might be me, I've got no idea It could be that one Timelines, friends, nothing to show English, Pulski I should put four torches in there Let's go back and see if you're the other one I can find you Genetic Genealogy Ireland and they're all going to be there There's one there, try that one Is that you? Level completed Joan Riddell Farm Heroes Saga That's not me I'll find you Are you here too? You love going fast No, I'm Glasgow I'm in them We came over Have you met Michelle yet? Because Michelle lives in Glasgow I'm not a genealogist I'm not a genealogist I actually have to I think you do DNA stuff in Glasgow Don't they have a DNA intro script? I'm not sure, actually Ask Michelle and see what she says Yeah, I know, we're fascinated I want to see Yeah, I want to see all the lights Because there's things I missed I want to see them again Well, we've got everything recorded there So it should be quite good I did, I did That was a long time ago Okay