OUR INHERITANCE: How genetic testing is trying to change the way we do medicine.

• Author: Griffin, Elle

"The problem is: our diagnostic capabilities are far surpassing our curative abilities.

I ONCE SAT WITH MY grandmother and asked her about my ancestors. I'm a quarter Norwegian, I was told, as were both of my parents before me, and though I have never been to that place, I've long loved the idea of being from the land with the dark and the grass and the sea.

It should be noted, that the remaining 75 percent of my bloodline was of a yet indeterminable variety, and it is for that reason I clung to that 25 percent, thinking myself descended from some farm in the countryside, where grasses grew tall and swayed in the sea breeze.

My grandmother confirmed as much, giving me the name of the farm her family was from, and a story about how they sailed across the Atlantic in 1865, writing it down on a piece of paper so that I might further research it at a later date. "Now that you'll be moving to Utah," she told me, "you'll be able to learn the rest."

MY ANCESTRY

I didn't know what my grandmother meant back then, though I soon found out when I moved. Genealogy is a big deal in Utah, and there are more than a dozen companies here who specialize in it. (Something about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints' penchant for post-mortem baptism, as it turns out--"Mormons take these names of ancestors who died hundreds of years ago, they take them into the Mormon temples, and they perform religious ceremonies or ordinances for these deceased people, that's why it's part of their beliefs to seek out their ancestors," says Kevin Steadman, owner of Universal Genealogy).

Starting with the largest in the space, I decided to give my saliva to Ancestry, hoping that, despite the long list of disclosures I was required to sign (may I never be cloned and sold for parts), I would learn something about myself and those who came before me. A whisper of those I never knew, yet who shared my bloodline nonetheless. Did I inherit their obscure philosophies, I wondered darkly, or their predispositions for cancer?

Only Ancestry could tell me. I was able to trace most lines of my ancestry back to the 16th and 17th centuries merely by entering three generations of my family tree into the website. This is probably your great grandfather, it would tell me, this is probably his father. And each new piece of information came corroborated with pictures other family members uploaded to their profiles as well as records of their baptisms, marriages, and immigrations.

The records gave me a somewhat abstract picture of where my family is from, and how they came about getting here. Apparently the vast majority of my family lived stateside as far back as the 1600s and both sets of parents had ancestors on the Mayflower (it seems they knew each other, as it turns out).

My father's side were early settlers of this country. They were puritans, reverends, and governors. Their houses are still standing as historical...