Bennett Greenspan, one of the founders of Family Tree DNA, spoke about “The Future of Genetic Genealogy” at the Southern California Genealogy Society conference this week. The SCGS has been gracious enough to provide a video of the livestream.
High points of Bennett’s presentation include:
- There will be a new Y SNP matching capability released in the next few days.
- “Regulatory issues are larger issues than the science.” Bennett discusses “armwrestling with the FDA.”
- If prices of SNP chips that test over 2 million locations don’t drop substantially in the next couple of years, then genealogy testing likely will not utilize the next generation of SNP chip, but will move directly to full genome sequence testing. This may happen in the 3-5 year range but will, for sure in the 5-10 year range.
Bennett talked quite a bit about privacy and what privacy is in this technology era, expectations and how privacy expectations may affect future DNA testing. Be sure to watch the video. It’s always interesting to hear Bennett, functionally the father of genetic genealogy, speak about this industry and the future.
