Wednesday’s Post: The science of DNA is simply amazing – Journal-Times

The story you are about to read is true. I know because it happened to me.

It started months ago when our daughters gave us gift certificates for DNA screening through Ancestry. com.

Like most of us, I knew that DNA has been used for years to catch criminals, clear innocent persons of crimes, determine paternity and identify the remains of deceased persons.

Frankly, the TV ads about tracing DNA to find your genetic makeup seemed like a fad, much like buying the name of a star out in space.

I never had a college course in molecular biology so I went online to learn that DNA was first observed by a German biochemist named Frederich Miescher in 1869.

But no one realized the importance of the deoxyribonucleic acid molecule until 1953 when James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin figured out the structure of DNA a double helix which they discovered could carry biological information.

Appropriately, Watson, Crick and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962.

Even after reading about DNA, I remained skeptical about how a half-teaspoonful full of saliva in a mail-order test tube could tell me where my ancestors lived and which ethnic groups I came from.

My test results arrived three weeks later. Somewhat to my surprise, my genetic makeup was 37 percent British, 32 percent Irish and 31 percent other European regions. My genetic community was identified as the early settlers of Central Appalachia East Kentucky and parts of Ohio, West Virginia, and Virginia. The system found 787 DNA matches to me out of a pool of 156,880 other descendants from that region. It also linked me directly to both of my grandmothers, my parents and one grandfather.

I wrote earlier about recently confirming my relationship to my biological grandfather, Harry Paul Temple of Sandusky, Ohio, who died in 1960.

So I queried the surname of Temple and came up with George Washington Temple, Harrys father and my great-grandfather, as a likely relative.

Ancestry.com had no independent information about my kinship with this other family.

Incredibly, they connected my bloodlines with those of the Temple family solely through my DNA.

In a word, wow!

Keith Kappes can be reached at kkappes@journal-times.com or by telephone at 356-0912.

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Wednesday's Post: The science of DNA is simply amazing - Journal-Times