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35 WINTER 2018 Finding family Lisa Endres, left, mom to junior Kelly, plans to meet her biological father. The next day Endres spoke with her birthmother, by phone, for the first time. Six weeks after their initial phone call, Endres and her birthmother met for the first time. Five days after that, Endres spoke with her biological father, Fred Torsiello, a retired machine operator now living in Florida. Since then, Endres has met more members of both families, including three half-sisters. And, in early November, Endres invited her birthmother continued on p. 36 3 MINUTES ON DNA TESTING WITH PROFESSOR NAYAK The geneticist Sudhir Nayak, a biology professor who teaches the freshman seminar, "It's going to get a lot worse: Science vs. society," isn't Ancestry's target market. Born in India to Indian parents, he's confident a DNA test would show a strong connec- tion to that part of the world. "I have no interest in it," Nayak says. "But I understand why people do it, particularly if they're adopted, or if they're of mixed race." The saliva sample you send in is analyzed for genetic "markers," or changes in DNA, explains Nayak. Given that human beings share more than 99.9 percent of their DNA, it's the minuscule changes that set us apart. The markers reveal genetic traits commonly associated with people from a particular region of the world, even a particular country. "These markers, everyone has them," Nayak says. "The specific type that I have will be overrepresented in people who come from Southeast Asia or India. That's how they can assign you to a specific location." Finding a low percentage of some- thing surprising in your results is to be expected: "It's genes being scattered across the globe through human migra- tion," says Nayak. He says people need approximately 25 percent or more of markers to a specific ancestry for it to be a significantly recent relative, such as a grandparent. "Below that, it's a question of 'Who's been peeing in my gene pool?'"

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