Author: Tristan Greene / Source: The Next Web
When people submit their DNA to companies such as 23andMe for testing, they’re usually not too surprised to find out they have relatives they haven’t met. But, it’s a bit different when you realize you have a cousin who works in the same field, shares some colleagues and friends, and once collaborated with you on research that appeared in a science journal back in the 1970s.
Byron Rubin and Bruce Gaber aren’t your average, run-of-the-mill septuagenarians. Rubin’s a PhD scientist and an incredible sculptor who works with metal to produce amazing recreations of molecular structures. Gaber is a gifted scientific illustrator whose work has been featured on the cover of numerous science journals. The amount of overlap in their work and passions is incredible.
And, depending on your views on nurture VS nature, it makes perfect sense: they’re cousins. Gaber and his daughter, Mi-Ai Parrish, sent off DNA to a consumer genetic testing company called 23andMe to get some information for the family tree. According to Parrish, they got more than they expected when they saw the results. She told TNW:
I was looking at the 23andMe coding one day and saw there was a match for me, for a second cousin who was clearly not on my mother’s side. It had a name. So I started to research whether I could find someone by that name who potentially would match being my father‘s cousin. It didn’t occur to me that it would be on his paternal side, which was the side that we never thought we would know anything about.
That last bit is important because it turns out that…
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