TIME Magazine is carrying an article by Michael D. Lemonick, that covers genetic genealogy research, an area that continues to grow as more people do DNA genealogy research and as more people become interested in their medical genealogy. This is another high profile story, the second or third in the past few weeks (although the others were more concerned with regular genealogy or DNA tracking alone).
From the story:
Dr. Kari Stefansson can trace his ancestry back 1,100 years. That’s almost unheard of in the U.S., but in his native Iceland, where genealogy is a national obsession, it hardly raises an eyebrow. The island nation is a genetic anomaly: settled by a few Norsemen and Celts in the 9th century A.D. and relatively free of later immigration, it is among the most genetically homogeneous countries on earth. And in the late 1990s, when scientists were racing to map the human genome, Stefansson realized that Iceland’s genetic isolation and unrivaled genealogical records made it a potential gold mine for isolating genes.