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t m c » p u l s e | m a r c h 2 0 1 9 7 E arly last year, Jan Moore of Brownsville, California, opened a kit from Ancestry.com and swabbed the inside of her cheek. She then carefully placed the sample in the vial provided and mailed it off for processing, expecting to confirm the heri- tage she'd learned growing up—that she was part Russian, Lithuanian, Polish and Austrian. What she discovered, however, came as a complete shock. Yes, her DNA test showed that she was Lithuanian and half Ashkenazi Jewish, exactly what she thought. But the other half mapped out English, Welsh, Irish and Scottish ancestry. Moore stared at her Ancestry.com results for a while, unable to comprehend. Then she scrolled down the page to her list of relatives and saw a woman's name with the designation "first cousin." But Moore knew all of her first cousins, and she had never heard of this woman. She clicked on the button to send her a message. "Who are you?" Moore wrote. The woman emailed back and they arranged to speak on the phone. During that first conversation, the woman asked Moore a series of questions. "Were you born in Baltimore?" "Yes," Moore answered. "Are you Jewish?" "Yes," Moore said. Then the woman paused and asked, "Do you want to know?" Moore nervously answered yes. "Well," the woman began. "I'm not your cousin, I'm your niece. And my father is your half-brother." Moore felt all the color drain from her face. "I almost fell to the floor," she said. "Everything stopped." It turns out, Moore's half-brother is Thomas Wheeler, M.D., chair of the department of pathology and immunology at Baylor College of Medicine. The well-informed niece is Danica DeCosto, Wheeler's oldest child. Wheeler's father, now deceased, was a prolific sperm donor in the 1960s, when he was a medical student and surgical intern at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. At that time, Credit: Angela Lally Photography Jan Moore surrounded by her half-brothers, left to right, Steve, Bob, CJ and Thomas Wheeler, M.D., at a Wheeler family wedding in September 2018. Wheeler's father was working with a doctor who helped pioneer artificial insemination and took clients who were primarily married Jewish couples with fertility issues. Unbeknownst to Moore, she was one of the chil- dren born from those efforts, a secret her mother and father—who have both passed away—never planned to reveal. Brave new world Stories like Moore's are becoming increasingly common now that direct-to-consumer genetic testing has become widely available, thanks to its convenience, relatively low price and the tantalizing promise of learning something new about one's life. The kits are helping to expose family secrets that would otherwise die along with those who kept them. Individuals can sign up with a company— 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA, Ancestry.com, AncestryDNA and MyHeritage are among the most popular—and a kit shows up on their doorstep with instructions to either spit into a tube or swab their cheeks and return the samples via postal service. Results are usually available within a few weeks. ➟