Already Aria was encouraged. If she could manage getting something like that, even one first or second cousin, she would be optimistic that the whole idea of finding Lover Boy would work. With a sense of building excitement, Aria scrolled down farther. All this was only going to cost a modest amount of money, which considering the implications, seemed to be quite a deal. Down near the bottom the screen read GET STARTED IN A FEW SIMPLE STEPS. The first thing she needed to do was to order a kit. The second thing was to activate the kit, whatever that meant, followed by providing a saliva sample. This was an issue that she had already considered since under the circumstances she would be unable to provide saliva for either Kera or the fetus. What Aria intended to do was contact the company and make sure that she could supply blood instead. Her research had suggested the blood would actually be better, anyway.
Aria’s eyes then shifted to the final step on the current screen she was looking at. It was then that her building excitement took a sudden nosedive. She read that in roughly six to eight weeks the results would be available.
“Six to eight weeks!” she said with utter disdain, slapping a hand to her forehead. “That’s a disaster.” She tipped back in her chair. She couldn’t believe it. She assumed that such DNA testing was all automated and done with microarray chips. Why would it take six to eight weeks? She was only going to be on her forensic rotation for another two to three weeks. Tipping forward again, she searched for a phone number to call the company. Although the website was generally rather well designed, finding a phone number to call was not easy and took persistence. When she finally got a customer service representative on the line, the woman wasn’t able to provide an explanation for the six- to eight-week wait other than suggesting it had to do with sheer volume. More to the point, the woman seemed to have no conception of the actual process, nor did she have the ability to connect Aria with anyone who might. Out of frustration, Aria ended up just disconnecting while the woman was in midsentence trying to extol her company’s level of service once the results had been obtained.
With rising frustration, she quickly checked the rest of the main ancestral DNA companies that she had read about the night before, namely Family Tree DNA, 23andMe, and MyHeritage. Although all three had slightly shorter estimated sample turnaround times than Ancestry, they were in the same ballpark, with the shortest being 23andMe, which estimated their results would be available online between three and five weeks. Still, that was much too long as far as Aria was concerned. She also tried calling these other companies, but the result was similar to her experience with Ancestry, namely that she only got to speak with a customer service representative who had little comprehension of the actual technological way the results were obtained. At the same time, all the representatives seemed to be reasonably conversant with the basic concepts of DNA science, including knowledge that their respective companies were relying on SNPs, or single-nucleotide polymorphisms, as the way that people’s DNA or genome were unique and relatives were varyingly similar, depending how close the relative was.
Aria rocked back again in her chair, wondering if she would have to give up this mini-crusade practically before she started it. As a soon-to-be senior, fourth-year pathology resident, she had too many other claims on her time than trying to figure out Kera Jacobsen’s fetus’s paternal family tree. Once she left the OCME rotation, which she considered almost a vacation, she would be back to working ten- to eleven-hour days with real responsibility. But the pause gave her an idea. Realizing that the ancestry DNA or genetic genealogy was a growing business as reflected in the long wait for samples to be analyzed, she reflected that there must be a lot of companies that were comparative start-ups, eager to get their firms in a competitive status with the big four, which were getting a lion’s share of the business.
Tipping forward yet again, Aria googled “ancestry DNA companies,” and as usual, Google came through. One website jumped out at her. It was a list of some thirty to forty testing companies. As quickly as she could, she started looking at all the websites, trying to find companies that were new to the game. After she found a handful of newbies, she started to locate them with the hopes of finding a relatively new company in the New York metropolitan area. After only fifteen minutes she hit gold. GenealogyDNA was fresh on the ancestral DNA scene and its home office was right there in Manhattan’s touristically trendy Meatpacking District on West 13th Street, which was a cab ride away. When Aria used Google Maps to locate the address, she was moderately taken aback from glancing at the photo. It was a six-story brick building devoid of any decorative elements but with a stylish boutique and a contemporary restaurant on the ground floor. The upper five floors were apparently recycled commercial space, which she assumed could be rented by a start-up for a decent rate in the near term, at least decent for Manhattan.
Going on the company’s website, which wasn’t as polished as those of the big four, she found another difference. The number to call for information was much easier to find, suggesting GenealogyDNA encouraged potential customers to call. And even more important from Aria’s point of view, there was a number to call for investment opportunities, meaning they were surely new to the game.
For a few minutes she stared at this second number while remembering how unproductive her calls to the other companies’ customer service personnel had been. She felt she needed to talk to someone a bit higher in the company’s hierarchy if she was going to have any luck circumventing this sample-processing delay. If she could manage to talk with one of the principals, she might have the best chance. But if that were to work, she needed a much more compelling story than trying to find the lover of a person who overdosed on opioids, as that was just too common and uninspiring. Aria knew enough about human foibles to know you had to offer something to get something.
Hoisting her feet onto the corner of her desk and crossing her legs in the process, which was Aria’s posture for serious thinking, she tried to put herself in the shoes of the people who had started GenealogyDNA. Although fully accepting she was laboring under stereotypes, she envisioned they were probably a group of relatively young, male, Silicon Valley — type computer techies, all of whom had been nerds in high school. Thinking along those terms, she tried to come up with something sexy, which she thought shouldn’t be too hard since the Kera story did involve consummated sex as evidenced by the existence of the fetus. But nothing came to mind that wasn’t overshadowed by the drug issue. That was when she had to abandon the overdose situation totally. In fact, she suddenly realized that whatever story she was going to come up with, it had to involve life, not death, meaning the father needed to be found to save the kid’s life. That was the kind of story that people could sink their teeth into, especially a young genetic genealogy company trying to make a go of it among giants.
All at once it came to her in a sudden burst of creative conceptualizing. It had to involve a child because kids always pulled on everyone’s heartstrings. By closing her eyes, she could envision a cherubic toddler with a rare disease, the kind of disease that spelled doom in most people’s minds. As a pathologist she thought immediately of an aggressive childhood leukemia, which heretofore was synonymous with death, yet against which great strides had been made of late.