How a spit kit became an obsession

Like a lot of people, I took a DNA test expecting an ancestry pie chart. I got the pie chart. But buried in the account settings was a button most people never press: “Download raw data.”

That button hands you a text file with hundreds of thousands of rows — each one a tiny spelling difference in your DNA, called a SNP ("snip"). On its own the file is unreadable, like being given a phone book in a language you don't speak. But every one of those rows has been studied somewhere: in papers about caffeine, sleep, vitamin D, muscle fibers, stress chemistry, how you metabolize medicine.

So I started looking things up. One marker became ten. Ten became an evening. An evening became a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet became a folder of research notes, and the folder eventually became something with a name on the door: Gene Compass — ten plain-English reports and a living dashboard, built by hand from a person's own raw data.

I'm not a geneticist and I don't pretend to be one. I'm a careful amateur with a good filing system, a respect for peer-reviewed sources, and a rule that I never overstate what a marker means. The honest framing is the one I named the project after: your genes are a compass. They point at tendencies. They don't decide where you go.