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As you know, Family Tree DNA always tries to do its best to have the results delivered on time, as much as we can. However, since we are not dealing with a product that is "off the shelf", but in fact needs to undergo different chemical processes, it's natural to have a certain rate of failure during different stages of the process. We explain this in each individual's personal page.
But still, we are constantly pushing the lab to improve their success rates. In my latest exchange with the head of the lab last week, I received an e-mail that I would like to share with you. While his points will not make us rest in our pursuit of excellence, it can certainly give you a better understanding of the lab work, and therefore, I thought it would be interesting to post it here:
"As I have indicated some time ago, biology is a plus or minus 3% activity (I lecture on this topic in my courses). This results from a lot of factors, including but not limited to species variability, the liability of biological materials, and the empirical nature of most biological assays, that is, instead of spending months or years working out the optimal conditions for a particular assay, biologists generally go with what works most of the time and press on. Bottom line, a 3% failure rate is inherent, that, is 30 out of every 1,000 assays (genomic, enzymatic, whatever) will misbehave in some way. I believe, by working on the optimization of assays, implementing robotics and clever applications of computing technologies, and hiring high quality people (all things we already have in place), we can reduce the failure frequency to less than 2%, but am not sanguine that we can do much better than that unless we do everything in triplicate (or more) and invest hugely in optimization. I can tell you that in my own research, we often repeat tests 8 to 16 times (statistically one should average 2 to the nth power, 2, 4, 8, 16 etc), but never do better than plus or minus 3% (often worse). Nevertheless, I am committed to push as far below 2% as possible. Note that hospital clinical labs would kill for a 2% error frequency (false positives and false negatives for example, which are often in the 5-10% range). I know how painful it is to deal with the 2% or so of customers the get caught up in the reality of the process, but it is inherent to the technology (as is medicine). I believe that we at the lab (the scientific community) and you at FTDNA's business office need to do a much better job of educating the public to the realities of genetic testing, clinical testing in general, drug side effects (which are typically in the 3-5% range), etc. If we do this, we will have done a significant public service and reduced substantially the number of unhappy customers."
So, I appreciate the patience of those that are in the 2-3% that he is mentioning above. Our rates of undelivered results after 2 months fall to less than 1%, and that's pretty good. Again, this won't make us rest and stop pursuying 100% success within the shortest possible time frame, but I can tell you that highly regarded people in the scientific community, unrelated to Family Tree DNA, were impressed with our overall success rates after the first run.
As always, we appreciate your continued support.
But still, we are constantly pushing the lab to improve their success rates. In my latest exchange with the head of the lab last week, I received an e-mail that I would like to share with you. While his points will not make us rest in our pursuit of excellence, it can certainly give you a better understanding of the lab work, and therefore, I thought it would be interesting to post it here:
"As I have indicated some time ago, biology is a plus or minus 3% activity (I lecture on this topic in my courses). This results from a lot of factors, including but not limited to species variability, the liability of biological materials, and the empirical nature of most biological assays, that is, instead of spending months or years working out the optimal conditions for a particular assay, biologists generally go with what works most of the time and press on. Bottom line, a 3% failure rate is inherent, that, is 30 out of every 1,000 assays (genomic, enzymatic, whatever) will misbehave in some way. I believe, by working on the optimization of assays, implementing robotics and clever applications of computing technologies, and hiring high quality people (all things we already have in place), we can reduce the failure frequency to less than 2%, but am not sanguine that we can do much better than that unless we do everything in triplicate (or more) and invest hugely in optimization. I can tell you that in my own research, we often repeat tests 8 to 16 times (statistically one should average 2 to the nth power, 2, 4, 8, 16 etc), but never do better than plus or minus 3% (often worse). Nevertheless, I am committed to push as far below 2% as possible. Note that hospital clinical labs would kill for a 2% error frequency (false positives and false negatives for example, which are often in the 5-10% range). I know how painful it is to deal with the 2% or so of customers the get caught up in the reality of the process, but it is inherent to the technology (as is medicine). I believe that we at the lab (the scientific community) and you at FTDNA's business office need to do a much better job of educating the public to the realities of genetic testing, clinical testing in general, drug side effects (which are typically in the 3-5% range), etc. If we do this, we will have done a significant public service and reduced substantially the number of unhappy customers."
So, I appreciate the patience of those that are in the 2-3% that he is mentioning above. Our rates of undelivered results after 2 months fall to less than 1%, and that's pretty good. Again, this won't make us rest and stop pursuying 100% success within the shortest possible time frame, but I can tell you that highly regarded people in the scientific community, unrelated to Family Tree DNA, were impressed with our overall success rates after the first run.
As always, we appreciate your continued support.
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