Saturday, August 31, 2019

National Geographic's Genographic Project Discontinued

If you've done a DNA test through National Geographic's Genographic Project and been to their site recently, you'll have seen the announcement of the discontinuation of their project. Kits are no longer available for sale, but if you have one, you can still send it in for processing until December 31, 2019. Existing test results will only be available until June 30, 2020. Here's the full announcement:

"The Genographic Project was launched in 2005 as a research project in collaboration with scientists and universities around the world with a goal of revealing patterns of human migration. Since then, nearly 1 million people have participated in The Genographic Project through National Geographic’s “Geno” DNA Ancestry kits. The public participation phase of this research project is ending and, as a result, effective May 31, 2019, Geno 2.0 DNA Ancestry kits are no longer available for purchase. If you have already purchased a kit, you may still send it in for processing until December 31, 2019. After December 31, National Geographic and our processing labs at Helix and FTDNA will no longer accept Geno kits for processing. 
If you have a Helix Geno 2.0 kit with an expiration date that already has passed, you may still request a new kit from Helix prior to December 1, 2019. A replacement kit fee of $25, plus standard shipping rates, will continue to apply. Replacement kits must also be submitted for processing prior to December 31, 2019. For replacement kits please contact Helix customer service at (844) 211 – 2070 or support@helix.com. 
National Geographic currently plans to maintain this site, through which customers may access their results, until June 30, 2020. We recommend that you download a printable version of your results for later reference through the Print Your Results link available on your individual results homepage. Please see our FAQ page for more information."

Full page screen capture
To be honest, I didn't get much use out of my Geno 2.0 results anyway, and this doesn't hugely surprise me. I would take screenshots or save your results as a PDF, and of course download your raw DNA data. This way, you can retain all your reports and results after they are removed from the site. Since the Geographic Project didn't do much (if at all?) in the way of updating reports and didn't offer DNA matching with other testers, we aren't really losing anything if we save our reports and download our raw DNA data.

To download your raw DNA data, just go to your profile (go to https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/results/myprofile once logged in) and scroll down to where it says "This CSV file contains the raw analytical output from your DNA sample." Tick the box for "I agree to these terms" and click the "submit" button, then follow the instructions.

As for saving your reports and analyses, there is a print option on the site and in the print preview window, you can select "save as pdf" under Destination. However, be aware that this doesn't save any of the maps for some reason (it even saves the "heat map" text with references to the map without the heat map - some use that is!). To do that, I would highly recommend using a Chrome extension called Full Page Screen Capture to take full screenshots of all your reports. With the extension, you can save each page either as PDF or an image. It's a great little tool that comes in handy for more than just this, and it's very easy to use.

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