Elizabeth Warren's Ex-Husband Founded Company Behind Her DNA Test
Jim Warren's was a crucial figure in a multitude of genetic testing
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Just when you think the Elizabeth Warren saga couldn't get any worse, it turns out the senator's ex-husbands co-founded the DNA testing company and even wrote the codes for the first computer-generated genetic comparisons.
Jim Warren's was a crucial figure in a multitude of genetic testing that Elizabeth Warren controversially used to prove she had Native American ancestry for her gains falsely.
One of the two other founders of Jim Warrens' company, FamilyTreeDNA, has worked with Carlos Bustamante, the Stanford University geneticist who conducted a DNA test at Elizabeth Warren's request.
Bustamante, a Stanford University geneticist, administered the test, which Elizabeth Warren used to answer to President Trump's "Pocahontas" taunt and his parody of her previous claim to be a Native American while a professor at Harvard Law School in the 1990s.
Warren's roll-out of the test results was widely perceived as a hint that she was running for president in 2020.
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According to The Washington Examiner: Rather than using a commercial service to conduct her DNA test, Warren hired Bustamante, 43, who appears in the video explaining the test and in a scene in which the Massachusetts senator telephones his office and asks to speak with him.
Warren received significant criticism for the test, which discovered that her Native American heritage stretch back six to 10 generations, making her between 1/64th and 1/1024th Native American.
Elizabeth Warren's previously unreported association to the family heritage industry is remote and dates back decades but is nevertheless a strand of a dispute that is unlikely to have been put to rest by the Bustamante test.
The Massachusetts senator, now 69, married Jim Warren when she was just 19. They met when she was in high school in Norman, Okla.
They had two children, Amelia Warren Tyagi, now 47, and Alexander Warren, now 42, but divorced in 1978 after 10 years of marriage.
Elizabeth Warren began dating Harvard Law professor Bruce Mann before her first marriage had ended and she remarried six months after her divorce.
Jim Warren remarried in 1989 and died in 2006.
One person who was close to Jim Warren said that after the marriage ended "there was no love lost between the two."
Jim Warren co-founded FamilyTreeDNA in 2000. Today, it is one of the major vendors of genetic testing kits, along with 23andMe, the Genographic Project, and Ancestry.
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A person who knew and worked for some two decades with Jim Warren, a mathematical wizard who worked at IBM for 25 years and became a NASA engineer, told the Washington Examiner he was brought on to design a code using algorithms the company developed to make its first genetic comparisons.
The code, known in the company as the "Warren Project," was particularly for Y-DNA testing, which tests for patrilineal ancestry — which therefore could not have been used in Elizabeth Warren's test administered by Bustamante.
FamilyTreeDNA declined to respond to inquiries about whether the project was named for Jim Warren.
Jim Warren is publicly listed as one of FamilyTreeDNA's co-founders, along with Bennett Greenspan and Max Blankfeld, who still work together for the company.
Greenspan told ABC News this week he had worked with Carlos Bustamante.
Greenspan demonstrated that it can be tricky to test for Native American ancestry because Native Americans "have historically been unwilling and uninterested in participating in this game of identification."
Bustamante is on the scientific board of Ancestry and has consulted on other projects.
FamilyTreeDNA declined to answer questions about the company.
Bustamante has given no media interviews since the Elizabeth Warren test results were released.
There was no response from his office to questions, but the Washington Examiner inquired about his relationship with Greenspan and whether or not he consulted Greenspan about Warren's test.
Warren's office did not respond to questions.
