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I'm not sure your anger is well placed. 23andme gets an undue amount of attention so it's natural to feel frustrated by the media hype. But 23andme aren't (at t

I'm not sure your anger is well placed. 23andme gets an undue amount of attention so it's natural to feel frustrated by the media hype. But 23andme aren't (at this stage) lying to customers about what it does, and I'm pretty sure most customers will be interested in the knowledge not simply the utility. Also ruling out strongly genetic diseases is probably quite interesting to a lot of people, regardless of how useful it is in a public health sense. Most likely their initial scan procedure isn't of great utility but does set up a market for people based on their genetics. A whole realm of industries could spring up which could be very interesting. I don't know why you think its 23andme's job to carry the entirety of biotech research, but if no one can make any money from personal genetics until we know everything there is to know about the genome then I doubt we'll advance the field at a great pace.

apathy 19y ago
It's not their responsibility to do much of anything. But they're uniquely well positioned to push a lot of these things along, and it's a bit disappointing that they opt not to. Plus, selling genomic information from your customers, in aggregate or not, is a rather evil thing to do given the potential for misuse. Hopefully there will not be any phenotypic information provided, but if they somehow manage to run out of money, who knows? Not all phenotypes require a whole organism, as I'm sure you know. Also, I'm not saying "wait until we know everything there is to know". I'm saying "let's not go off half-cocked -- didn't we learn anything from the schizophrenia 'gene' study?". I am more than a little concerned about this.
- greendestiny 19y ago
  Selling the information along is another thing, I'm just responding to your comment I'm not saying 23andme are a great company. I've noticed myself that when I know a bit about an area, its easy to look at a particular company and see how far behind the research they are. 23andme are trying to take genome sequencing and give it to the masses. Is it very useful? probably not, but they are trying to hit a consumer price point - so doing a whole bunch of original research on genome sequencing, or making a sequencing chip of their own just isn't practical. A lot of Brin's money is and no doubt will go to good causes, but this isn't suppose to be a charity. Even if it doesn't take off, it's likely to be a positive thing for the personal genome industry not a negative.

apathy 19y ago

It's not their responsibility to do much of anything. But they're uniquely well positioned to push a lot of these things along, and it's a bit disappointing that they opt not to. Plus, selling genomic information from your customers, in aggregate or not, is a rather evil thing to do given the potential for misuse. Hopefully there will not be any phenotypic information provided, but if they somehow manage to run out of money, who knows? Not all phenotypes require a whole organism, as I'm sure you know. Also, I'm not saying "wait until we know everything there is to know". I'm saying "let's not go off half-cocked -- didn't we learn anything from the schizophrenia 'gene' study?". I am more than a little concerned about this.

greendestiny 19y ago
Selling the information along is another thing, I'm just responding to your comment I'm not saying 23andme are a great company. I've noticed myself that when I know a bit about an area, its easy to look at a particular company and see how far behind the research they are. 23andme are trying to take genome sequencing and give it to the masses. Is it very useful? probably not, but they are trying to hit a consumer price point - so doing a whole bunch of original research on genome sequencing, or making a sequencing chip of their own just isn't practical. A lot of Brin's money is and no doubt will go to good causes, but this isn't suppose to be a charity. Even if it doesn't take off, it's likely to be a positive thing for the personal genome industry not a negative.