5 ms·

This seems to be the nuclear option. As a (now fortunate) previous purchaser of 23andme, I still have my health information. The information is really valuable,

This seems to be the nuclear option. As a (now fortunate) previous purchaser of 23andme, I still have my health information. The information is really valuable, and considering the price ($99!) it is cheaper than a lot of standard medical exams and bloodwork. Obviously not a replacement for any of those things, but it's amazing they can offer DNA health results for so little. The FDA seems to be mostly concerned that the results of 23andme could be misinterpreted, or wrong. As far as I am aware, 23andme was advertising the health assessment as the first step in prevention - not a one stop shop for diagnosis. I am not very impressed with the FDA.

sanxiyn 13y ago
I agree. Trying noninvasive but inaccurate tests before accurate but invasive tests is just par for the course. 23andMe is certainly noninvasive, and as far as I can tell more accurate than most such preliminary tests.
- asdfaoeu 13y ago
  The accuracy isn't the problem. It's that the accuracy is unknown. And evidently 23adMe haven't been attempting to prove it to the FDA. As far as I'm concerned at that stage you might as well take homeopathy. > and as far as I can tell more accurate than most such preliminary tests. Oh thats good? I'm sure that anecdotal well set the FDA at ease.
  - 001sky 13y ago
    As far as I'm concerned at that stage you might as well take homeopathy. How does this follow? No test is equivalent to ignorane. Using the test as a non-invasive prelim screen may be imperfect, but its hard to say the "null hypothesis" is equivalent. That would require that no information be present, which seems unlikely (if unproven). Or did you mean something else?
chmars 13y ago
Is there any way to export all existing test results and not just the raw data?
- khomenko 13y ago
  Yes, in PDF form: https://www.23andme.com/user/report/health/ https://www.23andme.com/user/report/health/
  - chmars 13y ago
    Thanks, but that's only (OK, at least) an overview titled '23andMe Genetic Health Overview'. Is there a more comprehensive and maybe configurable export feature available?
t0 13y ago
I don't see how the results could be harmful or negative. My highest risk item was a 54% chance of Type 2 Diabetes. It's interesting information, but I'm not making any huge life decisions based on it..
- nodata 13y ago
  Why haven't you made any huge life decisions based on it? Wasn't that the point of you ordering the test? If you do strenuous exercise several times a week and adopt a healthy diet, your risk will drop dramatically. Was it because you already do these things?
  - k__ 13y ago
    I got this test too, but it didn't show any terrifying results. I wanted to know if I have awesome genetic material and it was true ;)
groupthinker 13y ago
As someone who purchased four kits for xmas gifts three weeks ago - I'm pissed, and expect a refund in full.
timr 13y ago
Here's the deal: you have a report. You have no way of knowing if the information in the report is correct, or not. You may have paid $99 for something that's completely fictional. You just don't know. Is that your "right"? Sure, to some extent. A sucker is born every minute, and if you desperately want to be one of them, the US Government is mostly content to let it happen. We'll even let companies do patently absurd things like sell you pills that are supposed to make your dingus larger. We just limit what they can say when they're selling them to you, to protect the most credulous among us. Like it or not, our society has decided that certain forms of charlatanism are so egregious that we act proactively to prevent them. Medicine is one area where we are strict, because our country has survived a rather nasty era where unfettered "medical innovation" was allowed to kill large numbers of people. I have a vintage Merck manual sitting on my desk, and it recommends such wonderful treatments as oral arsenic for hair loss (to be fair, you probably care a lot less about being bald when you're dead...) and vinegar (via injection!) as a cure for cancer. That's "medical innovation" without regulation to enforce safety and effectiveness, and I don't particularly want to go back to it. Maybe you do. The FDA is doing its job rationally here, it is well within its mandate, and as far as anyone who knows what they're talking about can tell (including the leaders of the company), 23andMe is just clearly in the wrong on this issue. So if you don't like the laws we've set up to protect consumers against medical malpractice, I guess that's your opinion, but it's obviously dumb to blame the FDA for doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing.
- patrickaljord 13y ago
  This is ridiculous, you take extreme examples to prove your point. So let's see, you can still read about all this and worse on the internet, do we still have people taking arsenic en masse to cure baldness? No. Because most people are responsible and giving them the freedom to do what they want with their body is more important than anything else. Plus, if someone is ignorant enough to drink arsenic to cure baldness, he'll probably find other ways to hurt himself anyway, FDA or no FDA. So let's go back to the FDA, is it so effective? Here is the FDA authorizing a drug that killed lots of people http://www.undergroundhealth.com/fda-approved-prescription-drugs-kill-hundreds-of-thousands-of-people-annually/ http://www.undergroundhealth.com/fda-approved-prescription-d... Also, the time the FDA takes to approve a good drug can take more than 10 years, how many people die because of this unseen consequence? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Food_and_Drug_Administration#Alleged_problems_in_the_drug_approval_process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Food_and_Drug_... Not to forget its reluctance to approve drugs for political reasons (canabis). So let's see, many people die because of wrongly approved drugs and many die as it takes too long to approve good ones because of the FDA. Now let's imagine a world with no FDA, many people would still die, but at least they'd have the choice to do so on their own decision and not have to wait on a nanny state bureaucracy to tell them what's good or bad for them and many times wrongly so. Why not let people freely decide what they can do to their own body when not doing so still kills a lot of people too? Plus, allowing so would make it much faster to detect when a drug works or not and save way more lives. If you don't even own your own body, what do you own?
tokenadult 13y ago
"The SNP chip method that 23andMe uses was never very good at providing useful genetic information. Its advantage has been its low cost. But as sequencing gets cheaper and cheaper, SNP chips have already largely become obsolete for most genetic testing."[1] Basically, 23andMe has always oversold the results available from the crude SNP chip technology they were using as a hook to have people PAY to send them DNA samples that would make them "members" of 23andMe. Then the members are reminded to send in personal health history information to be put into the 23andMe database so that 23andMe can data-mine that and try to figure out what the DNA actually means[2]--which no medical geneticist knows to any precision at the moment. That business model of suckering in paying clients today for the promise of an unknown amount of actionable information in the future is why 23andMe was trying to stonewall the FDA while marketing what was plainly a direct-to-consumer medical device. It's not surprising (see first link here) that the FDA is not going to let 23andMe get away with that. [1] http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/03/why-the-fdas-anvil-dropped-on-23andme/2/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/03/why-the-fdas-anvil-dropped... [2] http://www.fastcompany.com/3018598/for-99-this-ceo-can-tell-you-what-might-kill-you-inside-23andme-founder-anne-wojcickis-dna-r http://www.fastcompany.com/3018598/for-99-this-ceo-can-tell-...
- jonlucc 13y ago
  I'd like to add that 23andMe also wants to be a resource for finding patients for studies. They boast being able to find a large number of people with a certain condition in a short amount of time (a real benefit in human studies) because of the health information they have.

sanxiyn 13y ago

I agree. Trying noninvasive but inaccurate tests before accurate but invasive tests is just par for the course. 23andMe is certainly noninvasive, and as far as I can tell more accurate than most such preliminary tests.

asdfaoeu 13y ago
The accuracy isn't the problem. It's that the accuracy is unknown. And evidently 23adMe haven't been attempting to prove it to the FDA. As far as I'm concerned at that stage you might as well take homeopathy. > and as far as I can tell more accurate than most such preliminary tests. Oh thats good? I'm sure that anecdotal well set the FDA at ease.
- 001sky 13y ago
  As far as I'm concerned at that stage you might as well take homeopathy. How does this follow? No test is equivalent to ignorane. Using the test as a non-invasive prelim screen may be imperfect, but its hard to say the "null hypothesis" is equivalent. That would require that no information be present, which seems unlikely (if unproven). Or did you mean something else?

chmars 13y ago

Is there any way to export all existing test results and not just the raw data?

khomenko 13y ago
Yes, in PDF form: https://www.23andme.com/user/report/health/ https://www.23andme.com/user/report/health/
- chmars 13y ago
  Thanks, but that's only (OK, at least) an overview titled '23andMe Genetic Health Overview'. Is there a more comprehensive and maybe configurable export feature available?

t0 13y ago

I don't see how the results could be harmful or negative. My highest risk item was a 54% chance of Type 2 Diabetes. It's interesting information, but I'm not making any huge life decisions based on it..

nodata 13y ago
Why haven't you made any huge life decisions based on it? Wasn't that the point of you ordering the test? If you do strenuous exercise several times a week and adopt a healthy diet, your risk will drop dramatically. Was it because you already do these things?
- k__ 13y ago
  I got this test too, but it didn't show any terrifying results. I wanted to know if I have awesome genetic material and it was true ;)

groupthinker 13y ago

As someone who purchased four kits for xmas gifts three weeks ago - I'm pissed, and expect a refund in full.

timr 13y ago

Here's the deal: you have a report. You have no way of knowing if the information in the report is correct, or not. You may have paid $99 for something that's completely fictional. You just don't know. Is that your "right"? Sure, to some extent. A sucker is born every minute, and if you desperately want to be one of them, the US Government is mostly content to let it happen. We'll even let companies do patently absurd things like sell you pills that are supposed to make your dingus larger. We just limit what they can say when they're selling them to you, to protect the most credulous among us. Like it or not, our society has decided that certain forms of charlatanism are so egregious that we act proactively to prevent them. Medicine is one area where we are strict, because our country has survived a rather nasty era where unfettered "medical innovation" was allowed to kill large numbers of people. I have a vintage Merck manual sitting on my desk, and it recommends such wonderful treatments as oral arsenic for hair loss (to be fair, you probably care a lot less about being bald when you're dead...) and vinegar (via injection!) as a cure for cancer. That's "medical innovation" without regulation to enforce safety and effectiveness, and I don't particularly want to go back to it. Maybe you do. The FDA is doing its job rationally here, it is well within its mandate, and as far as anyone who knows what they're talking about can tell (including the leaders of the company), 23andMe is just clearly in the wrong on this issue. So if you don't like the laws we've set up to protect consumers against medical malpractice, I guess that's your opinion, but it's obviously dumb to blame the FDA for doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing.

patrickaljord 13y ago
This is ridiculous, you take extreme examples to prove your point. So let's see, you can still read about all this and worse on the internet, do we still have people taking arsenic en masse to cure baldness? No. Because most people are responsible and giving them the freedom to do what they want with their body is more important than anything else. Plus, if someone is ignorant enough to drink arsenic to cure baldness, he'll probably find other ways to hurt himself anyway, FDA or no FDA. So let's go back to the FDA, is it so effective? Here is the FDA authorizing a drug that killed lots of people http://www.undergroundhealth.com/fda-approved-prescription-drugs-kill-hundreds-of-thousands-of-people-annually/ http://www.undergroundhealth.com/fda-approved-prescription-d... Also, the time the FDA takes to approve a good drug can take more than 10 years, how many people die because of this unseen consequence? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Food_and_Drug_Administration#Alleged_problems_in_the_drug_approval_process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Food_and_Drug_... Not to forget its reluctance to approve drugs for political reasons (canabis). So let's see, many people die because of wrongly approved drugs and many die as it takes too long to approve good ones because of the FDA. Now let's imagine a world with no FDA, many people would still die, but at least they'd have the choice to do so on their own decision and not have to wait on a nanny state bureaucracy to tell them what's good or bad for them and many times wrongly so. Why not let people freely decide what they can do to their own body when not doing so still kills a lot of people too? Plus, allowing so would make it much faster to detect when a drug works or not and save way more lives. If you don't even own your own body, what do you own?

tokenadult 13y ago

"The SNP chip method that 23andMe uses was never very good at providing useful genetic information. Its advantage has been its low cost. But as sequencing gets cheaper and cheaper, SNP chips have already largely become obsolete for most genetic testing."[1] Basically, 23andMe has always oversold the results available from the crude SNP chip technology they were using as a hook to have people PAY to send them DNA samples that would make them "members" of 23andMe. Then the members are reminded to send in personal health history information to be put into the 23andMe database so that 23andMe can data-mine that and try to figure out what the DNA actually means[2]--which no medical geneticist knows to any precision at the moment. That business model of suckering in paying clients today for the promise of an unknown amount of actionable information in the future is why 23andMe was trying to stonewall the FDA while marketing what was plainly a direct-to-consumer medical device. It's not surprising (see first link here) that the FDA is not going to let 23andMe get away with that. [1] http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/03/why-the-fdas-anvil-dropped-on-23andme/2/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/03/why-the-fdas-anvil-dropped... [2] http://www.fastcompany.com/3018598/for-99-this-ceo-can-tell-you-what-might-kill-you-inside-23andme-founder-anne-wojcickis-dna-r http://www.fastcompany.com/3018598/for-99-this-ceo-can-tell-...

jonlucc 13y ago
I'd like to add that 23andMe also wants to be a resource for finding patients for studies. They boast being able to find a large number of people with a certain condition in a short amount of time (a real benefit in human studies) because of the health information they have.