Article: As a geneticist, I will not mourn 23andMe and its jumble of useless health information

Sly Saint

Sly Saint

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
23andMe provided information purporting to be about your personal health and ancestry. All you had to do was spit in a tube and give them some money, and in return you’d get a very glossy map of your genetic genealogy, and some info on the probability that you like the taste of coriander, or your skin flushes when you’re drunk, or whether you have sticky or wet earwax, or your eye colour – things you might have already known, if you have ever looked in a mirror, or stuck your finger in your ear. If you look carefully, they did give solid info on the science underlying the results, but who reads the small print?

Your DNA is your most private data. The billions of letters of genetic code in your cells are unique to you, and always will be, in the whole history and future of humankind, even if you are an identical twin. It contains the history of your family, of our species, and of life on Earth. It harbours the most personal conceivable information about your family, your life and health. And that is what 23andMe wanted.
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The company has just filed for bankruptcy, and this does not sadden me. It didn’t invent direct-to-consumer genomics, but it made big data big business. The genius of its business model was not simply to get you to volunteer this personal data to a private company, but to persuade you to actually pay to give it to them. It then commercialised your DNA by selling it on to pharmaceutical companies, which would use it to develop drugs, ultimately for profit. It was the type of racket that a mob boss might look on and say: “And this is legal?” There was always an opportunity to opt out, but most people did not, because who reads the small print? And what did you get in exchange? A scientific trinket.
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As a geneticist, I will not mourn 23andMe and its jumble of useless health information
 
Important to know that a lot of people are advising anyone with 23andme data to log in and get it deleted, for fear of where it might end up. The BBC reported that some users were having problems (possibly due to high traffic on the site), so I went onto the site at 7am when I thought it would be quieter and got through the process with no problem. (Just do a websearch on 'how to delete 23andme data' to find out how to do it.)
 
IIRC, the same happened to Ancestry.com. Some hedge fund bought the company and who knows what they did with the data.

I had a full genome done through Nebula, gift from my ex who tried to help me for a while but gave up so no use for it anymore, and I had it deleted in full as well. It'll be cheaper as time goes on anyway, so if there's a real need for it it's not an issue. Nothing is lost.
 
rvallee said:
It'll be cheaper as time goes on anyway, so if there's a real need for it it's not an issue. Nothing is lost.
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The tech they are going to use for SequenceME starts at ~$800 for whole genome sequencing and takes 72 hrs.

Which is mindblowing when you consider that The Human Genome project took 13 years (1990-2003) for 92 % and cost $2.7 billions.
 
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