Posts Tagged ‘23andme’
The 23andme blog
23andme have been blogging for a while, but activity has recently picked up. Entitled “The spittoon” (tagline: more than you’ve come to expectorate…nice one), a recent post is bluntly headed “Why science can’t share” and points us to this NYT article by a cancer biostatistician on the difficulties in accessing raw biomedical data.
Update: the NYT article was free when I posted this, but now requires login. Ah, the irony…
The 23andme post is filed, quite appropriately and correctly, under “big questions”. A blog worth keeping an eye on.
From hype to reality, just like that
If you’ve been wondering whether personalised genomics startup 23andMe were for real, the wait is over. Details of their service are now available. Simply pay USD 999, spit in a tube and mail it to them (in the US only so far) and they promise a personal web-based genome browser with information about disease susceptibility, ancestry and (if your relatives join in), genealogy. The technology used is SNP genotyping – basically DNA is amplified from your sample and hybridised to an Illumina array, generating ~ 600 000 data points. All the details are available here.
Some reactions (first 2 articles by people who have trialled the service):
- Welcome to the Age of Genomics at Wired Magazine
- My Genome, Myself: Seeking Clues in DNA – NYT article
- Expect frequent posts from Pimm – Partial immortalization, Scienceroll and Deepak at BBGM on this topic
So there you go – we talk about the hype, the technical difficulties, the ethical/legal issues and then someone just goes and does it. I suspect that increasingly, this is how the future will unfold. Shall we lay bets on the year of the first cloned human?
