Google Health Live

The much-vaunted Google Health is online.

There’s a good early review at TechCrunch. Expect further coverage from bloggers who cover personalised medicine issues; you know who they are.

Questions that occur to me are: (1) how much personal information do you need to enter for the service to be useful; (2) how much will users be willing to enter? This will be a real test of the degree to which people trust Google with personal information.

Google Health – almost here?

Via Techmeme – Google Health Login Page.

Here’s the Google Health site – a brief summary of features, but you can’t login yet.

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?