June 13, 2008
Roy King is a clinical psychiatrist at Stanford University. He’s also a scholar who uses genetics and archaeology to figure out how agriculture spread through Anatolia and the Mediterranean region of Europe more than 10,000 years ago. Now Roy has another genetic puzzle to consider – himself. With the [...]
May 29, 2008
23andMe founders Anne Wojcicki (right) and Linda Avey on stage at D6 with hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher This morning 23andMe founders Anne Wojcicki and Linda Avey unveiled our new research effort, 23andWe, at the sixth All Things Digital Conference in Carlsbad, California. 23andWe gives our [...]
May 21, 2008
President Bush has signed GINA, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, into law. The legislation, which passed Congress last month after languishing for more than a decade, will make it illegal for employers or health insurers to discriminate on the basis of genetics. Genetic information will still [...]
May 16, 2008
Last week 23andMe founders Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki were interviewed at the second annual New Yorker Conference by Michael Specter, a staff writer for the magazine. The theme of the conference was "Stories from the Near Future," and boy, do we have some of those. You can watch the video here. [...]
May 14, 2008
Could this be Lilly Mendel? The judges have met and a winner has been chosen. In the first 23andMe Win Your Genome Contest, the challenge was to describe Lilly Mendel – a real person whose data are presented in the 23andMe demo account – based on her genetic information alone. As we declared in the [...]
May 3, 2008
Sometimes our customers ask us about the accuracy of their 23andMe data. How certain are we that they really do have the genotypes we report? The answer is, very certain. We typically claim that the genotyping technology we use reports the correct call for more than 99.9 percent of the approximately [...]
April 29, 2008
This woman shares 99.5% of her DNA with Lilly Mendel. Team 23andMe likes games – Wii tennis and Segway polo are big here. So are friendly wagers over a new employee's ACTN3 genotype, or whether a given Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation will converge during our lifetimes. So in the spirit of friendly [...]
April 24, 2008
The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) has made it through Congress, more than a decade after first being introduced as a means of protecting individuals from discrimination based on their genetic risk for disease. Though we don't believe the law is a panacea, it does lay the groundwork for a [...]
April 22, 2008
Generally, the DNA in a man's Y-chromosome contains information about prehistoric migrations that happened many millennia in the past. But a recent study of men in Lebanon shows that genetics can be a reflection of more recent events as well. A paper published in the April issue of the American Journal of [...]
April 17, 2008
If you were adopted, conceived through sperm donation or don’t know your parents for some other reason, 23andMe can give you a glimpse into your genetic legacy. Our service can’t help you locate your biological parents or reveal their medical histories – but it can provide some information about their [...]
