April 6, 2012
As part of Parkinson’s Awareness Month 23andMe is releasing the first of three surprising associations we’ve found between Parkinson’s and certain traits. The associations are surprising because they appear so unrelated to the disease itself, but they may offer insight into the direction for future [...]
April 2, 2012
During Parkinson’s Awareness Month, we’ll be highlighting promising research and new findings in the fight against Parkinson’s. Along the way we hope to boost enrollment in 23andMe’s Parkinson’s Research Community past 7,500 people, getting us that much closer to our ultimate goal of 10,000 [...]
March 30, 2012
This week 23andMe will begin surveying its members to study the biology of sexual orientation. The survey was prompted in part by customer interest, and fueled by our own scientific curiosity. We’re also launching the survey during “Come Out For Health” week, a nationwide event that has for the last [...]
March 28, 2012
In the lead up to this week’s arguments at the Supreme Court over the health care reform law, 23andMe got the opinion of two doctors on what’s ailing the country’s medical system. On separate visits we heard from Bob Kocher, an MD and partner at Venrock who previously served as a special assistant to [...]
March 19, 2012
As a PBS cameraman recorded the scene, 23andMe scientist Mike Macpherson drew lines connecting photographs of about two dozen celebrities to one another while Henry Louis Gates Jr. riffed on what those links all mean. The connections were sometimes direct family relations but more often than not each [...]
March 12, 2012
On a recent visit to 23andMe George Demetri —a physician and scientist who is an unpaid advisor to our Sarcoma research initiative — sat down for a short interview after talking to our team. Demetri, who is also director of the Dana-Farber Center for Sarcoma and Bone Oncology, said he has a lot to be [...]
March 7, 2012
Luck is not the word you typically associate with a cancer diagnosis or even a heightened risk of cancer, but some people can see a silver lining even in the darkest storms. Harvey Gould and John Lauerman certainly have. “Some believe that blessings come out of serious adversity,” said Harvey, who [...]
December 15, 2011
They had bigger brains and muscles, but for some reason Neanderthals —thick boned humans who thrived for hundreds of thousands of years in Europe and parts of Asia— died out about 30,000 years ago, while we modern humans survived. Why we, Homo sapiens, flourished and our Homo neandertalensis cousins [...]
December 14, 2011
There’s nothing futuristic about personalized medicine, but James Heywood, the chairman and co-founder of PatientsLikeMe, likes to pull a line from a futurist and science fiction writer to describe it. “There’s a William Gibson quote that I think is appropriate,” Heywood said in a recent interview in [...]
December 5, 2011
It’s hard to picture a more “personalized” approach to medicine than Dr. Ronald Levy’s. Levy, chief of the oncology division at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, has spent his career finding ways to induce a person’s own immune system to fight cancer, specifically lymphoma. Levy will [...]
