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 [...]
November 28, 2011
When Dr. Leroy Hood talks there’s a reason a lot of people in the fields of medicine, biology and genetics listen. Beyond his pioneering work in developing automated gene sequencing, Hood helped found companies as diverse as Amgen and Applied Biosystems; he is one of only about a dozen people who belong [...]
November 9, 2011
You are unique, but sometimes when you see your doctor you don’t feel you’re being treated that way. The promise of personalized medicine is that what makes you, you, can also be used to tailor the health care plan that is most effective for you. This is already happening, in part, because of the [...]
November 4, 2011
Giving people access to their genetic information is what we are about at 23andMe. We believe that it is not just a fundamental right, but, as with access to all of your health records, it is vital to making informed decisions about your wellbeing. That is why 23andMe is so encouraged by statements coming [...]
October 26, 2011
While a lot of the discussion about personalized medicine is focused on the future, Felix Frueh of Medco Health Solutions believes the most promising possibilities for individualized care could be implemented right now. Knowing a person’s underlying genetics with currently available tests could make [...]
October 21, 2011
All the drama in the European Union right now — the debt crisis, the North-South divide and the kvetching over the wisdom of a common currency — has reignited talk about the cultural divide between people on the continent. But is the divide more than a political and cultural one? Is there a deeper [...]
