July 23, 2012
Bethann is a Health Content Scientist at 23andMe and regular contributor to the Spittoon. The following is her story about finding out she has a genetic condition that puts her at risk for iron overload. When I received my 23andMe results my initial reaction was that of relief and curiosity — only [...]
June 21, 2012
The dance is sort of a gnome-like jig — all knees and elbows and no hint of cool — but where Matt Harding gets you is in his pure unabashed release of happiness. As you watch, a smile creeps across your face. You can’t help yourself. For almost a decade, Matt has cobbled together the most unlikely of [...]
June 12, 2012
With assorted schwag in hand, our team of elite 23andMers headed to Burbank last weekend to pass out a few free kits, some t-shirts and mingle with some of the most committed genealogists on the planet. Mike Macpherson ready to answer a few ancestry questions. This year’s Southern California Genealogy [...]
May 29, 2012
By Meghan Mullins Before joining 23andMe, I worked at a more traditional genetic research lab. Like virtually all research centers, we didn’t return genetic results to our research participants. I occasionally thought about what that meant, that I knew more about an anonymous stranger’s DNA than he [...]
April 27, 2012
Todd Sherer, CEO of the Michael J. Fox Foundation, with Michael J. Fox and Anne Wojcicki Michael J. Fox is a great actor, but his smiles and good humor during a visit to 23andMe headquarters in Mountain View this week were fully sincere. “I really mean what I say when I express optimism, positivity and [...]
April 25, 2012
If you were facing a daunting diagnosis you would want the news to come from someone like Dr. J. William Langston. Engaged and intelligent, he has the kind of optimism you don’t expect from a physician who has spent decades working to unravel the complexities of Parkinson’s disease. “Things have [...]
April 16, 2012
On his first Space Shuttle mission, Rich Clifford whispered a little prayer. “Please Lord let something go wrong so that I can fix it,” he recalls with a smile. But on the launch pad, strapped into the Shuttle with its two massive solid rocket boosters primed for ignition, Rich had second [...]
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 16, 2012
Nearly 37 million Americans claim to have Irish heritage according to a national survey conducted in 2009. That’s over eight times the number of people living in Ireland today. Although it’s remarkable that nearly 1 in 10 Americans might say “Kiss Me I’m Irish!” on St. Patrick’s day, it’s not [...]
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 [...]
