Cashing in on your genes
By Mark Henderson,
The Times
| 01. 07. 2010
Spitting is not an activity that has traditionally carried much social cachet. Yet at New York Fashion Week and the Davos World Economic Forum two years ago, an invitation to drool into a tube became one of the hottest tickets around. For Hollywood celebrities and business executives alike, the new place to see and be seen was at a "spit party".
At this 21st-century take on the Tupperware party guests would hand over a little saliva (and a few hundred dollars) to a Silicon Valley start-up called 23andMe. After the cocktails had slipped down the company would extract DNA from the VIP spittle to assess its new customers' chances of developing a hundred or so medical conditions and physical traits, from breast cancer to baldness.
The idea was one whose time seemed to have come. As science started to reveal how genetic influences shape our health, so a new breed of business was taking DNA out of the laboratory and turning it into a glamorous consumer product. Anne Wojcicki and Linda Avey, the telegenic founders of 23andMe, were soon extolling...
Related Articles
It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
By Robert Resta, The DNA Exchange | 07.22.2024
Medical geneticists and genetic counselors have an often complicated and at times tense relationship with people with disabilities, their families, advocates, and scholars. Geneticists are strong advocates and supporters for all of their patients, regardless of their abilities and disabilities...
By Katherine Bourzac, Nature | 07.10.2024
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...