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
By Pallab Gosh and Gwyndaf Hughes, BBC News | 06.26.2025
Work has begun on a controversial project to create the building blocks of human life from scratch, in what is believed to be a world first.
The research has been taboo until now because of concerns it could lead to...
Since the “CRISPR babies” scandal in 2018, no additional genetically modified babies are known to have been born. Now several techno-enthusiastic billionaires are setting up privately funded companies to genetically edit human embryos, with the explicit intention of creating genetically modified children.
Heritable genome editing remains prohibited by policies in the overwhelming majority of countries that have any relevant policy, and by a binding European treaty. Support for keeping it legally off limits is widespread, including among scientists...
By Ron Leuty, San Francisco Business Times | 06.16.2025
23andMe's two-step sale to a nonprofit led by former CEO Anne Wojcicki is nothing more than a dance around California's genetic privacy law, state Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a filing late Monday, one day before a judge will...
By Ed Cara, Gizmodo | 06.22.2025
In late May, several scientific organizations, including the International Society for Cell and Gene Therapy (ISCT), banded together to call for a 10-year moratorium on using CRISPR and related technologies to pursue human heritable germline editing. The declaration also outlined...