The New York Times had an article yesterday about Google’s investment in the personalized genetics company 23andme, founded by Sergey Brin’s wife Anne Wojcicki. The best comment came from investor Martin Varsavsky (founder of fon), who said:
“What used to cost billions now costs only $1,000,” Martin Varsavsky, an entrepreneur who has invested in the company, wrote recently in his blog. “So for the price of a laptop you can now learn the most intimate details of your genetic self.”
Mr. Varsavsky wrote that as medicine advanced, those who have had their genes mapped could be notified of developments concerning their own genes, including news of relevant drug discoveries.
As Nat wrote in email: “Brilliant! RSS for my genome.”
Martin commented further on his blog:
23andme is the ultimate user generated content site in the sense that users contribute their most intimate content, their genes. Why would people do this? Many reasons: desire to know how closely related they are to others, ability to understand human history through genes, increasing the chances of surviving negative genetic conditioning, helping medicine. The risk in this venture is similar to most in the web 2.0 world and that is that the user generated content, this time in the form of bodily fluids, does not materialize. Will people actually send their samples? I really hope so because it would be of great benefit to all.
The ultimate user-generated content site indeed.
P.S. The NYT needs to figure out what links are for. In their story, they linked to Google, Harvard and Yale, easy to find (and in the case of Harvard and Yale, only minimally relevant), but failed to link to 23andme, its founders Anne Wojcicki and Linda Avey, or Martin Varsavsky’s blog, from which they quoted. Hey guys, links are for providing citations, or more information!