Independent directors of 23andMe resign from board

This can be modeled with a binomial distribution as 1-probability of both failing. That comes out to 1-(.7^2) which is 51% of at least one drug reaching phase 3.

There is literally a coin flip chance the company will reach the stage where there is another coin flip it will be worth billions (I believe ~50% of phase 3 drugs go to market), but thanks to the messaging of the CEO, right now it seems like there is a near 0% chance investors (which include former company employees) would benefit from this.

Google was founded in the garage of Anne and Susan's childhood home. Anne was married to Sergei until he had an affair.

One of the board members of 23andMe is Neal Mohan who is the current CEO of YouTube.

It seems like there are contradictory facts being claimed: that the price to go private is a lowball, and that the current price is accurate.

The controlling interest can just hire incompetent ops heads and side-line competent ones for a few quarters ... slowwalk any events that could increase value

The board resigning likely helps the plan

Fair chance future offers will get worse the longer it goes on

Shortsqueezes are cases of driving prices up because shares are hard to get and shorts need to cover. Again, not related to the best offer being too low.

Secrets are also dumb examples because that’s hidden information.

What we’re talking about here is the valuation with all of the public information available now. Nobody of any relevant market size seems to agree that it should be $9/share.

The companies actual revenue has zero impact and never will. Treat DJT like a NFT and it makes a ton of sense.

Couldn't one just pull a worldcoin and give people $5 for a cheek swab?

I can't believe how people can be naive over and over.

Their business plan was straight out of South Park:

1. Collect lots of DNA

2. ??????

3. Profit!!

That would explain them selling 5 million users DNA information to GSK.

Earlier this summer, the often-scrutinized at-home genetic testing company 23andMe sold genetic data from five million customers to the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). This surprised a lot of their customers who had forgotten that they consented to this when they signed up for the service.

https://cglife.com/blog/23andme-sold-your-genetic-data-to-gs...

To be fair, a lot of the potential easy money in that market was erased two years after 23andMe was founded when Congress passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act.

Wait, so a sample he submitted for fertility testing was used to impregnate a number of women? Without his knowledge?

A lot of Ancestry.com and AncestryDNA was founded to support the Mormon belief that the LDS church can posthumously baptize ancestors of living individuals into the church under the belief that many deceased individuals were not alive to hear the gospel of Joseph Smith.

Thus the massive data collection effort for historical information like newpaper articles from this century and the last.

I get/got spammed by them about new relatives on the order of "6th cousin who shares 0.3% of your DNA." Thanks, but who cares...

I have a family member who is retired and has taken up geneology as a hobby, she has connected our family history really far back. Not my cup of tea personally but I can see the appeal, its like a treasure hunt. She has traveled to go to old libraries and dig up newspaper archives.

I think it's inherently human to want to understand who we are and where come from. Especially for someone like me in the USA. How did my people end up here?

Now there are probably some who think genealogy is a silly pastime and maybe it is, but researching my family history helps me feel grounded and more connected to humanity so I derive a lot of benefit from it.

Interest in family trees predates Ancestry.com and will certainly outlast it. It’s not necessarily about contact. I’m not sure what’s controversial here.

There is so much more power in 23andMe's Raw Data regarding health than people realize and I am capitalizing on it. (Less with the v5 chip but it is still really good,)

Finding drugs with 23andMe is a waste of time and is not wehre they should be focusing on making money. They should be focusing on personalized medicine.

I think she is unhappy that our family line will likely end with me. (only child, who is almost a 40 year old virgin)

If you don't get to see the future you want, consume your time with the past.

There are tons of websites for different last names in the United States, showing history of the name. Many times the last name be traced back to a singular person, which I find especially cool since you have sprawling families all connected by one guy who made the journey over. Obviously last names like Smith won't be like this, but if you have a unique last name it can actually be quite common that one person coming to the new world connects you and everybody else in the Americas together. I find that super cool to think about and I am glad people are doing the effort to research and find this info out.

Concrete example: My grandmother was born in Brooklyn. As it turns out, her half-brother lived a few blocks away. At the time my grandmother was born, he was 9 and living with his grandparents despite the fact his father lived nearby.

I still don't know why, but when I found out he even existed - something I didn't know until long after my grandmother died -, I also soon found his daughter was alive and well in New Jersey, and was able to get in touch. I now have pictures, and stories to fill in not just his background, but thanks to that connection I now have pictures of the graves of my great-great-grandfather, and several of his children, and stories about my grandmothers uncles, and aunts she never mentioned while she was alive.

I also have pictures of my great-grandfather - my mums grandfather - that I hadn't seen before.

Of course, that is reasonably close, but sometimes those things end up passed down one side of a family, with no copies existing, and you can increasingly find relatives far away from you in the tree who has photos of shared ancestors, and that proportion will increase dramatically with each new generation.

So every time I find a match, however remote, with an active account, you better believe I'll message them. Not because I care that we're related, but because I care about whether or not they can fill in some bit or other in my ancestry. For me, anyway, it's a fun puzzle more than anything else, when you go beyond the immediate family.

Like why is that one ancestor showing up as a widow one moment, and someone with the same name as her husband showing up as married to her sister in the next census with an implausible country of origin? Can I find evidence to corroborate theories? Can I find that notorious "hat maker from Bremen" that almost certainly didn't exist but was cover for infidelity, or evidence that he didn't exist (I almost certainly can't) - it'd be funny, because an entire arm of the family took on the supposed, probably invented, last name of the hypothetical hat maker because an ancestor of theirs thought it sounded posh.

The "long-lost second cousins" are just bit players in that game.

She would not pursue out of respect to her adopted mother. Outside of this I would be in the same boat as you.

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/dna-helps-children...

In cases where the user is trying to find their parent, it’s statistically unlikely that their parent would have taken the test, but 2nd cousin matches are very common. These seem like a huge distance away, but you can work backwards and build a family tree up to their great grandparents and fan out from there.

But Ancestry is a roach motel. Of all sites that sell user-contributed data back to their users, and they're all scummy, I don't know any which are more scummy than Ancestry and MyHeritage.

Any idea where I might find a list of Russian navy officers from then or the following decades?

I'm fairly relaxed about my medical history, but it's really obvious to me that I'm weird in being relaxed.

Despite my relaxed attitude, it's still fairly obvious that this lists every genetic condition*, which in turn obviously going to be relevant to any health insurance provider that isn't banned from using it.

Monetary damages are one of the easiest ones to quantify, from what I hear.

* even those that have not yet had the relevant genes discovered, because statistical methods need a larger population

At this point we practically have a single search engine that’ll take you genetic sequence aa input and return your face, you entire family tree, your current job and address and what you do in your free time.

But 'a distraction from fines'? Fines do nothing to help those affected by such breaches. Even class action lawsuits usually result in symbolic payouts to individual victims. Given the potential consequences of these breathes - especially in the health space, criminal prosecution for those executives responsible seem appropriate, commensurate and incentivising.

I had access to any data I wanted to see, download on my work laptop (we all worked remotely). I didn't have to ask anyone, I didn't have to justify it, and AFAIK it was not audited. Logged? I don't know, maybe it was. I had sent mail once regarding to a director and SVP and never received even an ack. Oh by the way, everybody had access, not just me. For that no other access type was required either. Company email was sufficient. And IIRC even the stage env. had product data and stage was truly fair game.

No, I did not misuse and used it handful of times for debugging purposes. I doubt anybody did.

What 23andMe was selling to GSK was the results of GWAS (Genome Wide Association Study) results, which could be used to generate therapeutic candidates.

GWAS is a sort of rudimentary machine learning algorithm that basically maps a phenotype (like propensity for a particular disease) to a region of DNA. From there the drug company can narrow down candidate genes to attempt to develop specific drugs for.

For example, data that is merely disassociated with your account but will forever live in their system.

Message I received by email:

> 23andMe and the contracted genotyping laboratory will retain your Genetic Information, date of birth, and sex as required for compliance with legal obligations, pursuant to the federal Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 and California laboratory regulations.

> 23andMe will retain limited information related to your deletion request, such as your email address and Account Deletion Request Identifier, as necessary to fulfill your request, for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims, and as otherwise permitted or required by applicable law.

I'm occasionally prone to self-indulgence in written correspondence.

... (There, I said it.)

I hope that my coworkers are blissfully unaware of this tendency. Sometimes I must write dense things which they must read, because a formal record is required and technology is complicated. But I hope they perceive me as a crisp and clear communicator who makes copious but appropriate use of sentence fragments in bullet point form (not too deeply-nested). With judicious and limited use of humor, and only of the sort that is adequately subtle to be overlooked by any who would not readily accept it.

I would especially hesitate to attempt anything but the most simplifed and direct version of my message in a request for help!

Although I guess when you're emailing a consumer product corp c-suite, you have a greater expectation of patience for customer communications, and of general literacy.

In truth, the exec's mail-tenders are likely relieved to receive anything not written in a hostile tone, and perhaps delighted by anything in complete sentences. All the more so, if they are able to help.

Thank you. May every minor wickedness find its appreciative audience.

~$800 USB dongle (above article was published in 2021 and the price has gone down) plus consumables.

DNA is already protected from use by insurance companies so that's a future harm that already got squashed.

From IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black.

Imagine the "massively organized information" that will be available to people in power in the future. It doesn't have to be a genocide for it to be useful to them. People in power today are fully on board with "social control" and it's so uncontroversial that they talk about it openly.

(no, I did not ask my children or my spouse or my parents or any other relatives for "consent").

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine