23andMe bankruptcy: With America's DNA put on sale
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Reasons
1) Most DNA is same with sparse deltas, so pathogen would need to match large amount of DNA and ignore lots. Challenges in biometrics and general mirror this.
2) Things tend to mutate, so even if this was possible with a single pathogen, it may mutate either targeting other genetics, or changing behavior.
3) Targeting someone specifically, and getting the "germs" into their system is tricky. I haven't thought about this as much but high mutation rate means that it would need to be introduce physically and socially close to target.
Maybe targeting specific racial groups or some other evil thing would be easier. There are many existing disease which affect different groups (not just racial) in differently with statistical significance.
That being said, I hadn't thought much about this before and it's certainly a "fun" scary thought.
You can tell it's worthless because the company is bankrupt!
Wow there. There's plenty intimate about your DNA and all the stuff in it that some shitty insurance company, for example, could use to justify screwing you. And the other obvious thing: sure you leave it all over the place, but generally, nobody follows you specifically around to vacuum it up for analysis and ID-tagged categorization. Having it handy in the databases of 23&Me, tied directly to you as a specific person and sold to third parties on the other hand....
No there isn't. The reason 23AndMe is bankrupt is /that stuff isn't real/ and it doesn't work.
If you've ever actually gotten life insurance though, you'll remember they have you do a nurse visit with a blood draw first. That gives them far more information about you than your SNPs.
This specific scenario is illegal though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrim...
> And the other obvious thing: sure you leave it all over the place, but generally, nobody follows you specifically around to vacuum it up for analysis and ID-tagged categorization.
There's no "analysis" or "categorization" you can do that's real, because correlation isn't causation. Again, that's literally why they're bankrupt.
23AndMe tried to work around this by having people do a lot of health research for free by taking thousands of surveys to provide actually useful data points, but even with that additional info it didn't produce anything.