The article reports, "'The long game here is not to make money selling kits, although the kits are essential to get the base level data,' says Patrick Chung, a 23andMe board member and partner at the venture-capital firm NEA. 'Once you have the data, [the company] does actually become the Google of personalized health care.' Genetic data on a massive scale is likely to be an extremely valuable commodity to pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and even governments. This is where the real growth potential is."

This statement is based on the assumption that once 23andMe has the 25 million people sign up that the founder desires, that their genotypes (at the resolution of testing that 23andMe can provide) will actually provide a lot of actionable information.

But there is a LOT of reason to doubt that hope. I was just at the weekly meeting of my alma mater's journal club on behavior genetics today, and the papers we discussed today are about rare variants in DNA and their possible relationship to human disease.

Casals, F., & Bertranpetit, J. (2012). Human Genetic Variation, Shared and Private. Science, 337(6090), 39-40. doi: 10.1126/science.1224528

Brookes, K. J. (2013). The VNTR in complex disorders: The forgotten polymorphisms? A functional way forward? Genomics, 101(5), 273-281. doi: 10.1016/j.ygeno.2013.03.003

Maurano, M. T., Humbert, R., Rynes, E., Thurman, R. E., Haugen, E., Wang, H., . . . Stamatoyannopoulos, J. A. (2012). Systematic Localization of Common Disease-Associated Variation in Regulatory DNA. Science, 337(6099), 1190-1195. doi: 10.1126/science.1222794

Schork, A. J., Thompson, W. K., Pham, P., Torkamani, A., Roddey, J. C., Sullivan, P. F., . . . Schizophrenia Psychiat Genomics, C. (2013). All SNPs Are Not Created Equal: Genome-Wide Association Studies Reveal a Consistent Pattern of Enrichment among Functionally Annotated SNPs. Plos Genetics, 9(4). doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1003449

It is dismaying likely that even millions of well-genotyped samples will provide very little illumination of the development of disease risk in human beings. For you to get actionable information from 23andMe, moreover, you have to count on 23andMe having detailed personal health information about yourself and the other 23andMe customers: "But first Wojcicki needs spit. Her goal is to sign up a million customers by the end of 2013. Eventually, she says, 'I want 25 million people. Once you get 25 million people, there's just a huge power of what types of discoveries you can make.'" Translated into English, that says that the company has very little information to offer yet, and wants you to pay for the privilege of providing highly personal information in the hope that the company can use your information to draw in other customers. I'm not optimistic that that will even help your fellow customers, as I learn more about current genomics research. This business plan certainly puts a premium on the company having ironclad guarantees of customer data privacy, and gathering lots of personal health information on the strength of those guarantees. It's an open question whether this is really a good trade-off for you or me or any other individual.