23andMe Goes Global In Its Data-Mining Efforts
By Megan Molteni,
Wired
| 05. 18. 2018
Yanny or Laurel—could the secret to which word you hear be in your DNA? It’s a notion someone pitched at 23andMe headquarters Thursday, during the consumer genetics outfit’s annual Genome Research Day. (Spoiler: The company is not going to roll out a survey to see if the latest meme has a genetic component.)
The event—a sort of cross between a science fair and a recruiting booth—attracted more than 100 researchers to the company’s candy cane–colored lunchroom for a day of talks, poster presentations, and most importantly, information sessions about how to work with 23andMe’s consumer data riches.
23andMe has amassed more than 4 million genetic profiles from customers who’ve consented to be studied, one of the biggest genetic research resources in the US. And because most of those people fill out lots of surveys, each genetic profile comes attached to about 300 phenotypic data points—like how many cigarettes you’ve smoked during your lifetime or if anyone in your family has ever been diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment.
And while the company has doubled in size over the last two years...
Related Articles
By Emily Glazer, Katherine Long, Amy Dockser Marcus, The Wall Street Journal | 11.08.2025
For months, a small company in San Francisco has been pursuing a secretive project: the birth of a genetically engineered baby.
Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, the startup—called...
By Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review | 11.07.2025
This week, we heard that Tom Brady had his dog cloned. The former quarterback revealed that his Junie is actually a clone of Lua, a pit bull mix that died in 2023.
Brady’s announcement follows those of celebrities like Paris...
By Emily Mullin, Wired | 10.30.2025
In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world when he revealed that he had created the first gene-edited babies. Using Crispr, he tweaked the genes of three human embryos in an attempt to make them immune to HIV and...
Public domain portrait of James D. Watson by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
and the National Human Genome Research Institute on Wikimedia Commons
James Watson, a scientist famous for ground-breaking work on DNA and notorious for expressing his antediluvian opinions, died on November 6, at the age of 97. Watson’s scientific eminence was primarily based on the 1953 discovery of the helical structure of DNA, for which he, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or...
