23andMe had devastating news about my health. I wish a person had delivered it
By Dorothy Pomerantiz,
STAT+
| 08. 08. 2019
Last summer, I thought it might be fun to have my DNA analyzed. Two companies, 23andMe and Ancestry.com, had popped up again and again in my social feeds, so I decided to join the party and see if I could blame my penchant for salty food on my genes. And as a journalist, I was just naturally curious.
So like 26 million other people, I ordered a testing kit online, spat into a tube, and sent my saliva off to Silicon Valley. Any concerns I had were around privacy. I checked all of the boxes to keep my results as secret as possible and went back to my normal life.
Privacy, it turned out, was the least of my worries.
I had just gotten home from the gym when I opened the email from 23andMe, saying a report was ready for me to read. That click changed my life forever: To my utter shock, the results showed that I have a mutation in a gene called BRCA1, which puts me at a huge risk of developing breast and ovarian...
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Following a long-standing CGS tradition, we present a selection of our favorite Biopolitical Times posts of the past year.
In 2025, we published up to four posts every month, written by 12 authors (staff, consultants and allies), some in collaboration and one simply credited to CGS.
These titles are presented in chronological order, except for three In Memoriam notices, which follow. Many more posts that are worth your time can be found in the archive. Scroll down and “VIEW...
