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23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

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431–440 of 458 posts

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#431
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the lucrative appendix removal industry.

There are 250 000 appendectomies a year in the US, multiplied by 14000 USD => 3.5 billion USD in revenues [1]. [1] https://www.lendingpoint.com/blog/appendectomy-what-it-costs...

Good point. I just have a hard time thinking of a non-elective surgery as an "industry".

Maybe we could make it elective and pump those numbers up to grow the addressable market size to all Americans

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170109162333.h...

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#432
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you can have a mutation that your parents don't have?

23&me most like will not help you there as they are only looking for relatively well known mutations and not de-novos. They are basically scanning a few (or less) million variants but there are billions of possible new ones

23andme is pretty useless for getting great information from your DNA. I say this because you can get a much better report by exporting the raw data and then ordering a more detailed report from promethase.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah, here we go. The notoriously flawed "I'm doing nothing wrong and I have nothing to hide" argument. There are so many reasons why this is wrong and it is a pretty well known philosophical stance. A couple reasons: - You assume that the government is acting for your best interest. What would happen if we elect a crazy president that changes the direction of the country? (Think WW2 Germany with their eugenics). - You…

I'm curious what you mean by philosophical stance. Could you expand a little?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#434
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to that is to abolish or neuter your insurance companies like the us in the rest of the world did. The fact that a private for-profit company decides if you live or die is absurd.

>>The fact that a private for-profit company decides if you live or die is absurd. Yes it is much better when corupt government bureaucrats do that ::Rolleyes::

I think the level of "corrupt" is up for some debate, but it's pretty inarguable that the US pays substantially more for a system that is objectively worse in many ways.

So your sarcastic comment is actually correct...

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The FDA made them remove health insights so that made the service less useful. I believe there are third-party sites that will still give you this information if you upload your raw data. Though of course, this has the downside of giving yet another party access to your data.

The 3rd party sites I've used don't ask for any identifying information though (unless you want to pay for paid features), it wouldn't surprise me if there were simply downloaded freeware that you could use to do it offline on a virtual machine if you even wanted. A quick Google query leads me to this >I recently wrote a small tool, Snappy, that can help you browse and interpret your raw data. Written in JavaScript,…

Cool, thanks!

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments are made up of people capable of good and evil just the same as private companies. If we’re simply going by the historical record, governments have committed some of the world’s greatest atrocities in the name of certain genetic theories.

> governments have committed some of the world’s greatest atrocities in the name of certain genetic theories. As have private companies.

Like?

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#439

Current, unaffected employee here. Throwaway for obvious reasons. A big chunk of the layoff is the new lab that we built in Phoenix. That only made economic sense in the scenario where we were selling far more kits than we succeeded in selling. The rest of the layoffs have a similar root cause: a massive overestimate of how much we were going to sell. I'd blame the shortfall on some combination of growing privacy con…

What the company to be so off with demand estimates?

Would the company have been in ok shape if they would have set lower estimates? Or was that target needed for other reasons?

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#440
post #371

Has anyone read their "research consent"? https://www.23andme.com/en-int/about/consent/ "If your data are associated with your identity, they may be made public or released to insurance companies, which could have a negative effect on your ability to obtain insurance coverage." This is about data breach but within, they acknowlidge the potential usability of those data for insurance bussiness. I wonder who would buy…

Is there any way to prevent them from using it for that purpose or to determine if my insurance company has access and is using it?
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