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Independent directors of 23andMe resign from board

investors.23andme.com

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Re: Independent directors of 23andMe resign from board

#181

Post by tylergetsay »

Simon_ORourke wrote: post #171
bruceb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Closest competitor does a lot of heavy lifting in this situation. Ancestry is the overwhelming leader in the find long lost relative space/your "roots" space. Look at https://www.ancestry.com/ and https://www.23andme.com/ 23andme has basically given up on this part of the business. Their pitch is health. But that pitch is murky with no good hook to keep you hooked for a monthly subscription. So after they get the ini…

> leader in the find long lost relative space/your "roots" space. Acknowledging Ancestry.com are well ahead of the market here, but I never got their appeal of finding some long-lost second cousins... basically strangers, and saying, "hey, isn't it fascinating that we share some arbitrary level of common genetic makeup". If some randomer reached out via email to me doing this big reveal I'd be "thanks, but into the s…

I think a more common use case might be finding siblings if your adopted, or trying to reengage with your roots if you were say a member of an indian tribe or native hawaiian.

I have a family member who is retired and has taken up geneology as a hobby, she has connected our family history really far back. Not my cup of tea personally but I can see the appeal, its like a treasure hunt. She has traveled to go to old libraries and dig up newspaper archives.

Re: Independent directors of 23andMe resign from board

#182

Post by _DeadFred_ »

Simon_ORourke wrote: post #171
bruceb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Closest competitor does a lot of heavy lifting in this situation. Ancestry is the overwhelming leader in the find long lost relative space/your "roots" space. Look at https://www.ancestry.com/ and https://www.23andme.com/ 23andme has basically given up on this part of the business. Their pitch is health. But that pitch is murky with no good hook to keep you hooked for a monthly subscription. So after they get the ini…

> leader in the find long lost relative space/your "roots" space. Acknowledging Ancestry.com are well ahead of the market here, but I never got their appeal of finding some long-lost second cousins... basically strangers, and saying, "hey, isn't it fascinating that we share some arbitrary level of common genetic makeup". If some randomer reached out via email to me doing this big reveal I'd be "thanks, but into the s…

I've found it extremely interesting. It's brought me greater insight into my grandfather I knew nothing about, and even the (very few) family traditions/recipes that have come down to me. It's made the world feel smaller and more connected, seeing actual relatives in all of these far off places, in the kind of way I always HOPED the internet would bring interconnectedness.

I think it's inherently human to want to understand who we are and where come from. Especially for someone like me in the USA. How did my people end up here?

Re: Independent directors of 23andMe resign from board

#183

Post by ben_w »

dvh wrote: post #175

There is absolutely no reason for these companies to collect your PII whatsoever. You should go to nearest pharmacy and buy sterile swab, swab yourself and write long random number on it and send it. Once a month company publishes one giant zip with all the monthly result where you find your file by that random number you wrote.

> write long random number on it

Human brains when generating 'random' numbers: https://xkcd.com/221/

> Once a month company publishes one giant zip with all the monthly result where you find your file by that random number you wrote.

Given how much of our appearance is due to genetics, that's basically all the harm with none of the convenience.

Re: Independent directors of 23andMe resign from board

#184

Post by dpeckett »

dekhn wrote: post #113
SoftTalker wrote: post #10

Zero chance I ever give my DNA to one of these companies.

I took an alternate approach: my genome is freely available: https://my.pgp-hms.org/profile/hu80855C When I was sequenced, a bunch of genetic counselors at Illumina analyzed it and said they couldn't find a single gene mutation that was linked to increased risk of disease, which was a surprise to me but is really absence of information rather than information of absence.

Similar experience here, was WGS and running the results against ClinVar came up empty[1] for known disease causing variants. Was not expecting that at all.

But I totally think this is more an absence of information than anything else. We all have a ton of de novo variation and that stuff is not going to be found in the databases.

1. Am carrying two recessive variants linked to a couple extremely rare developmental disorders (prevalence in live births of less than 1 in 10,000,000)

Re: Independent directors of 23andMe resign from board

#185

Post by paganel »

bruceb wrote: post #77
LarsDu88 wrote: post #2

Literally just one day after 23andMe presented positive phase 2 clinical results for two anti-cancer drugs: https://therapeutics.23andme.com/news-and-research/ The board of directors of 23andMe just resigned in protest. The CEO, Anne Wojcicki (who's sister Susan died of lung cancer last month, and was the former CEO of YouTube) had tried to low ball take the company private at only $0.40 a share -- a more than 96% dr…

Closest competitor does a lot of heavy lifting in this situation. Ancestry is the overwhelming leader in the find long lost relative space/your "roots" space. Look at https://www.ancestry.com/ and https://www.23andme.com/ 23andme has basically given up on this part of the business. Their pitch is health. But that pitch is murky with no good hook to keep you hooked for a monthly subscription. So after they get the ini…

I’m on mobile and too lazy to check, but is ancestry.com related in any way to Jehovah’a Witnesses? I’m asking because at some point I was online searching for any info about the Russian Imperial census held at the end the 1890s and, to my surprise, the JW website had all the info in there (or at least almost all the info on the region I was interested in, Kherson). And then I found out that this sort of stuff is right down JW’s alley for some religion-related reason, good for them.

Re: Independent directors of 23andMe resign from board

#186

Post by dragonwriter »

dekhn wrote: post #110
nextos wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was the plan all the time to go B2B (drug development) and they just used B2C (selling SNP kits) to hoard samples? Even considering all FDA limitations, I cannot understand how bad their genetic risk scores are. They have talent, they have lots of customers and data. This is a position other companies, like deCODE, would have killed to be in.

Anne's plan from the very beginning was to capitalize on the value of the human genome in drug development and medical testing. Frankly everything you need to know about the idea behind the company before its various pitfalls and pivots is here (2007): https://web.archive.org/web/20140312001152/http://www.wired.... (sorry, it takes a while to load but wired has killed most of their long-term links) IMHO she and Avey…

> Remember, around the time the company started, the human genome had only recently been sequenced and Craig Venter was trying to capitalize on that, and lots of folks figured it would quickly turn into a multi-billion dollar market.

To be fair, a lot of the potential easy money in that market was erased two years after 23andMe was founded when Congress passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act.

Re: Independent directors of 23andMe resign from board

#187

Post by LarsDu88 »

burningChrome wrote: post #154
LarsDu88 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the board is resigning, and the company is selling DNA kits, running a telemedicine operation, selling pharmceuticals online AND developing cancer drugs at a 180 million dollar market cap... It's quite possible there was no plan at all...

>>> selling pharmceuticals online That would explain them selling 5 million users DNA information to GSK. Earlier this summer, the often-scrutinized at-home genetic testing company 23andMe sold genetic data from five million customers to the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). This surprised a lot of their customers who had forgotten that they consented to this when they signed up for the service. https://c…

OP here. These headlines are simply exaggerated. 23andme sells mostly anonymous aggregated GWAS mapping results to companies like GSK as far as I'm aware

Re: Independent directors of 23andMe resign from board

#188

Post by matrix87 »

Something I just remembered about this company: after a data breach, they tried retroactively changing ToS to shield from lawsuits

Frankly I find this lack of accountability utterly repulsive. Anything this leadership touches is poison to me

> Through a mechanism called acceptance by silence or inaction, 23andMe stipulated that customers must explicitly tell the company they disagree with the new terms within 30 days of being notified of the changes or they will be locked into the terms automatically.

> After the attack, hackers published around 1 million data points about users with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage and information about more than 300,000 users with Chinese heritage.

https://www.axios.com/2023/12/07/23andme-terms-of-service-up...

Re: Independent directors of 23andMe resign from board

#189

Post by quesera »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #114
quesera wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the topic of laughability, I would propose that "invoking a dead stranger's name in a self-significant ritual" is absurd to do, and also absurd to be offended by. I hereby grant permission for my name to be invoked in all rituals, sacred and profane, by all current and future living persons. And I'll laugh at you in advance.

Que sera, sera Whatever will be, will be The future's not ours to see Que sera, sera

I'll be recommending this for page one of the hymnal.

Re: Independent directors of 23andMe resign from board

#190

Post by LarsDu88 »

tikhonj wrote: post #156
LarsDu88 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anne's sister Susan, who died a month ago of lung cancer was CEO of YouTube. Susan was the person who advocated Google acquire YouTube in the first place. Google was founded in the garage of Anne and Susan's childhood home. Anne was married to Sergei until he had an affair. One of the board members of 23andMe is Neal Mohan who is the current CEO of YouTube.

Well, one of the board members was Neal Mohan

Haha, correct
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