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23andMe's Fall

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Re: 23andMe's Fall

#231

Post by samatman »

txru wrote: post #179
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they file for bankruptcy, they cannot legally destroy the data. The data is a salable asset, the law requires them to preserve it so that it can be sold and the money returned to creditors. And many of the promises they have given about it's use can and will be broken by the trustees dissolving the company. The thing you need to consider when you give data to a company is not "will these people misuse this", but "…

My mom, dad and sister have all done 23andMe, so it doesn't matter if I have or not. They have an entirely complete genome for me. I agree with your limited license idea. It's just not ok that something like that can be dischargeable in bankruptcy. We don't have the ability to refuse consent in the first place, if our family provide it.

That's a lot of information, but it is in no sense a complete genome. It does mean that someone who had that information could prove that your DNA belonged to a child of your mom and dad with high accuracy, or that you were a sibling of your sister. It also reveals that you don't have certain mutations, or that you do have a few.

But where your parents have different SNPs, there's no way to derive which of them you inherited. What you said is a bit like saying that, because you know all of the cards in a deck of playing cards, you know what hand someone is holding, except in a counterfactual world where there are 10,000 possible cards and you know that a deck only has 52 of them.

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#232

Post by ackbar03 »

logifail wrote: post #165
icegreentea2 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think 23andme's strongest asset point would be in direct drug discovery, but rather in helping target sub-populations for clinical trials. The SNP data that 23andme has is relatively low quality compared to proper sequencing, but (combined with their survey data) is probably at least as good, or better information available for typical clinical trial planning or screening.

> I don't think 23andme's strongest asset point would be in direct drug discovery, but rather in helping target sub-populations for clinical trials Was there an issue with targeting sub-populations for clinical trials beforehand? At an ELI5 level, if you're hoping your drug candidate will help cure disease X, you sign up patients with disease X to join your clinical trial. That's not the hard part! (source: family me…

My understanding is, ideally your clinical trial manages to capture or balance out the different potential factors in genetic variation.

An example of this is when they tested the covid vaccine, they wanted to make sure they had enough participation from African American and other ethnicities since these were usually under represented in clinical trials relative to the population, and there are sometimes subtle variations in the way peoples body respond to drugs depending on their race.

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#233

Post by BasilPH »

epmatsw wrote: post #113
BasilPH wrote: post #92

> As an added security measure, we have temporarily disabled the ability to download your raw genetic data. We hope to re-enable this ability soon, and we appreciate your patience. After reading this article I decided to download my data in case they go under. Was greeted with this message on the relevant page. Does anybody have some insight if this is related to the data breach or something else?

They've been doing that for months. Scummy behavior tbh. It happened right after the hack, but there's also a new crop of competitors that let you upload your raw 23andMe data, so there's speculation that it's trying to stop the outflow. If you email them about it, you just basically get a copy-pasta reply restating the message on the site, and if you keep emailing them 3+ times asking for a refund (ask me how I know…

Thanks for letting me know, I'll try that.

My guess is also that they use the hack as an excuse to keep people in.

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#234

Post by ikekkdcjkfke »

digging wrote: post #197
astrange wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of what I mean by it not being worth much though. Sure, leaks are embarrassing - the most common issue here is finding out that your dad isn't your real dad. But it's not useful for evil purposes because it's not /accurate/. It doesn't reveal all that much real additional information about your ancestry and health! Since it's decided before you're born: 1. its effects are mostly already expressed and peop…

> But it's not useful for evil purposes because it's not /accurate/. It doesn't reveal all that much real additional information about your ancestry and health! I'm not actually convinced that accuracy is all that important to the value of personal data. Or perhaps I should say I don't think think there's an accuracy floor at which the value drops to $0.

Not in the field, but i would assume the data is combined to create profiles to be used to infer data about other people with similar data, so now they have dna into the profiling mix. And in combined I mean the rest of your digital footprint from other sources, not a survey on 23

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#235

Post by 331c8c71 »

wslh wrote: post #96

Please ELI5: I understand that one of the key features of 23andMe is their health report because the genealogy and the DNA dump are included in other companies. For a developer plus a scientist it is teally difficult to get the health data from the raw ADN and using current (Python?) modules?

Health report? They only have limited info about your DNA (common small variants).

The further you move from obvious disease-causing or high-risk mutations the more expertise you need. But even there you need where to look and how to present the results.

The real (honest) question is what such reports cover and what qre the precision/recall? Answering that requires far more than duct-taping a few python modules.

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#237

Post by 331c8c71 »

AlbertCory wrote: post #150

> To create a recurring revenue stream from the tests, Wojcicki has pivoted to subscriptions. Just in case, you know, your DNA changes /s I attended Ann's talk at Google when she was still with Sergey. They had spit kits in case anyone wanted to do it on the spot (I didn't). When President Clinton announced the completion of the human genome project, he looked forward to all the wonderful drugs that would follow ther…

> Just in case, you know, your DNA changes /s

It absolutely does. That's how cancer occurs btw. The term is "somatic mutations".

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#238

Post by Dylan16807 »

astrange wrote: post #202
Dylan16807 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only showing correlation is one thing, but if the correlations themselves are barely noticable then that's a big problem for making a useful report. Though if you find whatever gene is most correlated with something, what are the options for it not to be causation? If the chance of causation is high enough, it makes sense to proceed as if the risk is real.

When I said correlation isn't causation I meant it. Neither high nor low correlation is evidence for causation. There's a more advanced form of being bad at this where you think you can show causation by controlling for everything in the environment. This is also wrong; it produces something called collider bias. > Though if you find whatever gene is most correlated with something, what are the options for it not to…

> 1. It's a coincidence and it's never causal.

Half the point of analyzing statistics is to filter out coincidences, and that applies to correlations too. If something is a coincidence, it won't hold up as a proper correlation under reasonable amounts of analysis. So when the premise is we're starting with correlations, I think it's alright to assume they're mostly not coincidences.

> The bugfix part of the diff caused it to be fixed. The updates to the copyright dates or changelogs didn't.

In that case the bugfix is the "gene most correlated", isn't it? Give it a few generations to randomly spread, and the signal will be far stronger on the bugfix gene than on the copyright gene. (And if it hasn't been spreading for generations then you won't have enough samples to find either gene.)

> 2. It's causal, but the causal chain involves a specific environmental factor, and we should change that instead.

> For instance, you can say every human has a genetic disease that prevents them from producing their own vitamin C, which most other mammals can do. But instead of calling scurvy a genetic disease we just eat fruits and vegetables.

If you're testing just humans, you'll get a 0% correlation because everyone has that gene.

If you're testing across mammals, then "WARNING: Prone to scurvy". Which is a completely correct and causal result about a genetic problem, with easily accessible treatments.

So, I don't understand your example at all.

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#239

Post by breck »

I was an early adopter of 23andMe. I bought many as presents and recommended it to many, many people. I even bought some stock after the SPAC (not the best investment :)).

I have no regrets, and still rooting for them.

There is something magical that I could spit in a tube, and my cousin could spit in a tube, and then weeks later we got emails saying "Out of millions of users we found your cousin just from spit!"

As kids we are lied to about a lot (the big guy in a red suit, for example), so part of growing up is verifying that what you are taught is actually true. If you did not major in biology, you don't have an easy way to verify that what you are told about genetics, DNA, and evolution is true. 23andMe provided that easy test for the layperson. I think that alone is worth the hundred bucks.

The joy I got from verifying DNA is at the core of life is like the joy I got from Intro to Electrical Engineering, building my first circuit with logic gates, and realizing that indeed everything is built up of 1s and 0s.

It seems they haven't developed more of a business beyond that novelty. I think I was expecting they would come out with future innovative offerings, given that their first was cool and done pretty well.

I was never crazy about the drug development plan. Seems like a more logical first step would be to combine with a fitness wearable company (Goog/Fitbit, Apple, Oura Ring, Whoop, Garmin, Samsung, etc), that there might be valuable insights from those datasets merged.

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#240

Post by AlbertCory »

331c8c71 wrote: post #237
AlbertCory wrote: post #150

> To create a recurring revenue stream from the tests, Wojcicki has pivoted to subscriptions. Just in case, you know, your DNA changes /s I attended Ann's talk at Google when she was still with Sergey. They had spit kits in case anyone wanted to do it on the spot (I didn't). When President Clinton announced the completion of the human genome project, he looked forward to all the wonderful drugs that would follow ther…

> Just in case, you know, your DNA changes /s It absolutely does. That's how cancer occurs btw. The term is "somatic mutations".

I'll confess my ignorance here, but would your saliva cells also show it (assuming it's not a mouth or throat cancer)? And it is is, wouldn't you have noticed something before your regular "checkup" from 23andme?
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