Genomics just got personal.

Question: What is 23andMe?

Esther Dyson: Well, you go our website, and you order a kit that kit comes in the couple of days, you spit into a tube, so that they collect your saliva, you send there is packing materials and so forth this is very much designed to be consumer friendly you put to back into the packaging material and its already preaddressed go to the lab where your sample gets handle by the web and we it produces a sample of your gene that’s about 500,000 snips little genetic variations long and then that’s gets sent to 23ME and then you are notify to come to the website and putting your password and so forth and find out the data about yourself, so then you can is I mentioned you can look it if you got in you fail in that I am just signup which is probably ultimate and viral marketing you can compare yourself to your family members I have 30 family members so that I bought gets for so that’s actually a lot of fun, you can look at what your genetic tendency is to this or that condition looking you taste the bitter and broccoli that kind of stuff and its tremendously educational if you studied it mean dealing genetics and then you look your family where you can just see it all working it’s amazing.

Recorded on: 03/21/2008