I've had my eye on them for a while, and there's always some weird shit going on on their public face.

A deal being announced today with Genentech points the way for 23andMe, the personal genetics company backed by Facebook billionaire Yuri Milner and Google Ventures..

AND direct monetary support from the founder's husband, Sergey Brin. Let's not play.

“Obviously the goal for us for this collaboration is target discovery to find new medicines for patients in a disease-modifying sort of way.”

That's not what it was initially sold as, but that was the point all along, applying to Google monetization model to your genome. AND make you pay for their R&D.

One big question behind 23andMe’s business model has always been whether customers will be happy or upset when they find out that they realize they have paid to be used in for-profit research projects.

The FDA did the right thing, in my view. Tech companies may be able to release shit into the wild just to see what happens, but they were making proclamations about people's health, and while people should be able to sequester information about their genome to assist in quality of life, they also need to be able to retain control of this information.

Also, what's up with Calico? The connections really seemed to be coming together with that bad boy, but, last I looked around, they were still pretty quiet. Ooh, they're opening a research center,, I'm totally going to apply if any of those jobs fit.

This probably reading all conspiracy theory, so I have to say I don't think anything nefarious is going on, but this is truly weird sci-fi libertarian shit, like a Pynchon novel or something, and I just want to look beneath the surface more.