Oct 31 2008
It was a great honor to learn yesterday that the 23andMe Personal Genome Service™ has been named TIME Magazine’s 2008 Invention of the Year. Today the Spittoon would like to acknowledge several 23andMe partners who contributed to the innovation behind our service.
We’d like to extend our thanks to Illumina, Inc., DNA Genotek, Inc., and LabCorp, [...]
Oct 30 2008
About 3,500 years ago the Phoenicians expanded from their homeland in present-day Syria and Lebanon, using their superior maritime technology to establish trading posts across southern Europe and North Africa. They traded silver from Iberia, copper from Cyprus, and textiles from Morocco. They built cities in Sicily, Malta, and Tunisia that rivaled [...]
Oct 30 2008
Editor’s Note: This week TIME Magazine is naming the 23andMe Personal Genome Service™ its Invention of the Year, an honor that the publication has previously bestowed on innovations such as the iPhone and YouTube. This post by Director of Products Alex Wong (back row, second from right) offers a glimpse at how 23andMe came to [...]
Oct 29 2008
Even though European populations have been studied for years, there are still many lingering questions as to the continent’s population history – especially with regards to isolated peoples. Understanding the history of the Basque of northern Spain has long been a topic of interest among geneticists, as has the origins of the indigenous Saami of [...]
Oct 28 2008
Photo by Hsien-Hsien Lei, Eye on DNA.
“Data, data, data! I want to see my data!” sang my 7-year-old, jumping around the kitchen, strumming his air guitar. What on earth was going through his mind? What did he think he’d get when he looked at his 23andMe data? We’ll probably never know, but, [...]
Oct 27 2008
The Spittoon has pointed out several times in the last few months (here, here and here) that when researchers look for evidence of interbreeding between early humans and Neanderthals, they often fail to find any.
But there are still a number of geneticists who would like us to pay heed to the words of former defense [...]
Oct 24 2008
Michelle is 23andMe’s curation manager. “Curation” often evokes images of an old scholar in a musty museum categorizing dinosaur bones for museum exhibits. But in the past decade or so, the term has also come to be used to describe scientists, usually in a biological field, organizing and annotating electronic data and scientific [...]
Oct 23 2008
In the year 1831, two very important events happened to 22 year-old biologist Charles Darwin. The first was that he boarded the Beagle, a research vessel upon which he would embark on a five-year journey to Central and South America. There he would collect mountains of data on hundreds of plant and animal species, which [...]
Oct 22 2008
SNPwatch gives you the latest news about research linking various traits and conditions to individual genetic variations. These studies are exciting because they offer a glimpse into how genetics may affect our bodies and health; but in most cases, more work is needed before this research can provide information of value to individuals. For that [...]
Oct 21 2008
Russ Altman.
In a recent post on his “Building Confidence” blog, 23andMe scientific advisor Russ Altman recounts an experience that should be familiar to 23andMe customers who regularly read The Spittoon. After reading a recent New England Journal of Medicine paper about a genetic variant associated with the development of side effects among people taking cholesterol-lowering [...]
