Dec
07
2009
Esther Dyson is a Director of 23andMe and an investor in numerous Internet, private aviation, space and health care ventures. She has also shared her genetic data, medical records and other personal information with the research community and the general public as a research subject for the Personal Genome Project, an initiative led by Harvard’s [...]
Tags: 23andMe, Esther Dyson, Personal Genome Project, Quantified Self, relative finder
Jun
11
2009
Science is dynamic and ever changing. As new research is published, theories get revised, and hypotheses retested. The field of genetic ancestry is no exception: The flurry of published research just in the last five years has been staggering, and we can now piece together the histories of many groups from nearly all parts of [...]
Tags: Haplogroup, paternal ancestry, Y-chromosome
Jun
03
2009
It has been known for decades that having the gum disease periodontitis increases a person’s risk for heart attack (free registration required), stroke and other forms of cardiovascular disease. Research suggests that the link is due to inflammation in the gums causing an immune reaction throughout the entire body. That can increase blood pressure and [...]
Tags: 9p21, cardiovascular disease, heart attack, periodontitis, stroke
May
26
2009
Malaria is one of the leading causes of death in the developing world, claiming nearly a million victims each year. The great majority of them are African children below the age of five. The illness is caused by a single-celled parasite called Plasmodium that is transmitted by mosquito bites to humans. In a paper published [...]
Tags: Africa, GWAS, hemoglobin, Malaria, Nature Genetics, The Gambia
Mar
03
2009
The way our Personal Genome Service™ works is pretty straightforward, at least from a customer’s point of view. We send you a saliva collection kit, which is at its heart a plastic tube. You spit in the tube and send it to our laboratory, which extracts DNA from your saliva, analyzes it and deposits the [...]
Tags: DNA, DNA extraction, funnel, saliva, Spit Kit
Feb
13
2009
Generally when you think about what separates humans from other species, features like upright walking, large brains and language come to mind.
But diet has actually played an enormous role in human evolution. Today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a panel of anthropologists, geneticists and paleontologists got together [...]
Tags: AAAS, American Association for the Advancement of Science, diet, evolution, lactose, Lactose Intolerance
Jan
02
2009
Chia, a former organic chemist who is happy to be out of the lab after a ten-year stint in front of a bench, is the Community Manager at 23andMe. What does this mean, you ask? Well, it’s a cross between a den mother, grassroots PR person, customer service agent, brand evangelist and community advocate. This [...]
Tags: caffeine, community, maternal haplogroup, Meet the Team
Dec
19
2008
Rachel is the Manager of Communications at 23andMe, i.e. the company gatekeeper. She handles incoming press inquiries, manages the public relations surrounding the launch of new features and partnerships, and talks to reporters and news producers about everything 23andMe. Imagine C.J. on the West Wing, except shorter and with less politics and more [...]
Tags: communications, Meet the Team
Nov
28
2008
Jonathan was a founding student of CSU Monterey Bay where he studied International Relations, Global Economics and Computer Science. Though he wanted to work in international politics and only studied computer science to keep his two Silicon Valley engineer parents happy and paying for college, eventually genetics won out and he joined the “family business.” [...]
Tags: CSU Monterey Bay, IT, Norse, sysadmin
Nov
18
2008
This guest post is by Brenna Henn, a doctoral student in Stanford University’s Department of Anthropology and a 23andMe consultant. Brenna studies human evolution using genetic information. Her interests include the origin of modern humans, migration patterns among African groups, and genetic models of demography.
One of the reasons genetics is such a powerful tool for [...]
Tags: ice age, mitochondrial DNA, Molecular Biology and Evolution, mutation rate