Not too long ago I was a sedentary, slightly-overweight, South Asian man entering my thirties. Like everyone I know, I felt that the less I saw my doctor, the better. Most importantly, by medical standards, I had no reason to consider myself predisposed to heart disease. Not long ago, my 23andMe data changed my story. (Read on for a personal story of how 23andMe results prompted someone to learn some valuable information about his family’s medical history and make important changes for his health.)

Tags: familial hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, heart disease, MYBPC3, South Asian, sudden cardiac death

My parents aren’t world-class athletes, but in the summer of 2009 they both competed in the Senior Olympics. They were representing their home state of Wyoming, where people — much less senior athletes — are few and far between. It was at the Senior Olympics that my parents first encountered 23andMe. The company had set [...]

Tags: anesthesiology, pharmacogenomics, Senior Olympics

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 [...]

Tags: Invention of the Year, Personal Genome Service, TIME Magazine

Meet Marcela, a product manager at 23andMe. A product manager represents the customer’s needs while also considering engineering constraints and business requirements. Her most recent projects were focused on building the user experience of those who participate in research through 23andWe and helping to build the burgeoning 23andMe community. Marcela on the 23andMe Service: “I [...]

Tags: 23andWe, AMD, Japan, migrations, photic sneeze, product management

This is Fashion Week in New York City, a twice-yearly spectacle where designers, models, celebrities and the merely style-obsessed meet to consider next season’s top looks. 23andMe managed to lure a few hundred people away from the catwalks Tuesday night to consider the beauty that lies within — DNA. Our Fashion Week spit party was [...]

Tags: Anne Wojcicki, IAC, InterActiveCorp, Linda Avey, New York, Spit Party

Brian spends his days deep within the heart of the 23andMe web infrastructure. He is a software engineer with long experience in the biomedical field, having previously supported pharmacogenomics and brain imaging endeavors. In addition to being ready and willing to automate himself out of a job, Brian is obsessed with producing beautifully designed, well [...]

Tags: CSS, Golden Ziggurat, jobs, research, Rock Band, Segway, software engineer

Cary, a software engineer at 23andMe, works on a wide variety of systems, from processing raw data from the lab to working on the customer-facing website. Most of the site is developed in Python on top of MySQL and Apache, all running on Linux. Cary has mostly worked on the backend of the website, and [...]

Tags: 23andWe, anosmia, Apache, circadian rhythms, Compare Genes, engineering, MySQL, Python, software

We want to ensure that we always present our users with a delightful and empowering experience as they explore their genomes. We are continuously improving the design of all dimensions of our service because they all converge to influence the user experience (UX) of 23andMe – the experience a user will have while interacting with [...]

Tags: Brussels sprouts, design, Family Inheritance, jobs, usability, user experience

Denali is responsible for ‘quality assurance’ at 23andMe. She is a software engineer obsessed with producing software that works, in all cases, at all times. After years of writing buggy software, debugging it, and adding more bugs, a-hem ‘features’, she finally decided it was time to start writing correct software. As a full-blown test-driven development [...]

Yesterday 23andMe co-founder Linda Avey and I spent a muggy day on Capitol Hill, meeting with the staff of various senators and representatives, and thanking them for passing the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act (GINA). Most of them had never heard of 23andMe, so we took the time to explain what we do. We also emphasized [...]