Sep 24 2008
What is it about humans that distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom? Is it our upright walking? Our language? Our love of Reality TV? Even though we are said to be 99% genetically identical to our closest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee, we clearly differ vastly from them physically and behaviorally.
For many years, [...]
Apr 29 2008
This woman shares 99.5% of her DNA with Lilly Mendel.
Team 23andMe likes games – Wii tennis and Segway polo are big here. So are friendly wagers over a new employee’s ACTN3 genotype, or whether a given Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation will converge during our lifetimes.
So in the spirit of friendly competition, we’re starting the [...]
Feb 11 2008
There were fireworks on the beach at Marco Island, Fla., Thursday night, where 575 genome experts had gathered to discuss serious progress in genomics at the annual Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference.
I last saw fireworks at a genomics conference in 2000. Back then, euphoria around the first human reference sequence reached a frenzy [...]
Feb 10 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 [...]
Jan 29 2008
An editorial in the February issue of Nature Genetics makes a number of excellent points about the potential that personal genomics services such as 23andMe have to directly engage the public in research, not just as subjects but as collaborators.
23andMe was founded in part to harness the natural curiosity that results when people can see [...]
