Investors in Illumina must be stoked about how things have been going so far for a company that commands a dominant market share in one of the most transformative technologies of our time – genetic sequencing. It’s allowed us to pursue promising technologies like gene editing – and now base editing – which means we can start […]
You probably don’t know much about rare diseases unless you’re one of the unfortunate few who are afflicted by one. Not everyone agrees upon how we ought to define a rare disease, but in the United States, that’s considered one that affects less than 200,000 people or about 1 in 1,636 people. While some diseases […]
The history of direct-to-consumer genomics tests goes something like this. Genomics startups first started offering hereditary tests that required a DNA sample and everyone quickly climbed on board without realizing just how much information they were handing over to people they didn’t really know that well. Eventually, testing companies started moving into DNA health tests and then the FDA […]
It’s a dog-eat-dog world when it comes to DNA testing. We’ve seen it all over the last few years, from serious topics such as privacy issues and the ethics of DNA testing for intelligence to super silly applications like physical fitness and dating. It’s certainly an industry that has courted its share of controversy, with companies […]
We’re well into 2019, which means most of us have already given up on our New Year’s resolution to get back into shape. That is not our typically cynical but witty intro to the topic of personal trainer apps for getting into shape. There is a bit of science that says that most of us […]
With the emergence of big data and machine learning, we’re now able to do all kinds of things that we couldn’t do before. While genetic testing started out as something you could use to find out if your dad is actually the milkman, it has now progressed into other areas. We recently wrote about how polygenic […]
One of the most famous principles in classical philosophy (one of our MBAs double-majored in case the whole business degree didn’t work out) is called Occam’s razor. It states that one should not make more assumptions than are needed to explain a certain phenomenon. In other words, start with the simplest answer first. This is […]
“Consumer DNA Tests Are Wrong 40 Percent of the Time” said an article on Geek.com which was published on April Fool’s day. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a joke. Turns out that a company called Ambry Genetics published a paper on Nature a few weeks ago which revealed “a high false-positive rate (40%) in genes with potential […]
So, what’s in your genes? What might sound like a geeky, if not cheeky, pick-up line is a sign of our times. Apparently, DNA dating is a thing. We somehow missed this trend. Of course, based on our romancing skills—we are a bunch of MBAs, after all—we vaguely recall a website launched back around 2000 […]
It’s been a while since we’ve taken a look at the various “at home DNA tests” available from companies like 23andMe, Ancestry.com, and Family Tree DNA. What each of these DNA tests has in common is that they all offer ancestry testing so that you can see if you are related to anyone else that took the […]