Google co-founder Sergey Brin has just started a new blog which promises to offer some interesting insights into one of the most influential people in the technology world.
His first post details something incredibly personal – Brin’s predisposition to Parkinson’s Disease. He learned this from an examnation of his DNA by 23andMe, the company co-founded by Brin’s wife Anne.
I just ordered up my Genome at 23andme.com They’ll send the kit over the next few days, I’ll swab my saliva and send it back, and they’ll analyze the sample. Then I’ll be able to see a list showing most of my genome. every single nucleotide pair of mine. Obviously reading that report could get kind of boring …. “HOLY Crap, there’s *another* GATC sequence!” Which is why 23andMe has a lot of cool online information and tools to graph and understand your relationships to your genome, your ancestry, and more. It’s staggering that only a few years after cracking this holy grail of biology it’s available to everybody. “The Language of God” for more about the philosophy of one of the key players in the quest for the human Genome.
Yes, $999 is a lot of pizza and beer, but OMG how could I not do this? I’ll report more here as I learn more about my genes.
It is *so cool* to be around to see some of the most sweeping changes in human history unfold right before our eyes. www.23andme.com, the new service that will provide you with your complete genetic blueprint, brings the potential for a sea change in the way humans will view our relationship to each other and to our own biology and chemistry.
This company is brought to us thanks to the amazing work of the Genome Project, which fully documented a complete human DNA record. 23andme allows all of us to get a copy of our own genome – at a fraction of the cost for the first set of DNA.
Hopefully this will also help us along the path to a better philosophical and emotional relationship to the world that spawned all of us from physical and evolutionary processes that we continue to grasp in more fascinating detail.
www.23andMe is also intriguing as it’s the brainchild of Google founder Sergy Brin’s wife and early Google employee Anne. One of the exciting things about Google is that the founders and early employees are not only brilliant – they are also young and enthusiastic technological visionaries who, unlike some of their predecessors like Tesla, have *tons* of money to invest in these visionary technological dreams.
Will I be signing up for a copy? Maybe, but even though $999 is an amazing deal it’s a lot of pizzas, so I’m going to wait for the first …. ummm … “Genome sale”.
Joe Duck 