Genome and Social Networking

So for this blog I decided to look for something new in social networking. What I found was a company from Mountain View, Ca called 23andMe that offers people comparisons of their DNA to others. They call it a personal genomics service.

This goes a little beyond social networking, but is kinda cool. You could compare your DNA with, say, your best friends’ or even someone famous. You could potentially find relatives out there you never knew existed. A member of 23andMe’s scientific advisory board, George Church, says “The idea has precedence in PatientsLikeMe, people who have been enabled to find one another by their disease. Here, people can find each other by their alleles (or genetic variations)(Singer).”

I didn’t realize it before, but I guess there are several other sites out there already that offer this service. This is just a new one coming out soon.

So the idea is you can pay $999 for a kit, send in a sample of your spit, and then receive around “600,000 genetic variations linked to disease and other factors, such as ancestry, height, and color (Singer).”

The main purpose of the site is to eventually get enough people to create a database that is big enough to “reveal scientifically and medically relevant information about its users (Singer).”

This is way out of my league money wise, but I could see the benefits of the site and their potential. It would be easier than doing genealogy that takes forever and a day on some ancestors. It would be especially handy when your gene line breaks and you can’t trace your family back any longer, which happened to my grandmother when she did ours. Also, it might be beneficial for the entire family if they all threw in some money so one person didn’t have to foot the bill, but then who’s spit would be turned in?

Kinda cool. Here’s the link if you want to check it out and read more about the idea:

Social Networking hits the Genome