Will Our DNA & any other public identifying information be made public now?
July 26, 2015, 12:18 PM PDT How much would you pay to live longer? What if Google were making the pill to do it?
On Tuesday, Calico, the medical research company Google incubated in 2013, announced it had cut a deal for access to genetic information from Ancestry.com, the largest family tree website. It’s among the first public moves from Calico, the secretive division born to (gasp!) extend human life. With its new DNA data — properly anonymized — Calico will look for genetic patterns in people who have lived exceptionally long lives, then make drugs to help more of us do that.
The deal also marks another step in the next chapter of tech’s ambitious experiments with biology: After collating medical data, it’s marching the research to market. In January, 23andMe — the Ancestry.com competitor run by Anne Wojcicki, now ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin — inked a similar deal with Genentech to parse the genomes of Parkinson’s disease patients. Genentech is the former company of Arthur Levinson, the CEO of Calico. (It’s a small world.)
These companies are good at grabby headlines, but the commercial model for such ambitious research is unproven, and will likely remain so for several years.
Tim Sullivan, Ancestry.com’s CEO, said his privately held company has fielded requests from multiple medical research firms. It has spent over 20 years amassing its databank. He told Re/code: “We have been looking at, and frankly responding to, inquiries from a number of parties about ways that we can collaborate to take the data that we’ve aggregated historically, and that we’re starting to aggregate now, and get some real scale (recode.net)
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Re: Will Our DNA & any other public identifying information be made public now?
If you're going to violate copyrights, you should at least disclose what it is that you are reproducing without attribution.
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Re: Will Our DNA & any other public identifying information be made public now?
McC, If you're going to snark, you should at least read the entire post first. Attribution for the originating website is included in the OP.
You should also learn to use Google effectively, to avoid blundering into the abyss.
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Re: Will Our DNA & any other public identifying information be made public now?
goofey155... Wouldn't it have been easier to just post a link than to violate copyright laws?
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Re: Will Our DNA & any other public identifying information be made public now?
Okay..for the record. I wasn't trying to violate any copyright laws. I posted the website info at the end rather than the whole article because of the length of it. But here you go - http://recode.net/2015/07/26/the-long-game-google-partners-w...No copyright violation intended - I never guessed people wouldn't google recode.net to read the article - I never anticipated such harsh criticism over an innocent question and partial article with the website data enclosed. It was a serious question for those of us who were thinking of doing the DNA testing.
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Re: Will Our DNA & any other public identifying information be made public now?
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Re: Will Our DNA & any other public identifying information be made public now?
I think the major question is: what happens to the DNA that Ancestry subscribers have contributed along with their family information. I have not participated in this but if I had, I would have major questions now about the use of DNA. I contributed my DNA years ago for another company to compare with one line of my family history but never got any information so I would hope that the company I sent mine to would not decide to do anything else with my DNA.
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Re: Will Our DNA & any other public identifying information be made public now?
To answer the question in your subject ( but not actually mentioned in your post): No
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Re: Will Our DNA & any other public identifying information be made public now?
Thankyou. That is what I was asking and I appreciate your response. I know people who have had the DNA done through Ancestry and other family who had intended to have it done for matching purposes. I suppose everyone thought that the DNA test was protected in that the results belonged to the individual and not the company - if the data is sold and used to pull from in order to do research on genetic longevity, then how can they do that unless they have your personal data that indicates your age, name, gender and so on. That was what I meant in private now being public. Again thank you.
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Re: Will Our DNA & any other public identifying information be made public now?
The problem here from my standpoint is no one knows what will happen to their submitted DNA and information in the future. To cite a current example-who in the world would have thought that putting a fancy computer in the new cars would result in some hacker figuring out that they could take complete control of your car. So-could hackers hack that DNA base and do something we cannot even conceive of now. The headlong rush by the whole world to computers may and will have unintended consequences.
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