[ExI] most daring ceo?

[BillK]

On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 7:18 AM, spike wrote:
> OCTOBER 2013
> Leading the charge in the DNA revolution, Anne Wojcicki, our CEO and
> co-founder, is named the "most daring CEO in America".
>
> For instance, suppose the government is giving you a big hassle about
> practicing medicine when you aren't practicing medicine at all.  You are
> reporting the results of surveys freely given by your clients as
> intentionally open crowd sourced science, matching results with others who
> took the survey whose DNA markers match yours.  That isn't practicing
> medicine.  The FDA has no say in what you do with survey results.  So you
> feel justified in telling the government to go to hell.  Sure that's daring,
> but having the billion dollars from another source would have to contribute
> to that daring, ja?
>
> If Anne Wojcicki were not independently wealthy, sure I would call her
> daring.
>



The Oct 2013 article is just a PR piece for 23andMe which doesn't even
mention the FDA or whether the tests provided worthwhile health
information. I don't see anybody else calling her a 'daring' CEO.

23andMe are now selling their spit kit as providing mainly genealogy
data. They still provide their DNA test results but without any health
recommendations. So customers now have to take the results to a doctor
and ask them whether having gene XYZ has much significance. And given
the present state of knowledge, every doctor probably has a different
opinion. (Which, of course, is why the FDA is concerned).

>From Wojcicki's POV though, it doesn't much matter. Her objective for
the company is to collect over 25 million test DNA results and do 'big
data' health analysis to find correlations to enable disease
prevention.
Selling the tests for genealogy only, saves 23and Me money as they no
longer provide the health reports and they still collect the data they
want for their database collection. So long as the tests keep selling
and the data collection continues, I doubt if she is much worried.


BillK