Build-a-Baby gets patented by 23andMe. Cue outrage.

http://pandodaily.com/2013/10/02/build-a-baby-gets-patented-by-23andme-cue-outrage/

by fortepianissimo • 13 years ago

6 2 13 years ago

pandodaily.com

matthewbaker• 13 years ago

Reading this comments constitutes an NDA signature:

Wrap a dating service around this and we can finally bring back the eugenics movement.

OkSuperiorRace.com? PlentyofPerfects.com? eSuperhumanarmony.com?

With your special financial contribution, we can make this dream come true!

a_bonobo• 13 years ago

I think this is more gimmick than anything else, like most of the services personal genomics companies provide.

SNPs don't tell you much about a person's perceived "beauty" and probably tell you only little about disease risks, and there are myriads of problems in the current literature of SNP-associations. Many associations (which go into this baby predictor thing) turn out to be unreproducible once you check a more diverse, or a bigger set of humans for associations. If you search Google Scholar for "failure to replicate GWAS" you'll get 1940 results for 2013 alone.

The only predictions that work are the phenotypes you get from your population history: eye color, hair color, skin color etc. But to predict that you don't need SNPs, you only need eyes. That's also cheaper.

Edit: I'm not saying that GWAS are crap all in all - they're useful in science in identifying candidate regions which may harbor genes related to favorable traits like resistance to a certain disease etc. They're just not very useful overall for private customers.

Build-a-Baby gets patented by 23andMe. Cue outrage.

Related Stories