The genetics testing company 23andme was recently awarded a patent it applied for five years ago. According to PandoDaily, the patent covers a "calculator" that lets "people to pick and choose traits of their future child." Anne Wojcicki, the CEO of 23andme and wife of Google founder Sergey Brin, is listed as the lead inventor.
A Google-connected startup misdirected up to 96 genetic-test results, telling people their children were not their children, that their ancestors were not their ancestors and even that they were a different gender. Then came the panic and tears.
For a company with deep support from Google, 23andMe seems awfully beset by problems: Two layoff rounds in five months and the departure of a co-founder. So when we hear the company is "hemorrhaging cash," we're inclined to believe it.
Google hasn't been shy about sharing its riches with select friends outside the company. And the number one rule of this tightly-knit group seems to be: spread the love. Which brings us to 23AndMe's new, very incestuous blimp.
Genetics company 23AndMe can purportedly help you predict your health in decades to come, but we're hearing the three-year-old company can't even forecast its own near-term needs: A tipster tells us the company laid off seven employees.
If only Michael J. Fox, the actor and professional Parkinson's disease victim, had been an Internet genius like Google cofounder Sergey Brin, think of the good he might have done.
Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Sergey Brin, is exceedingly pregnant — and Brin himself has been spotted at the maternity ward. What will their baby look like? Wojcicki's genetic-testing startup, 23andMe, lets you spit into a vial and get a map to your genetic future. MakeMeBabies is not nearly as scientific, but we thought we'd run the couple's photos through to get a glimpse of their future progeny. Can you suggest a caption for the billionaire baby to be? The best will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: "French blue shirt, khakis shortage hits Valley hard." (Image by MakeMeBabies)
How long ago did we learn Anne Wojcicki, wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, was pregnant with the couple's first child? April, which was seven months ago. What a clever idea, to have a baby as a publicity stunt for her startup! It got her on Oprah. On the talk show, Wojcicki disclosed that she's nine months pregnant. "Please have the baby right now!" said the talk-show host. Wojcicki then jumped right into an infomercial for 23andMe's genetic-testing service and her nonprofit work on Parkinson's, a condition for which Brin is at risk. Free advertising for someone whose husband is worth billions of dollars: There is a reason the rich are rich.
Time's Anita Hamilton is refreshingly honest about why the magazine has picked 23andMe, the mail-order DNA testing outfit, as one of its top innovations of 2008: Anne Wojcicki, the startup's cofounder, is married to Google cofounder Sergey Brin. Few outlets are as forthright in displaying their motivations for celebrating 23andMe, arguably the least innovative and least scientific of the retail DNA tests on the market. Give Anne Wojcicki a prize, and her loyal husband will attend the awards ceremony. It's a great way to get Googler star power on the cheap.
Esther Wojcicki, known as "Woj" at Palo Alto High School, where she teaches journalism, is a beloved figure on campus. She's also quite welcome at the Googleplex, as the mother of Anne Wojcicki, who's married to Google cofounder Sergey Brin, and Google executive Susan Wojcicki. I wonder if proximity to power and wealth has dulled Woj's reportorial instincts.She recently wrote a wide-eyed travelogue for the Huffington Post about the first flight of the Zeppelin NT, a blimp launched by startup Airship Ventures. Airship is backed by Esther Dyson, who is also an investor in her daughter Anne's startup, 23andMe. That, at the least, Woj ought to have disclosed. (I've asked Mario Ruiz, an executive at Huffington Post, if she violated any of the online publication's disclosure rules for writers; he has yet to reply. But if she really wanted to impress her students with her journalism chops, Woj might have asked questions about Amphitheatre LLC, the shadowy entity which has also invested in Airship Ventures. Amphitheatre shares a name with the street address of Google's headquarters — and possibly more. I would love to have known what Woj would have discovered, had she been less interested in promoting her daughter's investor's new startup.
Zeppelins went out of style when the Hindenburg went down in flames over New Jersey. But Airship Ventures, a startup backed by quirky angel investor Esther Dyson, is trying to bring them back. With a little help from Dyson's friends. Airship's Zeppelin NT, the first to fly over the U.S. in 70 years, has just completed a transatlantic journey and is scheduled to touch down this afternoon at the Nasa-operated Moffett Field, where it will be permanently stationed, operating aerial tours of the Bay Area. Curious — a private enterprise making use of public lands. Nasa's excuse for hosting the zeppelin: It will be used for scientific investigations and other public-spirited purposes. Where have we heard that before?Why, with the Google founders' fleet of party planes, which are also parked at Moffett Field, with the excuse that they sometimes fly scientific missions. (In fact, the Google founders' jets proved impractical for Nasa's science needs; Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt bought a fighter jet to fly those missions instead.) One of Airship Ventures' backers is an entity called Amphitheatre Holdings. Amphitheatre is incorporated in Delaware under the address of INV Tax Group, which Google may have purchased in a real-estate transaction two years ago. Google's headquarters is at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, Calif. This hardly seems like coincidence. Dyson is an investor in 23andMe, the Google-backed startup of Anne Wojcicki, wife of founder Sergey Brin. Has Dyson taken Google's shareholders for a ride, by having them take a hidden stake in a blimp startup?
Google cofounder Sergey Brin has popped his blogging cherry, using his first post as an excuse to promote his wife Anne Wojcicki's personal genetic testing company 23andMe. Turns out Brin has a genetic mutation likely inherited from his mother that indicates a higher risk for Parkinson's Disease — a debilitating condition that affects movement, resulting in tremors and eventual paralysis. Which would certainly be a terrible fate for a gymnast who loves kite-surfing. Brin has "decades to prepare for it," though. My suggestion?Brin should do what many in the health-obsessed Valley unilaterally shun: Take up smoking, as nicotine has been shown to have a prophylactic effect on the degeneration of dopamine-producing brain cells in mice.
Guess what you're doing about six-to-10 weeks from now? Going to a "spit party!" Thanks to some dynamite PR and one very fancy guest list, plucky young tech firm 23andMe has made DNA testing parties the hottest new trend around. And they're bringing it to the masses—via media moguls at Fashion Week parties, that is. Don't worry, it will eventually trickle down to the rest of us. We say plucky, of course, because the firm was co-founded by the wife of Google oligarch Sergey Brin, and has received "token funding" from Harvey Weinstein and Wendi Murdoch, wife of Rupert, and is having its coming out party this week in the New Yorker and the Times. It's the Little Startup That Could! But why would those folks want to convince yuppies with disposable income to spit into a tube and mail the spit to a research lab, where their complete genetic profile will be uploaded to the web to be shared with friends, loved ones, and curious sex partners? Isn't it obvious...?Google exists for one purpose: to catalog all the information in the known universe, because information is power. Rupert Murdoch exists for one purpose: to disseminate all that information and make a fortune off it. But Rupert Murdoch can't live forever ... unless! Hear us out: 23andMe compiles a record of the most ideal chromosomes from the world's most remarkable genetic freaks (Usian Bolt's speed, Gary Kasparov's logical reasoning, Michael Phelps' giant flippers), melds them with Murdoch's base double-helix blueprint, and then installs the self-aware Rupert virus on a Google server farm. You know how this story ends:
Google-backed startup 23andMe is working on fixing the Bay Area beauty gap by convincing the pretty people at New York's Fashion Week to submit genetic samples for the new, low cost of $399. As non-California residents, Manhattanites represent a genetic talent pool untouched by regulatory agencies in the startup's home state. 23andMe cofounders Anne Wojcicki and Linda Avey, pictured here, see fashionistas as runway dilettantes, and therefore brick-dumb.But by figuring out the single-nucleotide polymorphisms which lead to chiseled features and a high-powered metabolism, Wojcicki might figure out how to make sure her next child with Google cofounder Sergey Brin is healthy, smart and ravishingly beautiful according to media norms. My suggestion? New York's models should be making 23andMe pay them for saliva samples. It's not like Wojcicki, whose startup is already backed by her husband's employer, can't dial for more dollars from Google's new venture investment arm whenever she feels like it.
Got to hand it to the team at 23andMe — when employees say that their personal gene sequencing services serve no medical purpose whatsoever, they mean it. Case in point is the company's latest blog post promises that with enough customer feedback, they may just be able to answer the age old question "Is my distaste for common herb cilantro a product of nature or nurture?" [The Spittoon] (Photo by Simon J. Hernandez)
