
Ask HN: Does this genetic testing (ie, 23andMe) service exist? - belltyler
I&#x27;m thinking of a service like 23andMe that instead takes 2 samples and outputs what the children of the two people would be like, what they&#x27;d be disposed to, what their traits might be, etc.<p>I know this can be done at physician&#x27;s offices to an extent (i.e., during family planning), but I was curious if there was anything cheap&#x2F;simple out there available to the masses?<p>Thanks!
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jaredsohn
Some other variations:

* Make your (genetic data) available to algorithms to use as criteria within a dating app for people looking to meet someone that they might want to have children with.

* Similar but use it for helping women find sperm donors (although it wouldn't surprise me if this already exists.)

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brudgers
I carry genes for brown eyes and blue eyes. My eyes are brown. A child with a
blue eyed partner may have brown or blue eyes depending on which of my genes
it gets. Most things are not as simple as eye color but even if they were all
binary, the combinatorics are so massive that a composite description of a
child based on their parents would be a total fabrication.

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notahacker
I find it hard to believe there isn't a huge market for this even if the
results are highly questionable...

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bordercases
Not with any reasonable accuracy for most traits - yet. There are both many to
one and one to one relationships for genes to phenotype. Add in
continuous/fuzzy/probabilistic measures and you get an explosion for the total
set (although some subcollection might be tractable with data.)

Observationally some traits are more straightforward. Skin color, IQ and and
height give us an unweighted average as the expected value for the offspring,
with the height of either parent setting bounds on the variance. But that
isn't news if your service can be replaced by SAT scores and simply taking a
look in the mirror.

It's a good idea though.

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kleer001
I would be curious as to the costs involved in creating a business from
scratch that mirrors 23andMe's functionality with regards to design,
marketing, legal, and scaled PCR.

I suspect it's a big chuck of change as they got $4 million from Google back
in the beginning.

They do have long legal coat tails, so it might be indeed available business
real estate for the intrepid.

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hanniabu
Quite interesting. I don't believe so, or at least I haven't heard of this.

23andMe can probably easily pivot to this area, but that hasn't stopped
competitors in other fields that were dominated at the time. Plus this area is
still pretty young and the market still has a lot of room for growth.

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samfisher83
Does some want to create the next Nate Grey ?

