
My deadly disease was just a 23andme bug - mntmn
http://mntmn.com/pages/23andme.html
======
IanDrake
I'm surprised at the negativity here. There is nothing conclusive about this
test and from what I've seen it does a pretty good job. So one guy got some
bad indicators that proved to be nothing, who cares?

My father did 23 and me, without giving any family medical history and it
concluded that my father was at a much higher risk factor for things that his
mother was ultimately afflicted with. So, it works to some extent.

On the flip side, long story short, I had a CT scan done on my chest that
checked out fine, but the doctor that reviewed it said I might have and
unrelated problem - Patent Ductus Syndrome. Nothing heart surgery and a
lifetime of supply of Coumadin couldn't fix. A few months later I got an
Echocardiogram which conclusively said the doctor was wrong.

Quick, stop doing CT scans!!!??? Are we're all so afraid of our own shadow
that heroes at the FDA need to protect us?

~~~
mikeash
"Are we're all so afraid of our own shadow that heroes at the FDA need to
protect us?"

Well, yes. You can try to make it look like a bad thing by using loaded
language, but _yes_ , the whole point of the FDA is to protect us from
problems like this.

Medicine is complicated. It's also a very poor fit for free markets, because
it tends to be filled with monopolies and because free markets require
informed participants and the extreme complexity of medicine makes that
impossible for most.

Historically, large numbers of people and companies have had no compunctions
with taking advantage of this to defraud a lot of people, frequently while
causing them pain or death. The FDA is intended to fix that. It may not
succeed, or may not succeed well, but yes, this stuff is dangerous and we are
afraid of it to the extent that we want an agency to protect us.

~~~
crusso
_It may not succeed, or may not succeed well, but yes, this stuff is dangerous
and we are afraid of it to the extent that we want an agency to protect us._

It may not work, but we want an agency to protect us.

Lots of people make similar comments regarding the TSA.

~~~
jbooth
Lesson being, the world is shades of gray, you don't just call all government
good or bad unless you want to be spectacularly wrong and confident about it.
The world's realized that the communists were idiots who thoughtlessly caused
a lot of suffering when they got their way, why don't the libertarians learn
the obvious lesson? Blanket ideology ratcheted up to 11 leads to really bad
ideas.

On the particulars -- the TSA has never caught an actual terrorist. The FDA
has stopped potentially harmful and/or ineffective drugs from coming to
market. Anything could be improved and, given drug research costs, there's
probably a lot of room for improvement at the FDA. But "let's abolish it
because ideology" doesn't fly. In 23andme's particular case, they seem to have
an extremely mild and common-sense set of requests that could be fixed at the
disclaimer level.

~~~
liber8
>> _the TSA has never caught an actual terrorist. The FDA has stopped
potentially harmful and /or ineffective drugs from coming to market_<<

This is an excellent example of the "seen" vs. the "unseen". Sure, the FDA has
stopped harmful and/or ineffective drugs from coming to market. But the FDA
has also stopped plenty of _effective_ drugs from coming to market, both
directly (e.g. no more Vioxx because it might slightly elevate your risk of
heart attack) and indirectly (the billions of dollars it costs, _directly due
to FDA requirements_ , to bring a drug to market).

Is the assurance that FDA-approved drugs are safe[1] worth the inhibited
advancement of medicine? I don’t know, but I doubt it. I think a much wiser
approach would be to have potential drugs freely available, and subject to
testing by third or quasi-third parties (ala Underwriters Laboratories). Hell,
you could even leave the FDA in place if you want to, only limit its ability
to restrict drugs to market. For example, you could reverse their decision-
making criteria: FDA will only _pull drugs from market_ if it can be shown
that the drugs are more harmful than beneficial for their intended use. This
would leave the choice to use a certain medication to individuals and their
doctors, with guidance from FDA/labs who conduct the same sort of testing the
FDA does now.

[1] Note that the FDA’s stamp isn’t really an “assurance” anyway. Vioxx (and
loads of other “harmful” drugs) still made it to market.

~~~
jbooth
Nothing's an absolute assurance, mistakes happen in all walks of life.

If you're talking about streamlining the FDA process without significantly
increasing the risk of harmful drugs slipping through, I think everybody's in
favor of that.

If you're talking about streamlining the process at the cost of higher risk,
then that's probably a nonstarter. Why? I (and most people) am not willing to
increase my odds of being harmed on behalf of someone else's profit margin.
You'd have to be crazy to accept that deal.

Expecting the market to 'just do your research' on drugs is crazy. It takes
experts with PhDs a long time to verify a drug as safe, and they still make
mistakes sometimes as you indicated... you're expecting me to do it? I haven't
taken chemistry since high school.

~~~
dllthomas
_" If you're talking about streamlining the process at the cost of higher
risk, then that's probably a nonstarter."_

For me that's not a non-starter. It's the start of a process that involves
looking at just _how much_ money gets saved (and by whom), just _how much_
additional risk is borne by those taking the passed medications, and _how much
faster_ we're getting new (safe enough and effective enough) drugs on the
market.

~~~
jbooth
I should have slid in the word 'significantly' like I did in the previous
sentence.

You're willing to take significantly more risk that a routine drug
prescription harms/kills you in order to streamline the process for drug
companies? (Note that there already is a process in place for those with
advanced diseases that justify a high-risk drug to take experimental drugs
with knowledge of the risks).

~~~
dllthomas
Without pinning things down quite a bit more into specific proposals, I'm not
willing to do much of anything. I'm just saying that _sometimes_ increased
risk for decreased money and increased time can be a good trade-off, and any
given proposal should be evaluated on its merits.

~~~
jbooth
Sure. If the proposal is "government is tyranny, abolish the FDA!", there
aren't any merits, the proposal is fundamentally unserious and comes from a
place of deliberate ignorance. That's the kind of idiocy I was objecting to.

Any realistic proposal (as in, we have an idea of how much extra risk we're
incurring) is going to have a lot of technical details and probably require a
huge amount of research to justify it -- it's human lives that we're talking
about here. The potential $ savings are big but that doesn't matter if you're
dead. Like I said way upthread, there is plenty of room for improvement, but
"libertarian pixie dust will make everything better automatically" is the same
thought process that led to collective farming and killing 10s of millions in
Russia and China.

~~~
dllthomas
Savings doesn't matter if you're dead, but the other side can't be ignored
either. If those billions permits more competition and leads to new drugs,
that _too_ can save lives.

We need to do what we think is most likely to lead to the best outcome.
There's a point beyond which that's no longer "more research", at which point
researching more isn't taking it seriously. I have no particularly strong
feelings about just where we are in that space - I'm busy saving the world
along other lines.

------
tptacek
Now consider that this is a marketing message that wants to have it both ways:
it alerts clients to genetic "risks", which are very likely to be subjected to
secondary testing, but does not want to be liable for the accuracy of its
negative results, which are very unlikely to be challenged.

It would be better if 23AM presented medical genomic information in a neutral
way, with external links to descriptions of genomic variations but no
assertion of diagnostic significance at all, or even a mention of how to
obtain a diagnostically significant result.

Unfortunately, the way 23AM is packaged (see the website), they are
incentivized to do the opposite; positive results are recognized by their
clients as valuable, and, whether 23AM likes it or not, so are the negative
results.

~~~
shazow
Here is a company who is trying to make genetics more accessible,
approachable, and comprehensible.

> It would be better if 23AM presented medical genomic information in a
> neutral way, with external links to descriptions of genomic variations but
> no assertion of diagnostic significance at all, or even a mention of how to
> obtain a diagnostically significant result.

What you're suggesting would effectively revert the consumer experience about
half a step above "go to lab X to sequence your DNA, then hop on over to
SNPedia.com to figure out what it all means."

> Unfortunately, the way 23AM is packaged (see the website), they are
> incentivized to do the opposite...

Perhaps this is more subjective than worth talking about, but that's not the
impression I had when using and working on the product. All the more reason
they need to be careful, for sure.

Disclaimer: I worked at 23andMe's frontend team briefly, a few years ago.
While I have mixed feelings about their engineering practices and other
things, I do believe in and support their mission.

~~~
tptacek
It is impossible to read 23AM's current website and not come away with an
impression of the tool's clinical ambitions. I _strongly_ buy into the idea
that everyone working on the product is doing so with the best intentions and
I'm thrilled to be living in a time when products like it are available at its
price point. But their marketing is incautious and might need to be tuned up.

~~~
shazow
> But their marketing is incautious and might need to be tuned up.

You're probably right. Unfortunately it's too easy to create a gap between the
public-facing marketing messaging and the real spirit of the product. I can
think of many companies who struggle with this.

If you do become a customer, it's evident that they perform an admirable
effort to make the results appear as neutrally educational as possible. Every
data interpretation is heavily cited and explained, all the while urging
further clarification from a medical professional. (Let me know if you'd like
some screenshots.)

Personally, this is above and beyond of what I would expect, and there are
competitors (especially foreign) who do far less. I can see why the FDA would
prefer to have everything that could be interpreted as medical advice to be
regulated and controlled, but I'm not convinced that it would yield a net
benefit to consumers in this case.

------
kohanz
The frustration directed towards the FDA in the 23andMe threads is not
surprising, but short-sighted, IMHO. Sure, there are likely inefficiencies in
the way the FDA operates, in a micro-sense, but in the macro-view, this sort
of stuff _needs_ to be regulated.

Many simple take-home tests that are arguably much more time-tested, reliable,
and accurate than 23andMe's DNA services are FDA-regulated. If your basic
take-home pregnancy test is FDA regulated, why should 23andMe be exempt? Or
would you prefer a world where all of these tests were unregulated?

Not everyone does their research. Not everyone is intelligent enough to
understand the implications of medical tests, drugs, and devices - regulation
protects the vulnerable among us.

As an aside, I've worked in medical devices for most of my career. All other
things remaining equal, engineering teams in these companies are no different,
talent-wise and quality-wise, than most teams you'd see in other industries.
Take the sloppiest engineering team you've worked with, now imagine them
working on a clinical product with the potential to cause real harm to people
(physical or psychological).

It is the regulation (FDA and others) that ensures that these teams "raise
their quality game", so to speak. It is not perfect by any means, but I don't
dare imagine the alternative. Yes, the regulation is a massive pain. I
experience it first-hand. It slows things down, has massive associated costs
and can even stifle innovation. The general trade-off, however, is worth it,
IMHO.

~~~
anigbrowl
_If your basic take-home pregnancy test is FDA regulated, why should 23andMe
be exempt? Or would you prefer a world where all of these tests were
unregulated?_

That's an outstanding comparison, one I wish I had thought of.

------
sneak
If I were to ever use 23andme, I'd use a fake name, a disposable mailing
address, a fake email address, and never, ever discuss it with anyone.

Your genome doesn't change, and who knows where that data leaks to later? Who
knows what healthcare providers will vacuum up such leaks?

Who knows what kind of discriminatory practices will be undertaken by service
providers, insurers, or even employers in the future?

Haven't y'all ever watched Gattaca?!

Keep your private information private. Nobody else will do it for you.

EDIT: Oh, and USA PATRIOT too.

~~~
aestra
>Who knows what kind of discriminatory practices will be undertaken by service
providers, insurers, or even employers in the future?

FYI, This is illegal in the United States. It is prohibited by the Genetic
Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrimi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrimination_Act)

You can thank Rep. Louise Slaughter for that one, she tried to get the bill
passed for 12.5 years, and never gave up. She declared it "the greatest thing
she has done in her time in Congress." She is the only scientist in Congress.

~~~
xxpor
> She is the only scientist in Congress

Not true, fortunately.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Holt](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Holt)

~~~
aestra
Sorry for spreading misinformation. When I heard her speak some years ago, I
could have sworn I heard the person who introduced her say she was the only
scientist in congress. Perhaps they were wrong, perhaps I heard or remembered
wrong.

------
zallarak
23andme is a consumer genetic testing company. The testing is not meant to be
clinically applied. I work for a company that is similar to 23andme, different
in the sense that the test can be clinically applied; the catch is that
everything you report must be very robustly researched and you must comply
with more regulation (research, lab, medical, security, etc.) which drives up
the cost but gives you much more actionable and medically relevant
information.

I think there are benefits to both approaches of genetic testing; 23andme has
a lot of data it collects and can do interesting statistical studies/reporting
that other more research-oriented companies cannot. However, like I said
before, you can't view a test like that as medically actionable. In the end
though, the more testing there is (as long as the messaging is clear and
consumers do their homework), the better oFf the world will be.

------
newnewnew
Thank goodness there are thousands of people being paid to prevent me from
spitting in a tube and getting noisy data about my own body! I should only be
able to get data about my body after running a gauntlet of specialists with
millions of dollars in total education, for my protection, of course.

------
rafeed
I'd never want to get my DNA tested by a service like this. It may be cool,
but there's too many things at play here.

    
    
        - privacy
        - security of data
        - wrongful use of data
        - spread of misinformation
        - mind fucking that ensues after reading your results
        - probably a lot more
    

The only benefit is for those who are so curious about what genes they carry,
what mutations they have, and who they may or may not be related to. Really,
why risk having your mind potentially fucked by knowing something about
yourself that you're not ready to handle yet?

Sorry if I seem overly critical about a service like this, but it just doesn't
seem worth it to me.

~~~
Jemaclus
I signed up for 23andme.com a few months ago, mainly because I'm adopted and I
don't know anything about my family history, so I thought it would be neat to
check out. The one and only thing that bothers me so far is their definition
of privacy. Here's what I mean:

One of the features they provide is ancestry help. They compare your DNA with
all other users' DNA and then give you a list of potential relatives. They say
"hey, you guys share .6% of the same DNA, you might be 3rd to 5th cousins."

That's cool, right? Especially for someone who is adopted.

The problem is that it takes 2 weeks longer to do the ancestry stuff than it
does to do the medical stuff. The medical results showed up in my account
about 4 weeks after I sent off my spit-filled test tube. The ancestry results
showed up a full month later. In the meantime, between medical results and
ancestry results, I'm getting "friend requests" from other users. There are no
messages attached to these users, but I presume they believe, somehow, that
they are related to me.

How can this be? I hadn't yet received my own ancestry results.

I emailed 23andme.com support, and here's what they said:

> Thank you for contacting 23andMe.

> If you've been genotyped through our service, you can share your genome with
> other 23andMe users and compare yourself with them using our various
> features.

>This is of special interest to members who are interested in their family's
data.

> Due to the way our computation process works, some of your relatives can
> actually see you appear in their list of DNA Relatives before all your
> results are uploaded.

Let me repeat that last part:

> Due to the way our computation process works, _some of your relatives can
> actually see you appear in their list of DNA Relatives before all your
> results are uploaded_.

So get this: my name and some level of my DNA results are shown to _complete
strangers_ , and not only that, but they are shown _before I even get the
information_.

That bothers me. That bothers me a lot. I haven't yet decided what to do about
it, but believe me, I've spent a great deal of time considering this since it
happened.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I don't really understand your objection - what is it about a cousin, say,
knowing they're your cousin a week or so before you know that troubles you so
much?

Please note I'm not saying I disagree, I'm simply asking if you can elucidate
the problem further.

The same sort of thing happens to non-adoptees all the time - one's cousins
who do family history research may know decades before you that they are your
[near] relative.

Aside, it's also interesting WRT privacy of sperm/egg donors. I recently
commented in a thread (on Reddit I think) that an egg donor should be aware
that it may be quite likely, even if not presently possible, for the child to
trace them [the biological mother in that instance] in the future either due
to tech or legal changes. This was flatly dismissed as an impossibility;
little was I to know it might already be quite possible [in the sense of being
attainable by the general public].

~~~
Jemaclus
There are three major problems with it:

1) I don't even have access to my own information at this point. It's like if
the doctor were to post a picture of your newborn baby on FB without your
permission before you got to hold it.

2) The accuracy of 23andme's ancestry information is suspect. They _think_ we
might be related based on vague data. And again, _the other people_ have this
vague data before I do.

3) Finally, there is medical information attached to my account. For instance,
maybe I have a normal risk of prostate cancer. Now 23andme decides that I'm
related to Joe (true or not), and Joe has a super high risk of prostate
cancer. What inferences can be drawn about that? What if this kind of data is
shared with a third party -- again, without my knowledge -- and that third
party can use that against me somehow? (Insurance, whatever.) I'm not okay
with that.

In the end, it's the opaqueness of this process. If 23andme wants to say "Hey,
we're not 100% done with your ancestry results, but we found a few people we
think might be matches" at the same time they say the same thing to the other
people, then that would be okay. But at the time, I was getting requests from
alleged relatives that I had no way of knowing they were alleged relatives
until 23andme gives me my results.

In other words, these other people -- strangers! -- knew something about me
that I hadn't yet found out myself, when it should have been made available to
me at the same time.

------
kevrone
Wow, this actually makes me pretty impressed with 23andme. Yeah, ok, maybe
their analysis front-end is borked, but hell, the science seems pretty sound
if he was able to get the "right" answer from the original sample.

~~~
aaronem
About what percentage, would you say, of 23andme's clients are both equipped
and inclined to educate themselves in bioinformatics, to the degree OP did, to
the extent required to replicate 23andme's sequence analysis and identify
errors in their results?

~~~
sachdevap
About what percentage, would you say, of individuals paying income tax are
both equipped and inclined to understand all the subtleties of income tax
returns? Yet people do pay income taxes and do not look into the possibility
of extra amounts paid most often. Only individuals who really care, are
willing to dig deep into it.

In my opinion, people who use this service are going to use it because they
are genuinely curious about their future health and if it leads to a few false
positive, I could live with that and get it checked elsewhere for
confirmation.

~~~
aaronem
It's interesting you should choose taxes in particular for your analogy; by
trivial extension, you cast 23andme as someone who operates as a tax
accountant not merely in ignorance, but in outright defiance, of the
professional licensure requirements of the field.

Libertarian-utopian notions of needless regulatory immurement aside, such
requirements exist for reasons amply evident in a study of their origins; in
short, without a licensure requirement in such a highly specific and technical
realm, incompetents and charlatans of every stripe abound, to the ultimate and
severe detriment of all those who would seek the advice of genuine
professionals in the field.

------
bparsons
Seems like the problem was addressed immediately. This seems like a success
story of 23andMe.

~~~
AsymetricCom
Seems like there's a lot of pointless and distracting comments on this story.
Thanks for your contribution.

------
jisaacso
This will likely be downvoted to hell, but personally I'm a fan of the service
23andme provides. It has aggregated scientific knowledge across a large number
of domains to provide an end-to-end pipeline for ancestry prediction, kinship
analysis and phenotype prediction.

It's a service built on learning algorithms to correlate features (DNA SNPs)
with diseases. As with any learning algorithm, results should be interpreted
with care. That doesn't lessen the fact that predictions it provides can be
helpful.

As an aside, 23andme has a solid API. It's opened up (with consent) a huge DNA
dataset for developers to mine. I'm excited for the science that can be
learned from this data.

~~~
aaron695
In saying "This will likely be downvoted to hell" you are basically saying you
are smarter than us.

Hence why you'll be downvoted.

------
robk
For a hundred bucks, I'm quite pleased with the results I get. Of course if I
was flagged for something serious I'd go to a doctor immediately to get it
checked and verified.

~~~
jrockway
This just increases your risk of a complication. If you have a disease with no
symptoms, it's probably not time to try and treat it. Treatment has risks,
after all. (Think about all the people that have some minor problem, get minor
surgery, and then pick up MRSA in the hospital while they're recovering. Now
they have a major problem.)

~~~
bmelton
I thought that was covered by the "go to the doctor" bit. The doctor would, if
even remotely competent, verify the presence of a disease before beginning
treatment.

For all the hoopla I keep hearing be attributed to malice regarding 23andMe's
results, honestly, I think the results, at the least, encourage people to go
to the doctor.

My father-in-law was diagnosed with cancer a couple of years ago, but because
he was regular with checkups, they were able to catch it early, and he's been
in remission for over a year.

A false positive by 23andMe regarding one's predisposition towards cancer
should motivate them to the doctor more often, which would indicate whether
they were or were not cancer positive -- but in the event of either, I'd wager
that more frequent trips to the doctor would be a net benefit.

~~~
tedunangst
For everybody who believes their doctor, there's somebody who doesn't and will
just find a new doctor to confirm their self-diagnosis. "I was right, my
doctor was wrong" stories get posted to HN fairly frequently.

~~~
bmelton
"fairly frequently" is still, in this context, within the general margin of
error for any statistically sound sample size.

Yes, people disagree with their doctors, and yes, sometimes those doctors are
wrong, but by and large, the number of people with multiple doctors in
agreement, where that agreement is still wrong, are statistical outliers.

Further, and maybe it's just me here, I've learned a lot in this thread
already, and I'm not an expert on the subject, but I just fail to see how the
idea that I have a higher predisposition to cancer than the statistical norm,
_even if that information might be wrong_ , can be harmful.

I mean, I understand the objective, and the idea of preventing the sale of
snake oil is one that I see as vlid in this context, but this isn't that.
23andMe doesn't make any curative claims whatsoever, as much as to announce
that "hey, there might be snakes." They're far more scientifically sound than
a mood ring, but even if they aren't, I just don't personally see the harm in
that.

------
aabalkan
Why your character encoding is broken on your blog post?

~~~
martin-adams
It's a mutation of the HTML's DNA

~~~
interstitial
Haplo-text mark-up language.

------
clavalle
Crazy idea: How about, instead of getting this report ourselves, we have it
sent to our primary care physician.

That way we don't have to stress that there is some likelihood that we might
get some dreaded disease but our doctor could talk to us if the risk is high
enough or if we start having symptoms that match one of our genetic risk
factors?

~~~
LogicalBorg
Or the doctor could have just told him that he had the disease without
questioning it and with no chance for him to look at his own data and disprove
it, giving him an even worse outcome than he had here. Doctors aren't all-
knowing or always right. And most of them know nothing special about genetics.

------
SwellJoe
I love 23andme. I don't make major medical decisions based on it (yet), and I
know it has limitations (it didn't predict the pancreatic cancer that killed
my dad, and it didn't find indicators for a number of other conditions in my
family tree...). But, it's a fun thing to play with, it has connected me up
with a number of folks in my family tree that I didn't know about, and it
resolved some questions about the ancestry of my family. I'm an American mutt
from poor white trash stock...no idea where everybody came from until 23andme.
My sister had tried to do a family tree but ran out of steam just a couple of
generations back.

Anyway, it's probably good they're being reined in from making medical claims.
I don't think the tech is quite there yet. But, as a tool alongside many
others, it's cool. And, I love that they're doing original research with their
surveys...it's a super cool idea to combine lots of crowdsourced data and DNA
results of thousands of people to find markers for diseases and traits.

I plan to keep recommending 23andme to folks who can afford it and folks who
can grasp that a DNA test isn't a reliable indicator of disease and that it is
merely a probability indicator.

------
adeptus
I'd love to use a service like 23andme, but am seriously concerned about
privacy issues. Do they have any privacy conscious competitors? Any upcoming
ones?

------
peter303
Unexpressed disease genes has been an issue from the beginning of human
sequencing. The 3rd human sequenced James Watson had almost 30 unexpressed
disease genes, including retinitus pigmentosa. No one understands why this
occurs.

------
coldskull
Hypothetically, if i were in OP's shoes and 'really' scared, I would be going
to a genetic doctor instead of conducting my own research. (i would still look
up stuff, but that would be too risky to depend on)

------
gojomo
Plenty of assessment errors occur via other forms of health research, self-
diagnosis, and professional diagnosis, too. That's why the more serious a
result is, the more it should be examined and re-checked.

This incident seems to me like a big win for the 23andme model. They made an
error – but followup by a single individual means the same error won't happen
again for anyone in their international clientele. Errors in other health
systems don't get globally corrected so quickly.

------
rohu1990
What could have happened on rest of life, if this guy just believed their
result ? This is how you can ruin life of some one by coding !

~~~
cmsimike
23andme should not be used as a replacement for a doctor. It would have been a
shock to see the results, yes, but the next step is confirmation from a
doctor.

~~~
flebron
That's for a false positive, sure. But who goes to the doctor to confirm a
false negative, that 23andme says there's no reason to worry about? The list
of negative results is going to be huge, in most cases.

~~~
cmsimike
The simple answer is that 23andMe is for informational purposes only. I don't
go any more or less to the doctors now that I've results from 23andMe. It is
cool information, yes, but that's it.

------
patfla
Hmm, a not irrevelant data point.

[http://allthingsd.com/20131125/fda-tells-23andme-to-stop-
mar...](http://allthingsd.com/20131125/fda-tells-23andme-to-stop-marketing-
dna-kits-23andme-says-its-sorry-for-being-slow/)

------
imahboob
For more read this [http://www.labcritics.com/2013/11/26/fda-asks-23andme-to-
sto...](http://www.labcritics.com/2013/11/26/fda-asks-23andme-to-stop-its-
services/)

------
ksk
The potential of pharmaceutical companies pushing meds onto unsuspecting
people using this data is really frightening. Hopefully 23andme wont turn into
an advertising subsidized business.

------
JosephBrown
You are a VERY good science writer btw.

------
pbhjpbhj
I wonder what financial value is placed on their database and how well secured
it is.

------
wissler
It is good to know of real-world misdiagnoses made via 23andMe.

Now, can we see some real-world statistics by the government-licensed medical
profession? I wonder what a side-by-side analysis of the errors 23andMe has
made vs. those the medical community has made might look like. I wonder how
the real-life consequences might stack up.

As far as I know, 23andMe has never accidentally amputated the wrong limb, so
it's at least go that going for it.

Interesting tidbit: you can always double-check the reports 23andMe gives to
you by getting followup tests someplace else.

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smackfu
Isn't this the whole point of the FDA looking into 23andMe? To evaluate
whether their accuracy matches up to their marketing claims?

~~~
nickff
Wissler seems to want a comparison of the differences in results between the
using 23AM and not using it. The FDA measures efficacy in absolute terms, not
relative to the counter-factual.

