Have you heard about 23andMe.comM? I have heard about it in a videocast on Forbes.com. It sounds like 23andMe may be the first business to garner the consumer market providing genome services (DNA) to general public. After all one of the backers of this business is Genentech (It is considered to have founded the biotechnology industry) and others include Google and New Enterprise Associates (NEA).
To obtain your DNA analysis, you purchase the kit from their website for $999.00 USD and send it back with your saliva sample and in 4-6 weeks after your sent the sample, you can explore your genome results via the website. It seems like a reasonable price for such a valuable information about yourself, but in my opinion it is still out of reach for most people, at least it is for me. It might be a good idea for Health Insurance companies to provide this service to their consumers so that the consumers are better prepared to take preventive measures against any genetically inheritable diseases if their DNA analysis should show they are susceptible to such diseases. This could be a great tool in reducing the overall health care costs and control the constantly growing health insurance costs in U.S.A.
I am really impressed with the plethora of genetic information that this website offers, for example check out the following pages:
genetics 101
articles on how the process works page
Before visiting this site, I hardly knew anything about genetics, but after going through the genetics 101 page, I find myself a tiny bit more knowledable about this field. The field of genetics is growing very rapidly and this site is a testament to that progress.
All the information presented on the site is very clean, educative, intuitive, and lot more approachable than the Genetics page on Wikipedia. I would love to know if there are any similar business ventures and similar learning resources about Genetics.
