Apr 25, 2009

23andMe

The pragmatic, political reality is that 23andMe is the public pet project of a billionaire’s wife. It’s not going to die, it’s not going to be thwarted by institutional disapproval, and it has to go somewhere.Thus, I propose to let 23andMe have their novelty consumer web service “data democracy,” but firmly block any implied medical application until the accountability and clinical application demands of the medical community are met. It’s wholly appropriate to have no medical opinion about an inactionable novelty consumer product so long as that product is not marketed otherwise.Maintain state control: you want to know what 23andMe is going to do and why. Do this by blocking where you don’t want them and making it easy for them to be somewhere that’s not valuable to you (novelty consumer web services). Don’t unilaterally block them with weak ideas like “your feelings as a doctor” because that offers 23andMe no acceptable response. Again, 23andMe has to go somewhere, so offering no acceptable response forces 23andMe to behave unpredictably (and in your offered context, unacceptably) without achieving any useful objective. Worse, sloppy, disorganized attacks brand you as uncooperative partisan to be mitigated —not a as leader. That will be a problem for you in Silicon Valley as the medical application of informatics and the internet continues to advance. Maybe impulsive attacks once helped galvanize the medical community when 23andMe was first announced —and maybe that was necessary at the time— but these impulsive attacks are now counter-productive and should be discouraged. Further, unlike Navigenics, 23andMe is far more transparent regarding the scientific data justifying its reports and openly engages the scientific community. This transparency should be rewarded, not punished, and using this transparency to justify impulsive attacks will set a president that transparency is an untenable liability in preventative medicine. This helps nobody. Again, while scientific transparency may not be appropriate to include in medical advice, it is absolutely appropriate to include in novelty consumer web services. Thus, for the case I make above, while both Navigenics and 23andMe are guilty of irresponsible medicine by marketing, I propose that the medical community permits 23andMe to exist as a novelty consumer product only with no medical insinuations until 23andMe chooses to practice medicine responsibly.

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