23andMe Wants Its DNA Data to Be Less White
The company is offering free kits to researchers studying populations in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere—but the ethics are tricky.
23andMe is best known for selling DNA test kits, but the company’s real value lies in the data of its 5 million customers. The bigger its genetic database, the more insights 23andMe can glean from DNA. That, in turn, means the more it can tell customers about their ancestry and health and the more valuable the data it shares with academic scientists and sells to pharmaceutical companies for research. About 80 percent of 23andMe customers choose to participate in such research.
As impressive of the people who have participated in studies of associations between genes and diseases are of European descent.
