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A giant biotechnology company might be about to go bust. What will happen to the millions of people’s DNA it holds? (theconversation.com)

submitted 1 month ago by Dot@feddit.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] errer@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I’m going to posit an alternative theory: the data is actually pretty worthless and that’s why this company is going under. I don’t think these origin websites and the limited DNA sequencing they did is really worth as much as people might think.

[–] Zron@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

There was a big idea a couple decades ago that corporations were going to copyright natural genes and sell them for massive profits to other biotech companies that could use them to make cure for diseases and other things.

Michael Crichton wrote a few books about it, pretty good reads.

They did do the gene copyright thing in the real world, but it turns out that doing anything with a random gene is pretty hard and the genome isn’t just something you can copy paste a gene into and have it cure aids or cancer, so no one wanted to buy genetic sequences that they would then need to do a whole bunch of work on anyway to make it useful.

Pretty much all 23andMe did was increase the size of the Law Enforcement dna database by letting cops send in samples of suspects and get back their family members info. Of course the company said that was very naughty, but no one got into real trouble for it. And now 23andMe owns a lot of other people’s genetic code, and it’s not worth the hard drives it’s stored on.