A Genomic AI -- An Idea For Our Deep Pocketed Friends
A friend of mine recently discussed at what price point we would consider buying the embattled genomics company 23 & Me.
23 & Me has had a rather precipitous collapse since its heights of $16 or so a share. It’s now below 72 cents a share, or roughly a market cape of about $330 million.
I suspect a lot of that slide has to do with how Chinese and Israeli 23 & Me is. Can’t be having that in this day and age. After all, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein were the initial investors. “I am an Israeli in my heart and mind,” said Weinstein in 2017. “I love that country, I love what it stands for, I am proud to be Jewish.” Weinstein was initially sentenced to a 23 year prison stay.
To survive personal genetics has to move away from the apartheid system while doing everything it can to take security more seriously. We can’t be treating the world’s genomics as we do the Palestinians or Uighurs and expect it to long endure as a field.
Harvey Weinstein on the far right and Rupert Murdoch on the far left with Barry Diller is extremely telling. So why aren’t we allowed to tell it?
And more importantly, why is no one from the Gulf or the intelligence community in this photo?
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One of the things that’s very frustrating about every day life is how things are immediately obvious to you aren’t abundantly clear to other people and how if you tell them they’ll just run off and steal your ideas.
I’ve had this happen more times than I care to count. Even this Substack itself has been billed as an “intellectual rummage sale” by one of its more prominent readers.
Still, with all that said, why is that no one has built an AI for your genomics?
You know, to ask the AI questions about yourself and your family, and to encourage family members to sequence one another. The recent passage of my uncle Dwight at 82 and a friend’s mother at 79 has me thinking a lot about their genetic legacy.
You have to assume you’ve already been genetically sequenced, of course.
A hypothetical example:
How likely am I to be allergic to warfarin?
You are 28% more likely than the general population to be allergic to warfarin.
The AI should also work (as best as possible) for SNP chip arrays like 23andMe and Ancestry.com and any new genomic sequencing technology as possible.
Of course such an AI would undercut the profession of genomic counseling but perhaps such a profession needs undercutting or even eliminating altogether. Or, you could summon a genetics counselor for an added up charge. Keeping a human in the loop is a critical part of AI analysis.
Overtime such an AI would become more powerful as more genome wide associate studies (GWAS) were added to the database. Indeed whoever publishes genome-wide associated studies could upload their GWASes to the AI and the AI could spit back questions.
Naturally you’d also have the benefit of knowing who was asking about which aspects of their DNA.
Were I advising a Gulf Arab sovereign wealth fund I’d buy 23andMe.com — I’d check with CFIUS first — and then get to the task of building just such an AI off of existing data.
Who knows. Traitwell might even build it ourselves.