Wired Science

Personalizing the Gene Pool

Anne Wojcicki comes from some pretty impressive genetic stock.  Wojcicki’s father, Stanley, is a physicist who serves as head of Stanford University’s physics department, and her mother, Esther, teaches journalism. Despite growing up in a family of achievers and amid the technology elite in Palo Alto, California, Wojcicki still managed to shine. She graduated from Yale in 1996 with a degree in biology and set her sights on the business world.

She began her career as a healthcare investment analyst with a particular focus on biotechnology companies.  While her professional life was blossoming, Wojcicki gained fame from a development in her personal life.  Her sister, Susan, had rented her Menlo Park garage to a couple of Stanford graduate students who were starting a company.  One of the guys in that garage would become Wojcicki’s husband and his garage company would grow into a successful search engine business you might have heard of: Google.  Wojcicki’s marriage to Google co-founder Sergey Brin was the talk of Silicon Valley gossip Web sites, but the couple still managed to keep a low profile.

Wojcicki considered starting numerous health care-related businesses before settling on one that fit her longtime fascination with genetics.  23andMe (a name that refers to the 23 chromosome pairs that contain a human’s genetic information) is the company that Wojcicki and her partner, Linda Avey, founded.

Avey has over 20 years of sales and business development experience in the biopharmaceutical industry.  She has worked with some of the most important companies in the business.  Prior to 23andMe, Avey helped develop translational research programs (the practice of connecting basic medical research and patient care) for the pharmaceutical companies Affymetrix and Perlegen Sciences.  Avey is fascinated by the possibilities of personalized medicine; a model of medical care that uses a patient’s genotype in determining treatment.  She foresees advances in genome scanning technologies reshaping the relationship between research and patient care.  It was imagining this new paradigm that helped shape the idea for 23andMe.

23andMe’s provides clients with a personal genetic profile.  With the detailed genetic information in hand, a client can discover details about his or her genealogy, as well as make decisions about medical care that take into account their unique genetic makeup.