Regeneron is to pay $256 million in cash to acquire “substantially all” of 23andMe’s assets, including its massive biobank of around 15 million customer genetic samples and data.
Regeneron is to pay $256 million in cash to acquire “substantially all” of 23andMe’s assets, including its massive biobank of around 15 million customer genetic samples and data.
That’s all true, but also completely irrelevant to the point I was making. Gene expression isn’t in that 99.9% of the DNA that is the same. All of the individually identifiable genetic information in the genome is in the other 0.1%. This is a privacy community. A complete understanding of how genetics works is neat and all, but it’s not relevant to the conversation we’re having. I didn’t say that all humans 99.9% identical to each other. That’s obviously not true. I said that there’s no point in storing duplicate copies of identical genetic sequences, and that saying they store less than 0.1% of your genome only says they’re not doing that.
For the record, 5-10% is way plenty to narrow things down to a very tiny number of people. Probably one in most cases, and it contains a lot of important medical information. That’s not some trivial unimportant thing.