Since the launch of its DNA testing service in 2007, genomics giant 23andMe has convinced more than 5 million people to fill a plastic tube with half a teaspoon of saliva.
In case it hasn’t dawned on you yet, you are a commodity just like hand cream, dish soap and laundry detergent. In the 21st century, we are all in the process of becoming one of the batteries that provides the fuel for The Matrix that we live in. It is only when we “unplug ourselves” are we able to see this construct for what it really is, and what is that? The coming kingdom of Antichrist.
“Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.” Revelation 13:18 (KJV)
Yes, 23AndMe is harvesting your DNA and selling it for obscene amounts of money to Big Pharma. Just like the Mormon Church started Ancestry.com which has become a huge medical research genealogy testing company. Everything is for sale, and privacy is an old-fashioned notion that exists only in the memories of people old enough to remember what life was like before AI took over. Just a little food for thought if you were planning on having your DNA tested.
Facebook is a huge, multi-billion dollar corporation, want to take a guess what their product is? Is it social media? Nope. Mobile apps? Nope. Is it advertising revenue? No, guess again. Facebook’s product is people, it’s you and me. We are not the customer and we are not the user, we are the product! They collect and harvest our memories and sell them to the highest bidders, and along the way create the world’s largest database. Yeah, that global database that we all used to be so afraid of and that so many end times books and movies were created around.
Congratulations, you lived long enough to see the future and this is it. You’re a cog in the wheel of The Matrix with absolutely no control over where the wheel is going. But read Revelation 13 sometime, and you’ll know exactly where that wheel is planning on taking you. Get saved now and avoid the worst of what’s coming.
23AndMe’s Big Pharma Deals Have Always Been The Plan
FROM WIRED: In return for all that spit (and some cash too), customers get insights into their biological inheritance, from the superficial—do you have dry earwax or wet?—to mutations associated with disease. What 23andMe gets is an ever-expanding supply of valuable behavioral, health, and genetic information from the 80 percent of its customers who consent to having their data used for research.
So last week’s announcement that one of the world’s biggest drugmakers, GlaxoSmithKline, is gaining exclusive rights to mine 23andMe’s customer data for drug targets should come as no surprise. (Neither should GSK’s $300 million investment in the company). 23andMe has been sharing insights gleaned from consented customer data with GSK and at least six other pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms for the past three and a half years. And offering access to customer information in the service of science has been 23andMe’s business plan all along, as WIRED noted when it first began covering the company more than a decade ago.
But some customers were still surprised and angry, unaware of what they had already signed (and spat) away. GSK will receive the same kind of data pharma partners have generally received—summary level statistics that 23andMe scientists gather from analyses on de-identified, aggregate customer information—though it will have four years of exclusive rights to run analyses to discover new drug targets. Supporting this kind of translational work is why some customers signed up in the first place. But it’s clear the days of blind trust in the optimistic altruism of technology companies are coming to a close.
“I THINK WE’RE JUST OPERATING NOW IN A MUCH MORE UNTRUSTING ENVIRONMENT,” SAYS MEGAN ALLYSE, A HEALTH POLICY RESEARCHER AT THE MAYO CLINIC WHO STUDIES EMERGING GENETIC TECHNOLOGIES. “IT’S NO LONGER ENOUGH FOR COMPANIES TO PROMISE TO MAKE PEOPLE HEALTHY THROUGH THE POWER OF BIG DATA.” BETWEEN THE FALL OF BLOOD-TESTING UNICORN THERANOS AND FACEBOOK’S ROLE IN THE 2016 ELECTION ATTACKS, “I THINK EVERYTHING FROM HERE ON OUT WILL BE SUBJECT TO MUCH HIGHER LEVELS OF PUBLIC SCRUTINY,” ALLYSE SAYS.
23andMe maintains that transparency is a core tenet of the company. “I think a really important distinction to make is that 23andMe operates under an independent ethical review board that oversees all of our research,” says Emily Drabant Conley, 23andMe’s vice president of business development, who oversaw the announcement of the GSK deal. “The guidelines we follow are essentially the same as what other research institutions follow.” So they should apply to any of the analyses GSK might want to run on 23andMe data, like a PheWAS, which connects constellations of symptoms and conditions across many people with a single genetic mutation they all share.
There’s a tension between the way 23andMe portrays itself as a health company, and simultaneously wants to be treated like every other tech company that makes its money from big data, says Allyse. “You can’t have it both ways. That’s why we have HIPAA, it’s why we have all these regulations that say health information is privileged information that can’t be commodified.”
But 23andMe, with its hybrid model, has been commodifying health and genetic data for years as it wades further into the field of drug discovery. In 2015, Forbes reported that the company had inked its first pharmaceutical company deal with Genentech, for $10 million up front, and up to $50 million if its data turned out to be useful for developing Parkinson’s treatments. Pfizer signed a data-sharing agreement of its own shortly after. That was back when 23andMe had data from only 650,000 consented individuals in its proprietary database. Its critics were unsure of the value of that information, self-reported as it was (and still is). But as the database has grown to the millions, differences in how customers interpret survey questions matter less and less to the company’s potential research partners, according to Spector-Bagdady. READ MORE
Soylent Green Is People!
Watch this 1973 cult classic clip where we see actor Charlton Heston. the actor who played Moses in the Ten Commandments, finally discover that the great new food product that was making a better world for everyone, Soylent Green, was actually a product made from people. Ironically, this 1973 movie was set way in the future in 2022. Think about that for a moment, and you’ll get it. Or not.