The founders of 23andMe are in Davos, Switzerland, plugging the European launch of their DNA testing service.
A stand opposite the lift on the first floor of the Belvedere Hotel is an ideal platform from which to promote their service.
"We're stopping everyone that comes past," says [Anne] Wojcicki, armed with 1,000 free spit kits and some fetching grey beanie hats, emblazoned with the words 'I spat!'. [Link]
The new genetic genealogy company everyone's talking about is 23andMe—mostly because one of its founders, Anne Wojcicki, is married to Google founder Sergey Brin. The company's first order of business was to set up a website and get Warren Buffett and Jimmy Buffett to spit in cups.
About two months ago Warren and Jimmy submitted DNA to 23andMe. (Warren "just kept spitting into a little receptacle, and then we FedExed it. Not very elegant," says his assistant. Jimmy did the same.)
When the results came back a month later, Wojcicki - a 33-year-old Yale grad and former health-care industry analyst - and her associate Joanna Mountain called Warren from 23andMe's offices, just half a mile from Google's Mountain View, Calif., campus, and broke the news that he need not include Jimmy in his will. In fact, "I'm as closely related to you as Jimmy is," said Mountain, the head of 23andMe's ancestry product line and a former professor of anthropological genetics at Stanford. [Link]I wonder if company executives will personally deliver the news to everyone who sends in a DNA sample.
