Have you been looking forward to somniferous alkaloid compounds customized to your personal metabolic dependency profile? Good news! 23andMe is selling users' DNA data—from the "approximately 80% of customers who have consented to participate in our research program"—to the pharmaceutical industry.
GSK Plc will pay 23andMe Holding Co. $20 million for access to the genetic-testing company's vast trove of consumer DNA data, extending a five-year collaboration that's allowed the drugmaker to mine genetic data as it researches new medications.
The beautiful part is users paid to be sold; the elegant part is that if a close relative of yours did so, your milkshake is more or less drunk too.
All in all, this is solid "everyone saw it coming" news, but it's useful to remember that all the quips and jokes and predictions are indeed ending in "it coming," and in the same genre we still have the dark enlightenment, shmeat looms and robot urban pacification dogs to come.
Correction: This post originally reported that 23andMe was selling "everyone's" DNA. This was incorrect. It is selling "data from the approximately 80% of customers who have consented to participate in our research program," and writes that "only consenting customers' anonymized data will be included as part of this collaboration."
