Technology

The reason people are comparing her bullshit made up science crap to Theranos is because she is not a medical person promoting a medical thing that supposedly checks for thousands of times more things than established science with a minuscule sample. Somehow this caught on in a ton of places through being the new hotness and will most likely implode when it is proven to be snake oil in less than a decade.

This is the exact same situation as Theranos.

Plenty of existing companies, like 23andMe, already screen for BRCA variants.

23andMe does an array. They only look at, I think, 44 BRCA variants of the 70,000. If you only look at a few, then you can give people false certainty.

And they’re obviously not testing embryos.

Yeah, they just do people.

Whereas you sequence the entire genome of embryos—orders of magnitude more information, on both monogenic and polygenic conditions, than anything that’s ever been done before. Even your main competitor, Genomic Prediction, only does arrays of embryos, looking for specific things.

Yeah. Whole genome is a big deal and a massive upgrade. You can mitigate risks for thousands of diseases that previously you weren’t able to detect. It’s kind of like a vaccine for everything that we know, genetic-wise, at once.

And all off a very small amount of DNA.

About 5 picograms per cell in an embryo sample. That’s a really, really tiny amount. From both a chemistry perspective and a computational perspective, we had to invent new things to make it so that you can recover whole-genome data.

It's fucking tech bro bullshit, and the fact that she shares a gender with the other high profile person is a coincidence. While there is something to be said about not pushing back on the men doing the same thing, the criticism of her totally not eugenics because it involves computers logic is completely warranted and the comparison is spot on.