Can You Ever Just Be Whelmed?

After poking around DecodeMe's demo reference genome, VentureBeat's David Hamilton reports that the "underwhelming" service offers few useful tools for customers to learn what their SNP profile means. Users can browse through 18 genetic diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, celiac disease, type 2 diabetes, or age-related macular degeneration, to see their risk of developing that condition -- though Hamilton warns that many of those risk estimates are only based on one SNP. Other tools predict eye or hair color and trace the user's ancestry; another lets customers share their profile with family and friends. Hamilton sums up by saying that at this point, DecodeMe "doesn’t appear to offer a heckuva lot of value for what it's charging."