Go On, Admit Defeat

Gene Essence, says Daniel MacArthur, is a good example of those personal genomics companies that will hopefully fall to the cease-and-desist guns. Aside from the reassuring fact that the company uses Affy chips, "it's all downhill from there." Their service is too expensive, the demo page is confusing, the user manual is unhelpful, and there is no evidence of a sure correlation between SNPs and disease risk. "In other words, the company provides a series of alarming and confusing predictions, and then simply tells you they don't necessarily mean anything," MacArthur says at Genetic Future. "There should be a minimum standard of validation and information reporting."