Take it to the Crowd

Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of 23andMe, spoke at Harvard University about crowdsourcing science, reports The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog. Wojcicki said that relying on the crowd can get researchers answers more quickly. For example, she described 23andMe researchers sending out a survey on family history of cancer to customers in their database with mutations linked to cancer. From that, Wojcicki said the company received more than 12,000 responses in 36 hours. "Being able to do research in a real-time way is the way research needs to be done in the future," she said.