Tapping a New Demographic

Blogger Daniel MacArthur says that 23andMe's latest move is "sheer marketing genius." The personal genomics company launched a service aimed at pregnant women and recruited a cadre of "mommy bloggers" to do it. At the Spittoon, Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki write that many mothers, expectant and otherwise, "prefer to carry out their pregnancies armed with as much knowledge as possible." Or, as MacArthur describes it, "Come for the enthralling conversations about cloth vs disposable; stay for the experience of comparing your weight gain in week 15 with hundreds of other expecting women; and hey, while you're here, why don't you get yourself a genome scan?" The Gene Sherpa, Steve Murphy, says it's a "BS PR move." He writes: "I like a lot of people am very mixed about this whole dump money into tests that may not be useful, but build the hype of genetic utility in order to 'educate.'"