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Ask HN: Does this genetic testing (ie, 23andMe) service exist?

5 points by belltyler ↗ HN
I'm thinking of a service like 23andMe that instead takes 2 samples and outputs what the children of the two people would be like, what they'd be disposed to, what their traits might be, etc.

I know this can be done at physician's offices to an extent (i.e., during family planning), but I was curious if there was anything cheap/simple out there available to the masses?

Thanks!

7 comments

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hanniabu
Quite interesting. I don't believe so, or at least I haven't heard of this.

23andMe can probably easily pivot to this area, but that hasn't stopped competitors in other fields that were dominated at the time. Plus this area is still pretty young and the market still has a lot of room for growth.

jaredsohn
Some other variations:

* Make your (genetic data) available to algorithms to use as criteria within a dating app for people looking to meet someone that they might want to have children with.

* Similar but use it for helping women find sperm donors (although it wouldn't surprise me if this already exists.)

notahacker
I find it hard to believe there isn't a huge market for this even if the results are highly questionable...
samfisher83
Does some want to create the next Nate Grey ?
brudgers
I carry genes for brown eyes and blue eyes. My eyes are brown. A child with a blue eyed partner may have brown or blue eyes depending on which of my genes it gets. Most things are not as simple as eye color but even if they were all binary, the combinatorics are so massive that a composite description of a child based on their parents would be a total fabrication.
kleer001
I would be curious as to the costs involved in creating a business from scratch that mirrors 23andMe's functionality with regards to design, marketing, legal, and scaled PCR.

I suspect it's a big chuck of change as they got $4 million from Google back in the beginning.

They do have long legal coat tails, so it might be indeed available business real estate for the intrepid.

bordercases
Not with any reasonable accuracy for most traits - yet. There are both many to one and one to one relationships for genes to phenotype. Add in continuous/fuzzy/probabilistic measures and you get an explosion for the total set (although some subcollection might be tractable with data.)

Observationally some traits are more straightforward. Skin color, IQ and and height give us an unweighted average as the expected value for the offspring, with the height of either parent setting bounds on the variance. But that isn't news if your service can be replaced by SAT scores and simply taking a look in the mirror.

It's a good idea though.