Anne Wojcicki

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands
by Eric Topol
Published 6 Jan 2015

Rabin, “In Israel, a Push to Screen for Cancer Gene Leaves Many Conflicted,” New York Times, November 27, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/27/health/in-israel-a-push-to-screen-for-cancer-gene-leaves-many-conflicted.html. 33. E. Murphy, “Inside 23andMe Founder Anne Wojcicki’s $99 DNA Revolution,” Fast Company, October 14, 2013: http://www.fastcompany.com/3018598/for-99-this-ceo-can-tell-you-what-might-kill-you-inside-23andme-founder-anne-wojcickis-dna-r. 34. FDA, “Inspections, Compliance, Enforcement, and Criminal Investigations: Warning Letter to Ann Wojcicki,” November 22, 2013, http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/EnforcementActions/WarningLetters/2013/ucm376296.htm. 35. A. Pollack, “FDA Orders Genetic Testing Firm to Stop Selling DNA Analysis Service,” New York Times, November 26, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/26/business/fda-demands-a-halt-to-a-dna-test-kits-marketing.html. 36.

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., “Dealing with the Unexpected: Consumer Responses to Direct-Access BRCA Mutation Testing,” PeerJ, February 12, 2013, https://peerj.com/articles/8/. 81. R. Epstein, “The FDA Strikes Again: Its Ban on Home Testing Kits Is, as Usual, Likely to Do More Harm Than Good,” Point of Law, November 27, 2013: http://www.pointoflaw.com/archives/2013/11/t.php. 82. A. Wolfe, “Anne Wojcicki’s Quest for Better Health Care,” Wall Street Journal, June 27, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/articles/anne-wojcickis-quest-for-better-health-care-1403892088. 83. C. Bloss, N. Schork, and E. Topol, “Effect of Direct-to-Consumer Genomewide Profiling to Assess Disease Risk,” New England Journal of Medicine 364, no. 6 (2011): 524–534. 84. R. C. Green and N.

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There are other complementary forces that are, in parallel, pushing DNA democratization forward—consumer genomics and a landmark decision at the United States Supreme Court. We’ll now zoom in on each of these. The Angelina Effect and Consumer Genomics On the same morning as Jolie’s op-ed, the CEO and cofounder of the consumer genomics company, Anne Wojcicki, had e-mails, texts, and calls pouring into her office. She said, “Angelina Jolie talking about a technical subject and saying, ‘I did this, you can do this’ is a great thing for us. She did something to prevent disease, and that’s exactly what we want people thinking about.”33 We’re going to drill down on 23andMe, whose mission is to democratize genetic information.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT went public with their split: Liz Gannes, “Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin and 23andMe Co-Founder Anne Wojcicki Have Split,” All Things D, August 28, 2013, https://allthingsd.com/20130828/google-co-founder-sergey-brin-and-23andme-co-founder-anne-wojcicki-have-split/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Brin went to Burning Man: Vanessa Grigoriadis, “O.K., Glass: Make Google Eyes,” Vanity Fair, March 12, 2014, https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/04/sergey-brin-amanda-rosenberg-affair. After separating in 2013, Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki divorced in 2015. A YouTube representative said the company could not confirm Brin’s attendance at Burning Man.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT her book on parenting: Wojcicki, How to Raise Successful People, 138. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT another magazine named her: Elizabeth Murphy, “Inside 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki’s $99 DNA Revolution,” Fast Company, October 14, 2013, https://www.fastcompany.com/3018598/for-99-this-ceo-can-tell-you-what-might-kill-you-inside-23andme-founder-anne-wojcickis-dna-r. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a San Jose newspaper: Mike Swift, “Susan Wojcicki: The Most Important Googler You’ve Never Heard Of,” The Mercury News, February 3, 2011, https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/02/03/susan-wojcicki-the-most-important-googler-youve-never-heard-of/.

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Meanwhile, Wojcicki’s sister Anne and Sergey Brin were going through a tabloid-style divorce. Brin, Google’s whimsical co-founder, had fallen for a twentysomething marketing staffer for Google Glass who modeled the dorky headgear Google pitched as the future of computing. The staffer also happened to be dating an executive at Google’s Android division. Brin and Anne Wojcicki went public with their split in August 2013, noting, through a publicist, that they “remain good friends and partners.” Anne absconded to Fiji with girlfriends to unwind with yoga. Brin went to Burning Man. But the breakup and awkward love rectangle were a recurring topic in Google’s gossip mill, adding even more tension.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
by Ken Auletta
Published 1 Jan 2009

But even though he was raised as a Jew and attended Hebrew school for a few years, he was nonpracticing, did not have a bar mitzvah, and was put off by traditional Jewish celebrations, which he once told an Israeli reporter he “associated with getting lots of gifts and money, and I was never comfortable with that.” When he was married on an island in the Bahamas in May of 2007 to Anne Wojcicki, cofounder of 23andMe, a genetics research company, the couple stood in bathing suits under a chuppah, the traditional Jewish wedding canopy, but no rabbi officiated. Then, as now, he was uncomfortable with introspection. Asked by the same Israeli reporter if it was a coincidence that his wife was Jewish, he said, “I believe there are lots of nice non-Jewish girls out there.

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A longtime Google employee describes Page this way: “Larry is like a wall. He analyzes everything. He asks, ‘Is this the most efficient way to do this?’ You’re always on trial with Larry. He always pushes you.” While Brin is more approachable than Page, he, too, can be awkward around strangers. His wife Anne Wojcicki’s company, 23andMe, was feted at a fashionable cocktail party in September 2008 that was cohosted by Diane von Furstenberg and her husband, Barry Diller, Wendi and Rupert Murdoch, and Georgina Chapman and her husband, Harvey Weinstein. The event was held at Diller’s Frank Gehry-designed IAC headquarters in Manhattan.

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Google ended the year with 16,805 full-time employees, offices in twenty countries, and the search engine available in 117 languages. And the year had been a personally happy one for Page and Brin. Page married Lucy Southworth, a former model who earned her Ph.D. in bioinformatics in January 2009 from Stanford; they married seven months after Brin wed Anne Wojcicki. But Sheryl Sandberg was worried. She had held a ranking job in the Clinton administration before, joining Google in 2001, where she supervised all online sales for AdWords and AdSense, and was regularly hailed by Fortune magazine as one of the fifty most powerful female executives in America.

The Industries of the Future
by Alec Ross
Published 2 Feb 2016

Founded by Anne Wojcicki: Katie Hafner, “Silicon Valley Wide-Eyed over a Bride,” New York Times, May 29, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/technology/29google.html. the company provides ancestry-related: “How It Works,” 23andMe, https://www.23andme.com/howitworks/. It’s not a full sequencing: “About the 23andMe Personal Genome Service,” 23andMe, https://customercare.23andme.com/entries/22591668. Since then, he drinks green tea: Elizabeth Murphy, “Do You Want to Know What Will Kill You?” Salon, October 25, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/10/25/inside_23andme_founder_anne_wojcickis_99_dna_revolution_newscred/.

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As these tests become more common, one of the most crucial issues for us to grapple with, he says, “will be to educate people as well as physicians about the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of particular challenges they might find, and to do it in a fashion that doesn’t cause great anxiety or anxiety out of proportion to the risk.” Vogelstein and Diaz’s concerns were brought to the surface recently by the genomic testing company 23andMe. Founded by Anne Wojcicki at age 32 in 2006, the company provides ancestry-related genetic reports and uninterpreted raw genetic data for its clients. You spit in a tube, send it to 23andMe’s lab, and for $99 they send you back your genetic information. It’s not a full sequencing of your genome, but a snapshot of the areas of your DNA that researchers know the most about, like genes that indicate a risk for Parkinson’s or how a person might react to certain blood thinners.

I Hate the Internet: A Novel
by Jarett Kobek
Published 3 Nov 2016

He loved that Google afforded him proximity to power. Like Zeus, he was weird and mysterious in a way that the others weren’t. He was always there but you never knew what he was really like. And let’s not get into his complicated romantic life, the servicing of which required a fuckpad on Manhattan island. Susan Wojcicki was the sister of Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Sergey Brin, and she was the Senior Vice President of Advertising. She was like Demeter, the goddess of the harvest and the growing earth. It was Susan Wojcicki who let Sergey Brin and Larry Page start Google in her garage, and it was Susan Wojcicki who really ran the show, overseeing the advertising which was the source of all the money.

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There was nothing ironic in the wrongness of a bunch of dumb assholes who offer bogus opinions for money. Dumb assholes who offer bogus opinions for money don’t need to be right. They only need to be loud. “I was very much captivated,” said Adeline, “by news of Sergey Brin’s affair.” Sergey Brin was one of the co-founders of Google. He was married to Anne Wojcicki. Over the summer, news had broken that Sergey Brin was having an affair with an underling at Google X. Google X was an experimental lab that developed products like driverless cars, dogs that don’t need to lick their own genitals, and Google Glass. Google Glass was a wearable computer built into a pair of ugly eyeglasses.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups
by Ali Tamaseb
Published 14 Sep 2021

For the billion-dollar companies launched between 2014 and 2018, a more recent cohort, Google, was still the largest previous employer, followed by Square (a relative newcomer, founded in 2009), Facebook, McKinsey, Amazon, Genentech, Cisco, and Oracle. It’s also worth pointing out that while some may see a contrast between the roles of investors and founders and may believe that investors are not good operators, a sizable number of billion-dollar startup founders worked in venture capital rather than in corporations. Anne Wojcicki, the founder of the consumer genetics-testing company 23andMe, worked as an analyst for Passport Capital. Katrina Lake was an associate at Leader Ventures before starting Stitch Fix, a clothing retailer. David Vélez was a partner at Sequoia Capital looking into Latin American investment opportunities before venturing out to start Nubank, the Brazilian online bank unicorn, and Andy Rachleff co-founded Benchmark Capital before starting Wealthfront, a consumer financial advisory company.

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Before the consumer genetic-testing company was launched, most people would raise their eyebrows at the invitation to mail a tube of their saliva to a startup in Silicon Valley. Genetics testing was, at the time, mostly medical. Few people had used it to calculate their genetic predisposition to certain ailments. In other words, there was no market for consumer genetic testing. The founders of 23andMe—Anne Wojcicki, Linda Avey, and Paul Cusenza—had to create one. The company 23andMe was one of the first to offer autosomal genetics testing for ancestry applications using saliva, and it took years for sales to ramp up beyond the early adopters. Initially, the tests were expensive—23andMe charged $999 for each test back in 2008.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
by Bill McKibben
Published 15 Apr 2019

Given the money at stake, “it seems only a matter of time before humans were added to the growing list of creatures whose genomes” were up for grabs.25 I’d hazard a guess that “Christina” will not be the last entrepreneur down this road. In fact, there are already players milling around the starting gate, many of them true heavy hitters from Silicon Valley. The best-known “consumer-facing” genetics company is probably 23andMe, founded by Anne Wojcicki. Anne’s father, Stanley, was the chair of Stanford’s physics department in the late 1990s; he had a couple of students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who would go on to start a thing called Google. In fact, they started it in Anne’s sister Susan’s garage. (Anne would later marry and divorce Brin; Susan is now the CEO of YouTube, owned of course by Google.)

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Supreme Court Unity Biotechnology Urban, Tim USA Today Utah utilities Vanity Fair vapor pressure deficit Vassar, Michael Venezuela Venice Verity, William Vermont Vietnam Vinci, Leonardo da Virgin Galactic Virtue of Selfishness, The (Rand) Vodafone volcanoes voting rights Walker, Scott Wall Street Journal Walton family Washington Post water Watson, James Wealth of Nations (Smith) welfare West, Michael wet-bulb temperature wheat Whippman, Ruth White, Curtis Whitehead, Emily white supremacy wilderness, protected wildlife Wilkinson, Richard Williams, Jerry Williams, Ted wind power Wired Wisconsin Wohlforth, Charles Wojcicki, Anne Wojcicki, Stanley Wojcicki, Susan women’s rights Woods, Darren World Bank World Happiness Report World Meteorological Organization World Petroleum Congress (Beijing, 1997) World War II Worster, Donald Wozniak, Steve Y Combinator Yellowstone Yosemite Valley Youtube Yudkowsky, Eliezer Zhang, Feng Zinke, Ryan Zuckerberg, Mark ALSO BY BILL McKIBBEN Radio Free Vermont Oil and Honey The Global Warming Reader Eaarth American Earth The Bill McKibben Reader Fight Global Warming Now Deep Economy The Comforting Whirlwind Wandering Home Enough Long Distance Hundred Dollar Holiday Maybe One Hope, Human and Wild The Age of Missing Information The End of Nature ABOUT THE AUTHOR BILL MCKIBBEN is a founder of the environmental organization 350.org and was among the early advocates for action on global warming.

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs
by Reid Hoffman , June Cohen and Deron Triff
Published 14 Oct 2021

But they built the critical early relationships, established the trust, and created a competitive advantage that made it possible to scale later—something Spotify certainly did, to the tune of 345 million active users and more than $2.5 billion in venture funding. * * * — While Daniel Ek needed to establish trust with an old-school industry that viewed him as a threat, Anne Wojcicki, founder of the DNA testing and analysis company 23andMe, faced even more formidable hurdles as she launched her business. She had to take on both the entrenched healthcare establishment and the U.S. government agencies that regulated it. Anne’s big idea was born out of a passionate belief that people have a right to know more about their genetic history—so they can use that information to make more informed and empowered decisions about their own health.

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* * * — Generosity can be found in the DNA of companies featured in every chapter of this book. Sallie Krawcheck’s startup Ellevest is focused on closing the “gender investment gap” by helping women to become more active and smarter investors. Payal Kadakia of ClassPass built her business around the vision of helping people become more active and find their fitness passion. Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe started her genetic testing business with the goal of empowering people to gain more control of their healthcare information. And Charles Best launched DonorsChoose with the express purpose of helping to fund worthwhile school projects by matching them up with donors. As these organizations that are “born good” gradually begin to scale, the acts of goodness often start to expand and multiply.

Money: Vintage Minis
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 5 Apr 2018

The idea is for Google Fit products to collect the never-ending stream of biometrical data to feed the Baseline Study. Yet companies such as Google want to go much deeper than wearables. The market for DNA testing is currently growing in leaps and bounds. One of its leaders is 23andMe, a private company founded by Anne Wojcicki, former wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The name ‘23andMe’ refers to the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that encode the human genome, the message being that my chromosomes have a very special relationship with me. Whoever can understand what the chromosomes are saying can tell you things about yourself that you never even suspected.

Free Ride
by Robert Levine
Published 25 Oct 2011

In 2008 Google gave the organization $1.5 million. (Lessig, who no longer works with Creative Commons, says this amount exaggerates the group’s dependence on Google, since the gift is a pledge to be fulfilled over the course of several years.) In 2009 the company’s cofounder Sergey Brin and his wife, Anne Wojcicki, donated $500,000—more than a fifth of the money contributed that year. It was something of a family gift, since Wojcicki’s mother, Esther Wojcicki, then served as chair of the organization’s board of directors. All of these organizations do legitimate work, and some present compelling ideas for copyright reform alongside ideas that would amount to handouts to Google.

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(Goldsmith and Wu) “Why Your Cell Phone Is So Terrible” panel, 3.1, 10.1 Wiggin LLP WikiLeaks, 4.1, 7.1 Wikipedia, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 10.1, 10.2 Williams, Robbie, 2.1, 9.1 Wilson, Stephen “windowing”, 6.1, 7.1 Windows operating system, 2.1, 7.1, 7.2, 10.1 WIPO Copyright Treaty (1996), 1.1, 1.2, 2.1 Wired, itr.1, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 Wojcicki, Anne Wojcicki, Esther, 3.1, 3.2 Wolff, Michael World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 8.1, 9.1, 10.1 World of Warcraft World’s Fair Use Day Wu, Tim, 1.1, 3.1, 8.1, 10.1 Wyden, Ron Xbox Live, 7.1, 7.2, 10.1, 10.2 X-Men Origins: Wolverine Yahoo!, 2.1, 3.1, 6.1, 8.1, 8.2 Yang, Jerry You Are Not a Gadget (Lanier) YouTube, itr.1, itr.2, itr.3, itr.4, itr.5, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 7.1, 7.2, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 Zelnick, Strauss, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4 Zittrain, Jonathan ZML.com Zucker, Jeff, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Robert Levine was the executive editor of Billboard magazine and has written for Vanity Fair, Fortune, Rolling Stone, and the arts and business sections of the New York Times.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture
by Scott Belsky
Published 1 Oct 2018

By participating, everyone feels more in control of their destiny. Especially when failures or major setbacks occur, you need to carry your team through it. For example, imagine working years to launch your product to much fanfare and then suddenly having your product shut down by the government for a couple of years. That’s exactly what happened to Anne Wojcicki, CEO and cofounder of genetic testing company 23andMe. Founded in 2006, 23andMe allowed customers to spit in a small tube and, within a few weeks, get access to a wealth of genetic information about their ancestors, predisposition to health issues, and other insights based on their genes. The company thrived in its early years, attracting excited customers and some of Silicon Valley’s greatest investors.

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But after the initial shock of someone leaving us rather than being dismissed, I realized that our team’s immune system was working as it should. As you lose people who aren’t a good match your team becomes stronger. Be great at retaining your A players, and less so with your B players. “You have to constantly be reevaluating the people you have,” says Anne Wojcicki from 23andMe. “Figuring out talent is hard. You never want to set someone up to fail. Doing so only hurts them and the company. One of the hardest parts of leadership is not getting attached to people. Even the people you enjoy the most may face a point where they become too specialized for their role or not specialized enough.

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 2 Mar 2015

Companies like 23andMe: Thomas Goetz (17 Nov 2007), “23AndMe will decode your DNA for $1,000. Welcome to the age of genomics,” Wired, http://www.wired.com/medtech/genetics/magazine/15-12/ff_genomics. Elizabeth Murphy (14 Oct 2013), “Inside 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki’s $99 DNA revolution,” Fast Company, http://www.fastcompany.com/3018598/for-99-this-ceo-can-tell-you-what-might-kill-you-inside-23andme-founder-anne-wojcickis-dna-r. personalized marketing: Charles Seife (27 Nov 2013), “23andMe is terrifying, but not for the reasons the FDA thinks,” Scientific American, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/23andme-is-terrifying-but-not-for-reasons-fda.

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
by Jake Knapp , John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz
Published 8 Mar 2016

Time and time again, the process brings teams together and brings ideas to life. Over the past few years, our team has had an unparalleled opportunity to experiment and validate our ideas about work process. We’ve run more than one hundred sprints with the startups in the GV portfolio. We’ve worked alongside, and learned from, brilliant entrepreneurs like Anne Wojcicki (founder of 23andMe), Ev Williams (founder of Twitter, Blogger, and Medium), and Chad Hurley and Steve Chen (founders of YouTube). In the beginning, I wanted to make my workdays efficient and meaningful. I wanted to focus on what was truly important and make my time count—for me, for my team, and for our customers.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy
Published 12 Apr 2011

Her husband traveled a lot, and when she got lonely, she would go to the other side of the house and talk to the Googlers. After a number of late-night sessions when she’d heard Larry and Sergey’s dreams time and again, she quit Intel to join Google herself. Eventually Sergey began dating her sister. (Anne Wojcicki and Sergey would marry in 2007.) In early 1999, Google moved to its new office space on University Place in Palo Alto, over the bicycle shop. The conference room had a Ping-Pong table, and, maintaining the tradition, the desks were doors on sawhorses. The kitchen was tiny, and food was yet to be catered.

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Many cheeky activities that had once seemed so refreshing began to assume an aura of calculation when they became routine. How many scavenger hunts can you attend before it becomes a chore? Page and Brin themselves had grown in the decade since they founded Google. Both were now married and within a year of each other fathered sons. Brin’s wife, Anne Wojcicki, was a cofounder of 23andMe, a company involved in personal DNA analysis. Brin defied corporate propriety when he shifted his personal investment in the firm to a company one. Google’s lawyers made sure the transaction passed formal muster. The normally gregarious Brin could turn icy when an unfamiliar person referred to his private life—for example, when a reporter offered congratulations at a Q and A at the Googleplex soon after his wedding, he changed the subject without acknowledging the remark.

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And
by Sonia Arrison
Published 22 Aug 2011

Through Google, Larry Page has given over $250,000 to Singularity University and has said that if he were a student, SU is where he’d want to be.67 Interestingly, his wife, Lucy Southworth, is a biologist who has written papers on aging issues, including one titled “Effects of Aging on Mouse Transcriptional Networks,” coauthored with Stanford’s Dr. Stuart K. Kim, who is a well-known aging expert and one of Larry Ellison’s award recipients.68 Sergey Brin is spreading the meme in a more personal way. 23andMe is a genomics company that was cofounded by Brin’s biologist wife, Anne Wojcicki, and has gone a long way toward popularizing the idea of personalized medicine. “Spit parties” are one of the cute marketing techniques the company uses to get the public interested in thinking about their DNA and how it might be fixed to cure disease. One high-profile party took place during New York City’s Fashion Week.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein
Published 23 Apr 2018

Sjöblad’s cyborg evangelism Bryan Menegus, “Company Offers Free, Totally Not Creepy Microchip Implants to Employees,” July 24, 2017, gizmodo.com; James Brooks, “Cyborgs at Work: Employees Getting Implanted with Microchips,” April 23, 2017, apnews.com. “gamete donor selection based on genetic calculations” Anne Wojcicki et al., U.S. Patent 8543339 B2, December 5, 2008; Karen Kaplan, “23andMe’s Designer Baby Patent Is ‘a Serious Mistake,’ Critics Charge,” October 3, 2013, latimes.com. endorsed the Singularity sect Lev Grossman, “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal,” February 10, 2011, time.com. an online forum of futurists who called themselves extropians.

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives
by Michael Specter
Published 14 Apr 2009

Many friends have heard me drone on about this subject for years—encouraging me all the while. (And also arguing—which I tend to see as the same thing.) For their support and good cheer I would like to thank Gary Kalkut, Esther Fein, Gerry Krovatin, Sarah Lyall, Robert McCrum, Anne McNally, Richard Cohen, John Kalish, Jacob Weisberg, Deborah Needleman, Jacob Lewis, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki and Alessandra Stanley. When I was a child it often annoyed me that my parents, Howard and Eileen Specter, acted as if I could do anything. As I age, however, I have come to realize there is a role for blind devotion in this world—and I thank them for it profusely. My brother, Jeffrey, and his wife Yaelle, shouldered much family responsibility while I hid behind my laptop, and without that help there would have been no book.

What Would Google Do?
by Jeff Jarvis
Published 15 Feb 2009

Education and information become insurance against insurance. Godin took this line of thinking to its extreme when he speculated about opportunities not just for smarter people but—genetically speaking—healthier people as determined by 23andMe, a service that analyzes users’ DNA. (Founded by Brin’s wife, Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe discovered his Parkinson’s gene. Google invested in the company.) Godin said: And while some may not like it, what happens when 23andMe gets a lot smarter and the healthiest gene pool starts their own life insurance coop? U.K. business journalist James Ball agreed with me that insurance is “a glorified betting market” where insurance providers “offer odds against certain outcomes—adverse outcomes—and we pay up the stake.

Uncharted: How to Map the Future
by Margaret Heffernan
Published 20 Feb 2020

Mark McCarthy, a geneticist at Oxford University, worries that ‘there aren’t enough genetic counsellors on the planet’ to manage the subtle interpretations of polygenic scores. But, as always in the world of forecasting, there’s money to be made from commercialising prophecy and imbuing it with moral urgency. Both Plomin and Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe believe it is a parent’s duty to ‘arm themselves with their child’s blueprint’.32 Duty to whom? Plomin’s big idea and Wojcicki’s big business trivialise the danger of emphasising what’s certain – the score – over and above what’s uncertain – the other half that represents life. Stereotyping, rationing, discrimination, passivity, surrender: these are the very real risks produced when overstating the foresight afforded by DNA.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine
Published 6 Feb 2018

It would make them rich beyond belief and transform Google from a mere search engine into a sprawling global platform designed to capture as much information as possible about the people who came into contact with it. The Brain Tap In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin moved into the garage of a house owned by Susan Wojcicki, the sister of Brin’s future wife, Anne Wojcicki. They had an initial $100,000 check from Andy Bechtolsheim, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems, a powerful computer company that itself had come out of an ARPA-funded 1970s computer research program at Stanford University.36 The initial small investment was followed by a $25 million tranche from two powerful venture capital outfits, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.37 Brin and Page couldn’t be happier.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Mar 2015

These products will be incorporated into wearables such as clothes, bracelets, shoes and glasses, and will collect a never-ending stream of biometrical data. The idea is for Google Fit to feed the Baseline Study with the data it needs.30 Yet companies such as Google want to go much deeper than wearables. The market for DNA testing is currently growing in leaps and bounds. One of its leaders is 23andMe, a private company founded by Anne Wojcicki, former wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The name ‘23andMe’ refers to the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that contain our genome, the message being that my chromosomes have a very special relationship with me. Anyone who can understand what the chromosomes are saying can tell you things about yourself that you never even suspected.

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality
by Blake J. Harris
Published 19 Feb 2019

MAY On May 1, Steve and Allison Spinner hosted a small fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, who weeks earlier had announced that she would be running for president in the 2016 election. In advance of this event, campaign chair John Podesta, who would be speaking there that day, was advised that “There will be four important individuals within tech in the room: Aaron Levie (CEO of Box), Padma Warrior (CTO of Cisco), Anne Wojcicki (CEO of 23 and Me and married to Sergei Brinn, co-founder [of] Google), and Palmer Luckey (founder [of] Oculus VR).” Luckey had concerns about Clinton (based on her platform in the 2008 presidential race), but figured this would be a good opportunity to find out if any of her positions had changed.

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
by Walter Isaacson
Published 9 Mar 2021

The citation heralded them “for harnessing an ancient mechanism of bacterial immunity into a powerful and general technology for editing genomes.” The prize, which carries a $3 million award for each recipient, had been established a year earlier by the Russian billionaire and early Facebook funder Yuri Milner, along with Sergey Brin of Google, Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Milner, an ebullient fanboy of scientists, staged a glittering televised award ceremony that infused the glory of science with some of the glamor of Hollywood. The 2014 black-tie event, cohosted by Vanity Fair, was held in a spacecraft hangar at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing
by Kevin Davies
Published 5 Oct 2020

The two women have shared the “Nobel Prizes” of Japan, Spain, Israel, and Canada (with Zhang), to name a few. The most lucrative award was the Breakthrough Prize, created by Silicon Valley billionaires including Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Sergey Brin (Google) and his ex-wife Anne Wojcicki (23andMe), and Dick Costolo (Twitter). At a black-tie awards ceremony in November 2014, Doudna and Charpentier received their awards from Hollywood actress Cameron Diaz. Charpentier flashed her Gallic humor on stage. “It’s kind of surreal to receive the prize from Cameron,” she said, then turned to Costolo: “Three powerful women… I was just wondering if you’re Charlie?”