To really understand the output of 23andme will take a lot more study and I think that if you're going to let it influence your life's decisions at that level that you should be prepared to spend a substantial amount over and beyond the initial fee here to have the results interpreted by a professional that is able to put them in to the proper perspective.

23andme is expensive infotainment without the required education in both the genetic and the mathematical/statistical background.

I couldn't disagree more. Knowing more about your body is always a good thing -- the fact that many people won't know what to do with that information is inconsequential. It may not make sense for many (most) people to buy into 23andMe, there are a lot of people out there that can understand this, or at least find it interesting to be able to peer into their genetic makeup.

Surely if the average person is told "There's an X chance you'll die. There's a Y chance you'll lose a leg. There's a Z chance you'll be blown up", they'll worry unduly no matter what X,Y,Z are.

I can see what you're saying, that if you're a qualified doctor, or have studied medicine for years, then 23andme could be useful, but for everyone else, I think it could be very dangerous.

Surely those things can be tested for properly by a doctor if you're planning kids and believe you may be high risk.

I don't know how things are in the US (I know health care is 'interesting' over there), but one of the jobs of a doctor is to take information and interpret those results for the patient. That's why they spend years training.

Giving patients access to tests directly doesn't seem a good idea at all to me. It's like showing a windows user a stack trace when a program crashes. Most of them won't have any clue how to interpret that stack trace, they'll probably get over-worried their computer is broken or has a virus, etc etc.

People who fork out money for genetic tests like these aren't windows users. I'm a linux user. I also have undergraduate and graduate degrees in biology, and my SO who also got the test done (and with whom I'm planning to have kids with) makes phylogenies for a living. We're perfectly capable of interpreting this information.

Doctors are a fine filter for stupid people, but it they can be infuriating for people like us. My mother is a biochemical engineer, and when she was pregnant with me she was so frustrated by the doctor's dissembling over her amnio, she grabbed the test results out of his hands and read them for herself.

I'm regularly frustrated with the lack of doctors' honesty. I don't need one to decide what I do and do not need to know about myself. I think we not only do we need more direct-to-consumer medical testing, I think we should have better access to our own medical information.

You would be right if the 23andme tests were accurate, but they really aren't. They only test for the most common mutations for certain genes so they don't replace going to see a clinical geneticist. Also, the vast majority of conditions you could have aren't even tested for at all. A lot of these are the kinds of things where there is only a 1 in 40,000 chance of you having it, but there are so many of them that your chances of having one of those conditions is actually pretty high. But yeah, doctors are terrible at diagnosing chronic illnesses so you really want to figure out what you have on your own and then just go to someone to order the tests for you. But 23andme wouldn't be useful for this unless you get really 'lucky' and have one of the 200 or so things they test for.

Your point on doctors is well taken - I myself hold 2 degrees, one in genetics and a second in computer science. I run whole genome sequencing analysis as part of my job and am acutely aware of the kind of knowledge required to properly interpret these kinds of results. When you consider that many MDs simply have 2 years of college's worth of molecular biology training - well it puts genetics knowledge into perspective.