Bill Clinton said we'd live to 150 due to the Human Genome Project.

What went wrong?

From the Washington Post news section:

Turmoil strikes 23andMe as board members resign in dispute with founder

The company that pioneered at-home DNA test kits has struggled financially and faces an uncertain future.

By Daniel Gilbert
September 18, 2024 at 2:13 p.m. EDT

The pioneering DNA testing firm 23andMe is in turmoil.

Seven independent members of the company’s eight-person board resigned Tuesday, concluding that despite co-founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki’s expressed intention to take the company private, “no such proposal is forthcoming.” They also cited a difference on the “strategic direction” of the company.

23andMe’s revenue has shriveled over the past year and its share price has sunk to about 30 cents, jeopardizing its ability to remain listed on the Nasdaq index.

After filing to go public in 2021, 23andMe’s stock briefly reached a nearly $6 billion value. Wojcicki’s profile rose with the company, with Mattel modeling a doll on her as part of its “Barbie Role Models” line.

Today 23andMe’s stock market value is less than $200 million, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, just 3 percent of what it was worth at its peak.

Competitor Ancestry.com was bought by Blackstone in 2020 for $4.7 billion.

Ancestry.com focuses more on genealogy and ethnicity, while 23andMe has promoted potential medical uses of DNA data.

One business problem for these firms is that nobody has a much of a reason to be a repeat customer.

Another problem, especially for 23andMe, is that the DNA as a panacea for medical problems idea has proven a dud compared to the outlandish optimism of 2000.

The turn of the century years just before 9/11 were an upbeat time. Perhaps the age’s most cheerful moment came on June 26, 2000 when President Bill Clinton announced the success of the Human Genome Project in the White House, along with Francis Collins and J. Craig Venter, the leader of the government and private efforts, respectively.

I’ve often referred to this as the Rose Garden Ceremony, but I now see it was held indoors in East Room of the White House. I wonder why I got it wrong? Perhaps it was supposed to be in the Rose Garden, but it rained that day?

Venter’s speech appears to be the main source of today conventional wisdom that The Science proves that Race Does Not Exist. Granted, it’s nuts that so many people took away from a project that provided the technology for determining your racial ancestry to 3 significant digits that Race Is Not a Biological Reality. But that’s what they were told in 2000, so why would they change their minds over the last two dozen years just because that doesn’t make any sense?

Yet, looking back, the speeches are also fascinating for how over-optimistic they proved to be about how the Human Genome Project was going to, real soon now, cure what ails us.

For example, Clinton orated:

With this profound new knowledge, humankind is on the verge of gaining immense, new power to heal. Genome science will have a real impact on all our lives -- and even more, on the lives of our children. It will revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases.

In coming years, doctors increasingly will be able to cure diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes and cancer by attacking their genetic roots. Just to offer one example, patients with some forms of leukemia and breast cancer already are being treated in clinical trials with sophisticated new drugs that precisely target the faulty genes and cancer cells, with little or no risk to healthy cells. In fact, it is now conceivable that our children's children will know the term cancer only as a constellation of stars. …

We must discover the function of these genes and their protein products, and then we must rapidly convert that knowledge into treatments that can lengthen and enrich lives. …

Now, it is my great pleasure to turn to my friend, Prime Minister Tony Blair … And, on a personal note, I can't help but think that the year of your son's birth will always be remembered for the remarkable achievements we announce today. I think his life expectancy has just gone up by about 25 years. (Laughter)

Then Blair chimed in:

… For let us be in no doubt about what we are witnessing today -- a revolution in medical science whose implications far surpass even the discovery of antibiotics, the first great technological triumph of the 21st century. And every so often in the history of human endeavor there comes a breakthrough that takes humankind across a frontier and into a new era. And like President Clinton, I believe that today's announcement is such a breakthrough -- a breakthrough that opens the way for massive advances in the treatment of cancer and hereditary diseases, and that is only the beginning. …

The Francis Collins of NIH:

So there is much to celebrate. But I have to tell you that this morning is also a bitter-sweet experience for me, personally. Less than 24 hours ago, I attended the funeral of my beloved sister-in-law, a wonderful marionette artist who brought magic and joy to thousands of children with her art. She died much too soon of breast cancer. The hope and promise of understanding all of the genes in the genome and applying this knowledge to the development of powerful new tools came just too late for her.

I think I speak for all of us in this room, and for the millions of others who have come to believe in the remarkable promise of biomedical research, that we must redouble our efforts to speed the application of these profound and fundamental observations about the human genome to the cure of disease.

Venter:

The genome sequence represents a new starting point for science and medicine, with potential impact on every disease. Taking the example, cancer, each day approximately 2,000 die in America from cancer. As a consequence of the genome efforts that you've heard described by Dr. Collins and myself this morning, and the research that will be catalyzed by this information, there's at least the potential to reduce the number of cancer deaths to zero during our lifetimes.

And Clinton summed up:

When we get this all worked out and we're all living to be 150 -- (Laughter) -- young people will still fall in love, old people will still fight about things that should have been resolved 50 years ago -- (Laughter) -- we will all, on occasion, do stupid things, and we will all see the unbelievable capacity of humanity to be noble. This is a great day.

It was a great day in many ways, especially for what is now denounced as Race Science. It’s now so easy to determine people’s racial ancestry that the stock of a well-established brand name like 23andMe is selling for pennies. Even what genome scanning is really good at — racial ancestry — isn’t hugely informative because most people can figure that out anyway.

Nor has DNA science proven all that useful at, say, determining whether your kid should concentrate on soccer or baseball. It’s more accurate (and more fun) to have him play both sports and see what he likes more.

And it has especially not proven the cure for all ills. We haven’t cured cancer yet and nobody is living to 150.

That shouldn’t have been so unexpected. It was always unlikely, of course, that our genes had evolved to kill us.

A lot of illness is due instead to development errors and to infections, neither of which are easily fixed by changing genes.

There are a few ailments, such as sickle cell anemia, that are due to genes evolving in some regions whose benefits are irrelevant in the modern U.S. So far, a few people have received gene therapy for sickle cell, which is great, but it’s probably not going to be all that relevant for most illnesses for some time.