How 23andMe's bankruptcy led to a run on the gene bank

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 26 April 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

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Summary

Reporter Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi's Aunt Vovi signed up for 23andMe back in 2017, hoping to learn more about the genetic makeup of her ancestors. Vovi was one of over 15 million 23andMe customers who sent their saliva off to be analyzed by the company.

But last month, 23andMe filed for bankruptcy, and it announced it would be selling off that massive genetic database. Today on the show, what might happen to Vovi's genetic data as 23andMe works its way through the bankruptcy process, how the bankruptcy system has treated consumer data privacy in the past, and what this case reveals about the data that all of us willingly hand over to companies every single day.

This episode was produced by Sylvie Douglis and edited by Jess Jiang. It was engineered by Harry Paul and Neal Rauch and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:05.6	A few weeks ago, I hopped onto a video call with a very special friend of the show.
0:10.9	Just introduce yourself, who are you?
0:13.0	Who am I? Oh, come on.
0:15.4	I'm your aunt Vovey.
0:18.7	This is my aunt Vovey.
0:26.9	I called her up to talk about an experience she had a few years ago with the genetics testing company 23 and Me.
0:37.9	Vovie is a lifelong learner. She loves anthropology and the story of human migration. So back in 2017, when 23 and me was all the rage, she was interested. She thought that taking one of their tests might reveal how she fit into the evolutionary sweep
0:42.9	of human history.
0:44.7	So was part of the interest about using 23 and me about...
0:48.4	Belonging.
0:50.6	Maybe belonging to a much larger collective.
0:54.0	Amphovi knew our family had been in Afghanistan for the last few hundred years.
0:58.1	But she also wondered if this test might reveal the migration route, our ancestors had taken out of Africa.
1:04.1	She wondered if it might uncover some long forgotten tale of star-cross travelers on the Silk Road.
1:10.1	And so I bought a kit and I convinced some of my friends to do so as well.
1:16.2	You were patient zero.
1:17.9	Yeah.
1:18.9	Vovya and I actually talked about this at the time.
1:21.2	By handing over her genome, she was automatically giving this company part of my DNA.
1:26.5	After all, we share 25% of the same genome.
1:29.8	And for me, it just wasn't clear what the consequences of all this might be.
	...

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