Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service with me David Reid.

Today, the story of a DNA testing company that four years ago was valued at $6 billion, but is now bankrupt.

23 and me was going to be the next big thing.

How did it then become the next big thing to fail?

There are only so many people who want to use the service.

And ultimately, like, they did run into a roadblock and getting new customers.

And what about all that sensitive data containing millions of people's DNA?

How informed was the consent when the data was gathered in the first place?

And did it take a police manhunt for a serial killer to finally wake the public up to the risks posed by online genetic databases.

I didn't know that it was going to be sold to like pharmaceutical companies.

Yes, I did feel, I did feel dup.

I felt like, oh, you know, you could have told me.

Most people really weren't thinking about the risks.

But at that time, the Golden State Killer case broke.

And that began to really raise a lot of questions around disclosing one's DNA in a more public way

and what the implications of that were on a broader scale.

Many of us have questions about who we really are.

In the past few years, at-home DNA testing has been riding an extraordinary wave of publicity.

Night and day, question, who am I?

TV and radio has fed us the most incredibly compelling stories.

Now amazing advances in DNA technology.

Sending a saliva sample and wait a few weeks for your life to be upended by long-loss relatives, undisclosed infidelities, even a new ethnic identity.

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