When Eugenia Brin was still living in Moscow, her aunt Serafima was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at just 50. With little access to effective care, Eugenia did what close families do: after work, she’d go to her aunt’s apartment to help bathe her and cook meals. “I loved her very much,” she said. “I watched her deteriorate, and it was pretty awful.”
After Eugenia joined the Jewish exodus from the Soviet Union and immigrated to Maryland in 1979, she tried to help from afar. She began mailing therapeutic doses of synthetic dopamine to her aunt. But Serafima, never sure when the next shipment might arrive, rationed the medicine so tightly it brought little relief.
A diagnosis that hit close to home
As Eugenia neared her own 50th birthday, she noticed her left foot starting to drag. Parkinson’s is most often sporadic, with only a minority of cases tied to clearly inherited genetic causes. Still, when Eugenia was diagnosed in 1998, she was “extremely upset.”
Like her aunt, she was confronting the disease young—one that steadily damages neurons and can eventually affect movement, mood, and cognition. But she was also a mother. If genetics played a role, what did that mean for her children?
One of her sons, Sam, was 11. The other, Sergey, had just founded a small search company called Google.
The Silicon Valley bet: DNA as data
In Google’s earliest days, the team was tiny and worked out of a Menlo Park garage owned by Susan Wojcicki. That garage would become Silicon Valley lore. Wojcicki later joined Google as employee No. 16 and became a key figure in its rise. (She stepped down as YouTube CEO in February 2023; she died in August 2024.)
Her younger sister, Anne Wojcicki, would later marry Sergey Brin and help build a company with an ambition that echoed Google’s original pitch: organize information at scale—this time, the information encoded in human DNA.
That company was 23andMe, named for the 23 pairs of chromosomes in human DNA. Its premise was simple and unsettlingly powerful: if you can collect genetic data from enough people, patterns emerge. Those patterns can point researchers to drug targets, reveal why some patients respond poorly to specific therapies, and accelerate the slow grind of biomedical discovery.
Selling you your own genome
23andMe’s clever twist wasn’t just collecting DNA—it was making customers pay to submit it.
As the cost of genetic technology plunged over the past two decades, the company began offering consumers a spit kit that could generate a personalized genetic report quickly and at mass-market prices, without a prescription. Customers mailed saliva to a lab and received results online—ancestry insights, trait reports, and health-related risk estimates. The tradeoff was baked into the fine print: to use the service, customers had to consent to 23andMe using their data for research and commercial purposes.
It was a vision of seamless research that doubled as a business model: build a reservoir of genetic information, learn what it means, and eventually turn those insights into products and partnerships.
The genetic finding inside the Brin family
In 2007, Eugenia Brin took a 23andMe test. Her results showed two copies of a rare mutation in a gene called LRRK2, a variant strongly associated with Parkinson’s in a small share of cases. With two copies, she could pass only the mutated version to her children. Both of her sons carried one copy, which is associated with elevated risk.
For Sergey Brin, the result became personal—and motivating. In a 2008 blog post, he wrote that knowing his genetic predisposition gave him a chance to adjust his life and support research long before the disease might affect him.
The FDA steps in
By late 2013, 23andMe had built one of the world’s largest consumer genetic databases, and its ambitions were colliding with regulators. On November 22, 2013, the Food and Drug Administration sent the company a warning letter, arguing that it was effectively providing medical tests without appropriate approval and oversight.
In response, 23andMe stopped offering health reports to new customers for a time, continuing to sell ancestry services while it worked through the regulatory dispute. The broader tension was clear: Silicon Valley wanted iteration and scale; the FDA wanted validation, reliability, and guardrails—especially when health claims could influence life-altering decisions.
Two different definitions of “knowing”
Underneath the clash sat a deeper disagreement about what counts as scientific knowledge.
Traditional medicine often moves step-by-step: hypothesis, experiment, replication, cautious conclusions. Big-data genetics moves in the other direction: gather enormous datasets, run pattern-finding algorithms, and let correlations suggest new hypotheses. That approach can be incredibly useful for population-level research, but it can also be shaky at the individual level—particularly when consumers interpret probabilistic results as personal destiny.
Even today, genetics can explain some risk, but rarely the whole story. Environment, lifestyle, and chance still matter—sometimes more than any single marker.
The afterstory
The conflict over consumer genetic testing didn’t end with one warning letter; it reshaped the entire direct-to-consumer genomics industry. 23andMe continued to evolve through regulatory pathways and shifting business realities. And the cast of characters changed, too: Anne Wojcicki remained central to the company for years, but stepped down as CEO in 2025 amid 23andMe’s bankruptcy process and subsequent ownership changes.
Still, the core question that drove the company at the start hasn’t gone away: if DNA is data—and data can be organized—how much of health can be predicted, prevented, and ultimately improved?