With 23andMe closing shop today and the bluebird bio sale to private equity last month it is clear that the DNA bubble has burst.
Every bubble leaves something positive in its wake. Yes, there was a lot of speculation with tulips in the Netherlands, but the Netherlands is still the world’s top exporter of cut flowers. There was a railway bubble in the United States that left us with a lot of railroad tracks and not so great passenger rail. More recently, the dot-com bubble left decent network infrastructure and a lot of IT professionals with nothing better to do than to invent Web 2.0.
And so with DNA. Sequencing has never been cheaper, and it does have some valid uses. Unfortunately, there are many harms of fetishizing DNA, from thinking that DNA mutations are the be-all and end-all of every disease pathology — think, “the fat gene” — to completely missing the point of the entire field of epigenetics, which has much more to it than molecular changes to histones and base pairs.
Business and finance are now the first to realize that there is more to genetics than DNA, and more to medicine than genetics. Academia and funders, ossified as they are, will be slower on the uptake and come to this epiphany one retirement at a time.