Genetic Genealogy II: The big players (overview)
- Rachel Leah
- Sep 18, 2019
- 3 min read
There are a number of genetic/genealogy companies* currently in operation throughout the world, with a number of them being in the United States. However, two companies, in particular, have become the forefront of the industry.
Both companies, Ancestry and 23andMe, are currently providing similar services but started on two opposite ends of the spectrum.
Ancestry, originally founded as Infobases, was started by two university students (Paul B. Allen and Dan Taggart) in 1990. Their original product offering consisted of LDS (Latter-Day-Saints) publications on floppy Disk. By 1995 you could purchase the collectors edition CD for $299.00 from the company. The following year they launched online under Ancestry.com
In 1997 Allen and Taggart began to run the database separately from Infobases. They also purchases Ancestry Inc, a publisher that specialized in Ancestry magazines and books. They would go on and sell that portion of the business in 1999 to an LDS publishing company.
Their database has steadily grown since 1997, boasting approximately 10 million records in 2018. While their online offering grew, they also began to diversify into other aspects of Genealogy which eventually morphed into similar offerings of its biggest competitor.
In 2012, for their American consumers, they began offering autosomal genetic testing through Quest Diagnostics. This would continue to spread to other countries ending with Germany in 2018. By 2017, 14 million of these kits have been sold around the world, through the site.
While this was developing, Ancestry also launched Ancestry Health in 2015. This division of the company has been slower to evolve as they have tried to avoid the same pitfalls that 23andMe encountered.
On the other end of this spectrum, 23andMe started in 2006 as a Biotech company with little link to the Genealogy aspect of the technology. In 2007, they became the first company to offer autosomal testing in a consumer health market, offering raw data that could potentially tell its customers if they had genetic markers for particular illnesses or other health issues.
From the beginning, the company was considered a star within the silicon valley crowd (with investors such as Google Inc) but they had one big hurdle. They had no FDA approval.
They spent the next three years offering their services, without approval, before the FDA would require shut down of any health applications of their business in 2010. It would take them until 2013 to completely comply.
While they headed to the drawing board, with the intent of receiving FDA approval, they grew their Genealogy division. This service both allowed customers to track their family trees past the point of records, much like ancestry, but also began a genetic web that would potentially link you to relatives you might not know.
By 2015 they had managed to rework their business model that allowed minimal FDA approval. In 2017 they received further approval that allowed them to test for the genes thought responsible for things like Dementia and Alzheimer's, to name a few.
Although not all of the market offerings are Genealogy based and in fact have begun to lean towards a more health based application. It is, however, because of the popularity of Genetic Genealogy that the large growth of the industry and related industries has happened. It has also allowed a very large, connected genetic database to grow.
It is in this database we often are faced with the Cons of the technology, and some may argue they out number the pros of the whole thing.
In the next post I will discuss these pros and cons, with some of the more recent news articles that have got a lot of people discussing the same thing.
Footnotes:
Websites referenced:
https://isogg.org/wiki/AncestryDNA - Excellent source for in depth reading on the subject.
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