Anne Wojcicki
Co-Founder and CEO of 23andMe
Anne knows from experience that even major, almost-company-ending setbacks can be overcome. She is the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe, the wildly successful genetic testing company. 23andMe is best known for the product that helps you gain insights into not only your DNA but your ancestry as well, and all you have to do is spit into a vial!
Anne grew up the daughter of a professor on the campus of Stanford University and, herself, went to Yale where she studied biology. In 2018, 23andMe entered into a deal with GlaxoSmithKline, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. The partnership may help Anne reach her goal for 23andMe faster, which is to empower people to leverage their genetic information to provide cures for diseases and treatments.
When I became pregnant, my husband and I thought it would be a good time to determine what health risks we might be in for, so we decided it would be a good idea to better understand our hereditary risks; both of us sprang for 23andMe kits. We wanted to ensure we could plan for our eventual demise (for instance, how likely would we be to get Alzheimer’s and therefore need to plan for longer-term, more expensive care?) and our child’s future (we had questions surrounding what health conditions we may pass on but also fun things, like what eye color may he end up with and is green or blue more dominant). Morbid? Major life events like pregnancy can cause you to evaluate everything in your life in new and interesting ways, not to mention drive you to make other major changes!
Thanks to Anne and her work with 23andMe, I understand interesting things about my ancestry, know why my kiddo has blue eyes (apparently green eyes are recessive in that coin flip), and can appreciate that my partner is actually predisposed to being a night person and I am meant to be a morning person. If it weren’t for Anne and her passion for science, we’d be left wondering!
Powerful Quotes by a Powerful Woman
“The paternalism of the medical industry is insane.”
“My mom was a problem solver.”
“I feel that gender balance in the work environment is actually the best recipe for success.”
“The reality is that the only way change comes is when you lead by example.”
“Obesity is awesome from a Wall Street perspective. It’s not just one disease - there are all sorts of related diseases to profit from.”
-Anne Wojcicki
+ References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Wojcicki
- Kapp, D., & Karman, B. (2019). Girls who run the world: 31 CEOs who mean business. New York, NY: Delacorte Press.
