Anne Wojcicki MAKERS Profile The 2020 MAKERS Conference

You have to wake up and do something every day. So you might as well do what you love, and you might as well try to have an impact. My mom is a teacher. My father does physics at Stanford. And both of them push. Find what you love, experiment, try all kinds of things. My father taught me how to make a magnet out of little Styrofoam cups. And he brought me into a Stanford class, and I showed off the little magnet I made. And I remember thinking, like, I'm only in fourth grade, and I'm as capable as these Stanford students. So my parents always gave us a sense, like, science is totally in your reach, and you can do anything. I was, I think, about six years old, and I remember my mom lecturing my sister about something. And she said something about, like, oh, it's in your jeans. And I was really confused because she wasn't wearing jeans. And I kept saying, what are jeans? What are jeans? And then she told me, and I was like, it's in you? And it's part of your makeup? And ever since that moment, I was fascinated by microbiology. I loved it. I absolutely loved it. So I got to Yale, and I had a feeling I wanted to do something in science. I remember having a professor who I really liked, who was like, look, like, you just really should not pursue physics. And hearing that, you know, you shouldn't pursue it, I was like, well, I had a little bit of, like, well, maybe I should, just to spite you. I might not have been the best in the class, but I really loved it. I found it fascinating. And I didn't necessarily grasp every concept right away, but when I did, I was, I just, I loved it. And that did definitely influence me, where I wanted to make sure that anyone can understand science. There's nothing that's too complicated for me or for any individual out there. I was at a dinner with a scientist who was telling me about this genetics project he had done. And I started saying, like, if you actually had the world's data, if, you know, every single person in the world was sequenced and you had their medical records, would you be able to solve most healthcare problems? He's like, undoubtedly, yes. I was like, well, then that should just be our initiative. The mission of 23andMe is really just to revolutionize healthcare. Genetic testing is a lot like your cholesterol test. Your genetic information can tell you you are potentially high risk for something, just like a cholesterol test, but it doesn't mean you're definitely gonna get it. I think that there's a lot of misunderstanding about genetic information. And that's one of my goals, is to make sure that people do understand it and that they have an appreciation for the science. When we tested Sergey, we found out that he actually is a carrier for the LRRK2 variant, making him high risk for Parkinson's disease. Suddenly, it became very personal. It becomes about me and my family and how are we gonna deal with this? So we started really researching the literature and looked at things like caffeine consumption. It looks like it could have an impact on Parkinson's. So we started drinking coffee regularly together. We started exercising all the time. There's clearly things you can do in your environment to try and prevent disease. And I wanna know what those things are. We are trying to do research in a different way. We're trying to actually have it be consumer generated. So any person in the world can fill out a survey and spit and get genotyped and contribute to research. We're getting over a million data points of information on our customers every single week. I like to be adventurous. There's just so many exciting things to do all the time. That's why I have to wake up early and I have to go to bed late because there's just so much to do.