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Today marks another entrant in the personal genomics game: Navigenics, the much anticipated startup out of Redwood Shores, Ca, is open for business.

The company arrives as direct competition to 23andMe and DeCodeMe, both of which began offering direct-to-consumer genotyping last year. Navigenics was originally planning to launch around the same time as the competition, but ended up taking several months longer to fine-tune it’s product. As planned, Navigenics is taking a more clinical approach to personal genomics, with a more overt pitch towards the medical implications.

Thought I'd jot down some of the feedback I've been getting to my story in the NYT Mag on PatientsLikeMe. Overall, I've been fairly blown away by the response – I've gotten dozens of emails and the story has been been blogged mightily. In stories like this, where I'm writing about one company or person, it's important to keep in mind that the enthusiasm is more for the ideas and portent of PatientsLikeMe and not my story, per se. But I'm going to assume that the humble messenger - me - did a fair job conveying the import of the message, and that that's worth something. Anyway, the reactions fall along a few lines:

I've always hated the presumptive embargo - the company or academic journal or quasi-governmental agency that sends out an email blast of "news", but stamps the word "EMBARGO" onto it, stipulating that the information cannot be published until a certain date. Not only does this practice undermine the concept of "news", but it often presumes that the journalist will play ball for no reason other than to get another such email later. As a matter of practice, I disregard the defacto embargo, and consider any press-release sent to me by email fair game, unless I have previously agreed to abide by a hold. That said, I will also admit that never, not once, have I been sent something on presumptive-embargo that I consider worthwhile, so I've never had the occasion to test this principle. Anyway, that's a long preamble for another tale from the World Health Organization's silly use of embargoes and penalties, in this case removing the Associated Press from its distribution list because they violated an embargo and ran a story announcing the eradication of polio in Somalia. To be clear, my sourcing on the WHO penalizing the AP comes from this blog post.

Tomorrow's New York Times Magazine has a story I wrote on PatientsLikeMe, the innovative patient community. The company, I believe, is doing some powerful things:

Funny how when titans of technology, guys who made their millions (or billions) as profound innovators, turn to science, they often just want to do the simple stuff. Bill Gates, for instance, has geared his foundation to accomplishing simple goals (albeit on a grand, transformative scale), and now word that his fellow Microsoft founder Paul Allen - shown here - has turned the Allen Institute for Brain Science to the goal of mapping the human brain, specifically the gene activity in the brain. The scale of the goal is admittedly audacious - there are some 20,000 genes at work in the human brain, and plotting their activity in a 3D model will take 4 years and cost $55 million. But this is, at root, simply basic science, rather than cutting-edge research. It's somebody saying 'wait, let's take a step back and understand what this brain of ours actually does'. That sort of time-out for core principles is all too rare these days - everybody's eager to make a big score, the breakthrough, the home run. Nice that some people are still trying to lay out the baselines.

An astute observation by the WSJ Health Blog that there's much ado about toxic substances these days prompted an informative Q/A with George Corcoran, president of the Society of Toxicology. He makes an interesting point - one reason we're seeing reports of toxic substances, such as pharmaceuticals in drinking water, is simply that we're now able to *measure* such things at such a small level. Which raises the question: Are we measuring something that is now there that wasn't before, or have there long been such background levels of toxic substances, but now we're simply seeing them?

Some quick observations from the Health 2.0 conference in San Diego. 1) These panels are chock full of flashy startups. There's a profusion of companies at seemingly every step of the health care system. Reminds me very much of a a decade ago, the first dot-com boom. Each one seems to offer a promising tool, helping patients find a physician, say, or helping a patient narrow in on a more precise range of information for their illness. All useful tools.

One of the great accomplishments of public health in the US is simply the existence of the thing in the first place. That is, Americans actually know something about our health on a population level. We take the availability of statistics and health data for granted; every day we read about the 80 million Americans with heart disease or the 8 million with diabetes and we don't really consider where those numbers come from. The significance of this information was highlighted for me last year, when I spoke with Christopher Murray, now the director of the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Funded by a $105 million grant from the Gates Foundation, the Institute follows a simple idea: If we want to improve health, we have to have a baseline understanding of what health is, and a scientific understanding of what works. Unfortunately, in most of the world, Murray notes, there's little knowledge about the most basic measures of health: mortality rates, birth rates, morbidity rates - these measures that we in the US take for granted remain question marks in many parts of the world.

There's been much hubub in the news over the past few months about children and cold medicine, with the emerging reports and studies coalescing into the realization that the young children - ages 2 to 5 - and infants and toddlers, probably shouldn't be taking the stuff. (The FDA recommended such for infants this fall.) A study out yesterday in Pediatrics bolstered the thinking. Researchers looking at emergency room admissions found that 7,000 kids a year were going to emergency rooms because of cough medicine (mostly kids guzzling the stuff on their own). This is good science, and I'm glad to see that the system, on one level, is effectively monitoring over-the-counter medicines and raising alarms.

I just heard about The Root, a "Slate for black readers," according to founder Henry Louis Gates Jr. Since Slate is one of my favorite sites, this is a cool development. So what's that got to do with public health or genetics or medicine? Well, right there smack on the prime front page real estate is an unexpected service - a link to Gates' AfricanDNA.com, Gates' effort to bring some substance to the DNA ancestry market. There is a disclaimer that notes AfricanDNA.com is a separate company, but the link is otherwise seamless - here's what it looks like on the home page (the DNA is on the right side, under "Roots"): I have no criticism here - I'm not saying there's a conflict. I find it noteworthy simply because it's the first explicit combination of journalism and genetic services I've seen. These don't seem like obvious complimentary partners, but with a little thought it actually makes sense. 23andme, for instance, is very much a content company - they've put a great effort in writing up their Gene Journals to help customers understand their genetic backgrounds and information. My hunch is that the utility of genetics as a consumer service will depend on the ability of companies to translate what this abstract science actually means for you. Sure, there are early adopters who get it and will sign up for the raw data.