Donnerstag, 5. Januar 2012

iWulff


aus dem Nachlaß von Steve Jobs:
das rote Präsidententelefon für besondere Anlässe.






Sonntag, 1. Januar 2012

POIESIS & TECHNE

Comments about 23andme's new terms of subscription

Repeatedly the question arise, who owns our genome and I think, it is worth a notion, that greek philosophers around 500 bc already developed a rather appropriate distinction about two different powers, how things can be produced. One is named POIESIS and it means the power to let natural things grow and evolute into their own shape. The other is related to human intelligence and means the power to transform given things and to invent something completely new. It is called TECHNE.
Applying this to the field of genetics, we can easliy see, that a "Genome" is undoubtly part of the natural world, is a result of the power of POIESIS and belongs both to all of us and nobody as does the air around us, we can breath. Nobody can claim, it is his creation or invention or propriety. What of course not means, that someone else has the right to put his hands on information about my genome!
On the other hand we have to agree, that all methods of Genome investigation, sequencing and chip technologies, tools like Relative and Ancestry Finder are part of TECHNE and must be regarded as unique inventions, innovations of the several companies, who owns them.
In so far I have to agree to the new terms of subscription, they mostly correspond to what I think about the freedom of a companies business strategy.

The problem is the timing. What seems to be ok for the future, must not be ok for the past!
The current consumers for the V3 technology ordered under different conditions and will be blamed with the new TOS.
I wanted to know, how it will look like, when the new terms are not taken back!

This is the current situation for each participant of Relative Finder. There are distant cousins, tested with the V2 chip, those with V3 and about 3/4 are non responders ( coloured icons! ). I omitted decliners and the chaotic fact, that some accept contact, but decline sharing.




The new TOS will only concern the users of V3 and those unlucky ones, who paid for an update to V3. If they decide to continue paying the subscription fees, they will lose all the non payers of V3.



Who cancels the subscription, will maintain the access to his raw data, but will face a situation, anybody can have for free installing a simple demo account. He will see this:

I deeply recommend to sign a petition, compiled by Larry Vick against the new terms of subscription.
http://www.change.org/petitions/23andme-dont-take-away-our-relative-finder-matches#