Biotech Startup Aims to Make Use of Humanity's Genetic Outliers

pacopico writes: A startup called Variant Bio has quietly been going around the world for the past couple of years, looking for genetic outliers. We're talking about people with super high metabolisms, amazing eyesight, the ability to hold their breaths for really long times. Variant wants to sequence their DNA and come up with a new class of drugs based off these traits found among isolated, indigenous people. The whole business is sort of the opposite of 23andMe or Ancestry where you sequence a ton of people and hope something interesting pops out. Instead, you're going to the obviously interesting spots and then trying to strike deals to get the DNA and turn the interesting genes into the basis of drugs. Tons of ethical and moral questions but very sci-fi and at the frontier of bio-tech.