Who owns the right to your genetic code?

In March 2025, 23andMe filed for bankruptcy.

Fifteen million people had spit in a tube and mailed it to that company. And in the bankruptcy, the most valuable thing on the table wasn't the lab. It was the database. Attorneys general in several states publicly reminded customers they could delete their data before it changed hands.

Think about that. The most personal information you have, and the advice from your government was: hurry.

What's the pattern?

In 1951, a woman named Henrietta Lacks was treated for cancer at Johns Hopkins. Cells taken from her tumor, without her knowledge, turned out to be immortal. They became the HeLa line, used in tens of thousands of studies, the polio vaccine, and a great deal of modern medicine. Her family learned about it decades later. They were never asked and never paid.

That's the pattern: medicine has long treated the human body as a source of raw material. Blood, tissue, cells, now genomes. Each time, the science races ahead and the consent catches up a generation later, usually after a scandal.

In Radical Next I write about the biotech era as the one after this one. Gene editing, personalized medicine, longevity. All of it runs on genomic data. Which means the question of who owns that data isn't a privacy footnote. It's the property question of the next era, the way land was for agriculture and IP was for the industrial age.

What should leaders do now?

So, three things. Especially if you touch health data.

Treat consent as revocable, not one-time. If someone can't take their data back, you don't have consent. You have a signature.

Plan for your own death. What happens to the genomes you hold if your company is acquired, sold, or bankrupt? If the answer is "they're an asset," say so up front, and expect people to walk.

And separate the sample from the person as early as possible. The value of a genome for research rarely requires knowing whose it is.

We got the Lacks case wrong for seventy years. We're getting the chance to do this one right at the start. Take it.

Where is your DNA right now, and who's allowed to sell it?

Related: Will we live to 120, and who pays for it?

Sam Rad, The Change Futurist. Keynote speaker on change, transformation, resilience, and AI adoption. Author of Radical Next. Book a keynote