Well, that didn’t take long. Less than seven hours after I posted a request and reward for a 23andme app, I had two submissions. Beau Gunderson and Eric Jain (who turn out to be friends) both submitted short programs that fulfilled my request. The winning version is at Beau’s site.

First, a little context. The point of this wasn’t to create a consumer experience, so don’t go to the link and expect one. It’s a download tool, no more and no less. But it didn’t exist before and now it does. What you will get if you click the link is the ability to store local copies of your genotype and health results.

You will have to accept conditions to execute the app. Read them carefully before you do so. I am not sure if the 20 user limit is concurrent or total, and the tool may break at some point if it’s the latter until it goes through account review. This is alpha software, caveat emptor, you should probably wait to use it until lots of other people do, and so forth. I generated a zip file and downloaded it, for reference’s sake.

Second, let’s thank 23andme for supplying the API and enabling the health GET commands. They didn’t have to do that at all, much less make it so easy to do. This doesn’t get done in seven hours without clean API design. Credit where it is deserved. More reason to hope they can get data into the FDA that gets approved and they keep DTC genomics economically accessible.

Third, we now have the challenge of integrating the output into a Blue Button format, so it can benefit from the ecosystem of applications emerging there. I’m not sure I can pull that off in a twitter challenge but we’ll see - at least we’ve moved to the next step of the process.

More in a bit. I’m going to wire this into a few places over the next week and think about it some more. This was both wonderful and unexpected in the best way. Thanks to everyone who joined the conversation and to 23andme for making the API available.