Seventy-one years ago, Francis Crick burst into the Eagle pub in Cambridge to announce to startled lunchtime drinkers that he and his fellow researcher James Watson had discovered “the secret of life”. Their deciphering of the structure of DNA launched a new era of scientific research and won them the Nobel Prize for medicine.

Nowadays, it has become ridiculously cheap and easy to discover your own DNA. Spit into a tube, post it to a lab and a genetics testing company will email you the results for as little as $99. The collapse in the cost of this technology is staggering, outstripping the exponential advances in computing power, known as Moore’s Law. At the beginning of the century it cost more than $95mn to sequence one human-sized genome. 

This data revolution has enabled millions of people to trace their ancestry and discover lost relatives. It has also helped doctors diagnose genetic diseases and created an astonishing research resource for scientists. While researchers have been salivating about this informational treasure trove, investors seem less impressed. But intriguingly, several billionaires have laid contrarian bets that 23andMe, one of the biggest testing companies, can reinvent itself as a valuable drug discovery business. Can it succeed?