Cece Moore

I don't think they want credit for it, but they certainly do deserve some credit for it.

You know, I went to them very early on, just shortly after that time that I'm discussing now, and asked if they would be willing to accept crime scene DNA into their database immediately.

And they schooled me very quickly and sent me to her general counsel, Ashley Gold, at the time.

And we had about a three hour long conversation about why that wasn't something that they wanted to do, why that wasn't part of their business plan.

Yeah, I mean, it's just an amazing tool for any type of family mystery, missing family members.

It's incredible.

But at that beginning, it was very clear that we would never fulfill that potential unless we got lots of people to take the test, which is obviously one of the reasons they didn't want to involve law enforcement, especially at that early time.

And that made a lot of sense to me as well.

Now coming from media and marketing perspective,

I knew that the only way that we were going to be able to build these databases to where we could actually solve mysteries was by sharing positive DNA testing stories.

And so I started working with 23andMe and on my own independently to promote positive DNA testing stories.

So if someone made an amazing discovery or even an upsetting discovery that led to a more positive outcome, these were things that we were...

I was starting to pitch to the media on my own, but 23andMe was also getting inquiries and they would send them my way a lot of times.

We would have meetings with, for instance, a very early meeting with the 2020 producer.

She reached out to 23andMe and they said, hey, Cece, come on up so you can tell her some of the stories of the things you're finding in this database.

And that's happened to millions of people now.

There's over 40 million people that have taken these direct-to-consumer DNA tests.

And it's a pretty high percentage, surprisingly, that have found out that their father was not their biological father or one of their grandfathers was not.

And so I don't know if people realize just how many people have made that shocking discovery from direct-to-consumer DNA testing.

Right.