‘Doyenne of DNA’ says: Just chillax with your ex

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In 2007, Anne Wojcicki, then 33, lassoed the moon.

She was getting her new company, 23andme, a mail-order genetics testing firm, off the ground with her “Party ‘til you spit” celebrity get-togethers.

She married Sergey Brin, the cute co-founder of Google, who was also 33 and already one of the richest men in America, at a top-secret Esther Williams extravaganza in the Bahamas. The bride in a white bathing suit and the groom in a black one, they swam to a sandbar in the Bahamas and got hitched in the middle of the sparkling aquamarine ocean.

Soon after the marriage, as Brin accumulated more power, a yacht and a fleet of jets, Wojcicki became pregnant with the first of their two children, and Google invested millions in her startup, named after the 23 paired chromosomes that consist of our DNA.

But six years later, the Silicon Valley fairy tale was shattered by two public humiliations: Brin got involved with a beautiful young Englishwoman named Amanda Rosenberg, who provided a public face for Google Glass — an attachment that broke up his marriage. And the Food and Drug Administration shut down the primary function of Wojcicki’s business, calling her DNA spit vial “an unapproved medical device” and imposing stricter rules for consumer genetic testing. Her business, once so ripe with promise to tackle health issues, was curtailed to its ancestry testing division.

And here is where genetics saved the genetics entrepreneur. Her father, Stanley, fled Poland in 1949 when he was 12 with his mother when the communists took over. Her mother, Esther, was the daughter of impoverished Orthodox Russian Jews who immigrated to New York in the ‘20s.

The Wojcickis grew into Silicon Valley royalty. It’s the sort of family, Anne jokes, where “you’re only a viable fetus once you have your PH.D.” Stanley is the former chairman of the Stanford physics department and an emeritus professor. Esther, whose family just wanted her to marry a nice