About

A small, careful tool.

Most consumer DNA platforms have grown into walled gardens — subscriptions, gamified findings, dashboards full of moving circles. Crick is an attempt at the opposite: a quiet, readable, peer-reviewed tour of what your raw data already contains.

Why it exists

If you've ever downloaded the raw text file from 23andMe or AncestryDNA, you know it's a few hundred thousand rows of rsid → genotype. On its own, it's inert. The interesting work is mapping those rsids to peer-reviewed findings — and that map is already out there in the literature. It just isn't in one calm, readable place that doesn't want anything from you.

Crick is that place.

What it isn't

• It isn't a medical test.
• It isn't a diagnostic tool.
• It isn't a way to find your ancestry.
• It isn't a replacement for genetic counselling.
• It isn't a substitute for a conversation with a doctor.

What it is

• An open-source educational tool.
• A privacy-first viewer of variants you already paid to have sequenced.
• A small library of well-replicated variant–trait associations.
• A reminder that effect sizes are usually small.

The name

Francis Crick co-discovered the structure of DNA. He spent a great deal of his later career thinking about consciousness, about how biology becomes understanding. The tool tries — modestly — to do a small bit of that work: take a file of base pairs and turn it into something a person can read.

The library

Every match lives as a YAML file in the GitHub repository. You can read, suggest changes to, or add new matches as a pull request — no TypeScript required. See the browse pages for a tour of what's in there, or jump straight into the /matches directory on GitHub.

How it's paid for

Crick charges a one-time £4.99 per run. The result is a URL you can bookmark — there is no subscription, no account to be cancelled, and nothing held back behind a premium tier. Subscription DNA platforms typically charge £100–£300 per year; we'd rather take a small one-off fee that covers compute, hosting, and Stripe's own fees, and never have to sell anything else.

We don't charge if your file fails to parse or finds zero matches: we check first, then ask. If we ever can't cover the hosting bill, we'll say so on this page.

Who built it

Crick is maintained by a small group of contributors who care about privacy, open science, and clear writing. If you'd like to help — by adding matches, fixing bugs, or just sending notes on the tone — you're welcome.