It’s not just talk. The company has hired Richard Scheller, who led drug discovery at biotech icon Genentech for 14 years before announcing he would retire in December, and who has won some of science’s top awards, including the Lasker Prize, often referred to as “America’s Nobel,” and the Kavli Prize.

“I wanted a new challenge, I wanted a new area of science to learn more about, I wanted to see if we could really take advantage of the full potential of the human genome and thought that this is the best place to do that,” Scheller says. He will start next month with the title of Chief Scientific Officer and head of therapeutics, and could eventually have a staff of dozens.

The move is a big one for 23andMe, because it will allow it to capture a much greater proportion of the economic value its genetic databases could create. Consider this: doubling the 800,000 genetic test kits it has sold to date would bring in $79 million. Sources have told me that a recent collaboration with Genentech, which is now a unit of Roche, on Parkinson’s research could generate $60 million in total. But a medicine in clinical trials can easily be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and a marketed drug can be worth billions.

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