News Articles 2006

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The Salt Lake Tribune
June 18, 2006—"Story of the Week: Sorenson bails out Medicaid with $1M."

Deseret Morning News
June 15, 2006—"Utah billionaire James Sorenson and Intermountain Healthcare are contributing the $2 million needed to fund dental care for the blind, elderly and disabled, state leaders announced Wednesday."

The Salt Lake Tribune
June 15, 2006—"Utah's richest man and the state's largest medical provider have teamed to do what the state Legislature refused to - provide dental care for 40,000 of the neediest residents."

Deseret Morning News
June 14, 2006—"Emergency dental service funding for 40,000 blind, disabled and elderly residents will be continued through $2 million in private donations to supplement federal budget cuts."

KSL 5 TV
June 14, 2006—"Salt Lake City businessman James Sorenson has come forward as the 1-million dollar donor to fund Medicaid dental coverage."

The Wall Street Journal
June 13, 2006—"War has always been a crucible for medical technology. For Sorenson Medical, a small, closely held company outside Salt Lake City, the battlefield has been a proving ground for its infusion pump."
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The New York Times
June 11, 2006—" 'People come up and ask me all the time, “How can I find out if I'm related to Oprah?” ' said Peggy Hayes, director of sales and marketing for Relative Genetics, a Salt Lake City company specializing in DNA genealogy tests. Ms. Winfrey's genetic profile, Ms. Hayes added, is confidential."

The Wall Street Journal
April 24, 2006—"Also in 2000, two American entrepreneurs with keen personal interests in genealogy, Bennett Greenspan and James LeVoy Sorenson, separately founded what have become the country's largest genealogical DNA testing laboratories. They are Mr. Greenspan's Family Tree DNA, in Houston, and Relative Genetics, a division of Sorenson Genomics LLC in Salt Lake City. Since 2000, these labs and others have tested or are testing more than 120,000 DNA samples."

“With each company, the procedure is much the same. A person orders a kit via the Web or the telephone, does a cheek swab, and mails the kit back to the test lab. The cost ranges from less than $100 to several hundred dollars, depending on the laboratory and the number of DNA markers examined. One caveat: Results can take several months to arrive.”

The Salt Lake Tribune
March 28, 2006—"Southern Utah University announced plans to rename its school of education the Beverley Taylor Sorenson College of Education after Sorenson donated another $2 million to Cedar City-based SUU.”

Deseret Morning News
March 28, 2006—"The Sorenson Legacy Foundation has donated $1 million to Southern Utah University to endow a permanent chair in the College of Education -- the first endowed chair in the university's history. The chair will be named the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Endowed Professorial Chair in Elementary Arts Education.”

Deseret Morning News
February 16, 2006—"The little dyslexic boy who grew up in a tarpaper shack in Yuba City, Calif., and was called mentally retarded by teachers is now a giant. Calling Sorenson ‘an American original,’ Abbott CEO Miles D. White said, ‘Jim would be a giant in any city.’”

The Salt Lake Tribune
February 15, 2006—"Abbott Laboratories CEO Miles White was happy for the chance to praise James LeVoy Sorenson, saying he has learned much from the Utah medical device entrepreneur over the past decades.”

“It is only the beginning for the biotechnology and biopharmaceutical industries, he says, predicting the coming decades will be ones of both huge potential and dangerous crossroads.”

“Utah has forged an important role for itself in biotech's future, he added, pointing to the state's strong research universities and to state government support for funding startups to develop and market innovations. He also lauded a growing, regionally oriented venture capital community.”

The Plain Dealer
February 12, 2006—"In parallel (to National Geographic’s Genographic Project) Mormon philanthropist James LeVoy Sorenson is trying to apply DNA advances to specific family-tree histories via his Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation in Utah, and its companion Web site ( http://smgf.org/ ). The site promises to convert individuals' genetic tests into a free DNA database that can then be used to build actual family trees based on both genetic markers and Mormon pedigree charts, while maintaining firewalls to protect privacy."

Newsweek
February 6, 2006—"Looking for relatives without your surname? You can also search within individual testing companies or in public databases like the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, funded by Mormon philanthropist James Sorenson, which has collected 60,000 DNA samples and ancestral charts over the past 41 years. “Eventually, you'll be able to query the database and find relatives you don't even know you have," says Sorenson's chief scientific officer Scott Woodward.’”

The New York Times
February 5, 2006—"More than a dozen companies, like Family Tree DNA in Houston, Relative Genetics in Salt Lake City and African Ancestry in Washington, now sell home DNA tests; the prices range from $100 to $900 each.”

USA Today
February 2, 2006—"Genetic genealogy has been pushed forward by a ‘significant increase’ in data that can be searched online, says Scott Woodward, director of the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation in Salt Lake City. That enables test-takers to compare results with people descended from the same families or ethnic groups.”

The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal Asia
February 1, 2006—"'A lot of people feel that we don't belong to a community anymore,’ says Ann Wee, an anthropologist and former associate professor at the National University of Singapore. Nationality often is no more than a passport, she says, not a badge of cultural identity. ‘People are grasping for something that's me . . . and, you know, they've got their ancestors.’”

“One explanation for the increased interest is simply that, these days, family researchers can accomplish far more, with much less effort, than in the past. With DNA-testing kits being sold by U.S. companies like Relative Genetics Inc. and Genealogy by Genetics Ltd. for as little as $100, DNA-based genealogy is starting to take hold in the region. ‘Asia has become an emerging market for consumer-oriented DNA-testing services,’ says Doug Fogg, chief operating officer of Sorenson Genomics LLC, which owns Relative Genetics. His company is expanding in Asia, where it has sold more than 1,500 testing kits in the past few years through affiliates.”