I've just watched this talk about Genetics and Intelligence by Steve Hsu1, a theoretical physicist and Scientific Advisor to the Cognitive Genomics Lab of BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute), probably the leading genomics research center in the world.
Apparently, the main reason he gave this talk was to recruit volunteers for a study from the Cognitive Genomics Lab with the goal of investigating the genetics of human cognition.
From their homepage:
We currently seek participants with high cognitive ability. You can qualify for the study if you have obtained a high SAT/ACT/GRE score, or have performed well in academic competitions such as the Math, Physics, or Informatics Olympiads, the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, TopCoder, etc.
Automatic qualifying criteria include:
- An SAT score of at least 760V/800M post-recentering or 700V/780M pre-recentering; ACT score of 35-36; or GRE score of at least 700V/800Q.
- A PhD from a top US program in physics, math, EE, or theoretical computer science.
- Honorable mention or better in the Putnam competition.
If you qualify as a participant, we may send you a DNA saliva kit. After you return this kit, we will genotype your DNA, and the data will eventually be available to you on this website, in a format compatible with many 3rd party interpretational tools.
I guess there are quite a few Lesswrongers smart enough to qualify for this study. If you want to advance Science and get genotyped for free check out their website for further information.
1: Steve Hsu has an awesome blog called "Information Processing". He writes about the genetics of intelligence, economics, psychometry, career advice for geeks, physics, etc.
Actually, they will not sequence your genome - they will genotype you. It's actually quite a difference and I would recommend changing the title of this post. So what they do is use a so called "SNP chip" to test your genotype at a large number (hundreds of thousands) of positions known to be polymorphic in the human population (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNP_genotyping). This is the same technology currently used by personal genomics companies such as 23andMe, and it's not particularly expensive.
Sequencing a genome is done by totally different technologies, and can potentially determine your entire genome sequence (whereas in the genotyping case you are restricted to the particular loci that were included on the chip). It it also still considerably more expensive.
I signed up for this back in March 2012, sent in my spit in September, and according to an email I got today they're actually sequencing my full genome. So it turns out the original title was correct (at least in my case).