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.
I received a similar email and was able to download my genome file a few days ago. The file is 23andMe format output by Plink. It was text even though it had a .gz suffix. I had trouble uploading the file to Promethease, but was able to get it working by changing the header to one copied from an actual 23andMe file and removing the missing (--) SNPs. Unfortunately, despite being ~125MB (~5x the size of an example 23andMe file I have) my file is missing many of the 23andMe SNPs (7948 genotypes annotated in Promethease vs. 20k+ for the 23andMe example). I have an email in to BGI requesting additional information. For example, Promethease directly supports the dbSNPAnnotated.bz2 Complete Genomics file and I was hoping to get a copy of that file for my data.
Have you had any success analyzing your results? Would anyone be interested in starting a discussion group for analyzing our BGI results?
I'm another participant. I'm still waiting for my results, but would be interested in any discussion group for analysis.