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Results of study genetics of super-genius will be ready in two months time

Thursday, March 7, 2013 19:56

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From NextBigFuture.com

A 20-year-old wunderkind named Zhao Bowen has embarked on a challenging and potentially controversial quest: uncovering the genetics of intelligence. Mr. Zhao is a high-school dropout who has been described as China's Bill Gates. He oversees the cognitive genomics lab at BGI (Beijing Genomics Institute), a private company that is partly funded by the Chinese government.

At the Hong Kong facility, more than 100 powerful gene-sequencing machines are deciphering about 2,200 DNA samples, reading off their 3.2 billion chemical base pairs one letter at a time. These are no ordinary DNA samples. Most come from some of America's brightest people—extreme outliers in the intelligence sweepstakes.

The majority of the DNA samples come from people with IQs of 160 or higher. By comparison, average IQ in any population is set at 100. The average Nobel laureate registers at around 145. Only one in every 30,000 people is as smart as most of the participants in the Hong Kong project—and finding them was a quest of its own.

The genetic intelligence project has been in progress for three years.

The plan, to compare the genomes of geniuses and people of ordinary intelligence, is scientifically risky (it’s likely that thousands of genes are involved) and somewhat controversial. For those reasons it would be very hard to find the $15 or $20 million needed to carry out the project in the West. “Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t,” Plomin says. “But BGI is doing it basically for free.”

Today only about 10 percent of BGI’s revenue comes from government projects—and that’s largely from local municipalities, not from Beijing. The rest is a mix of grants, some anonymous donations, and fees from clients, including as little as $3,000 to $4,000 to sequence a human genome.