Slashdot Mirror
Genome Researchers Wants Your Genes
An anonymous reader writes "The Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) is looking for smart volunteers to donate their genes for analysis. They are seeking subjects with high intelligence; you can only qualify if you got a high score in SAT/ACT/GRE or got awards in competitions like Math/Physics Olympiads or TopCoder. They're also launching a drive to recruit US participants. Their first stop (PDF) appears to have been Google, which has run into trouble with the Chinese government. Also worth noting: BGI is registered in China as an 'Institutional Organization,' which by law requires it to report to a supervising governmental office or agency."
Those with a 33 (like me) need not apply, I guess.
After World War 2 people were appalled to find out that the Nazi government were building up files of peoples measurements of faces and other such measurements to show / prove their master race theory. Isn't having DNA taken the exact same thing? There should be outrage over this kind of thing and where it could possibly lead mankind.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
It's got to be super-soldiers.
I'm a dysthymic underachiever. Am I perchance needed out there?
Anyone smart enough to qualify should be smart enough to hold out for a better offer. :|
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
My great aunt has given her body to science so people will learn as to why she became that old. I would like to do the same thing, but be sure that not some Monsanto makes a shitload of money from it by patenting the shit out of my dead body.
I would realy like it to be some sort of GPL where findings are actually intended for the general public.
Does anybody have any experience with such a thing?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
They want our brains?
zOMG zombies!
Many people are afraid of getting genetically tested. They fear that they will be denied health-insurance if the insurance-companies find out. Also, when applying for a health-insurance you have to sign that you have no knowledge about illnesses and that you will inform them if you get any. So, unless privacy gets better I see no reason to share genetic information. There is also the threat of law-enforcement using more and more health-data for their genetic archives when they are investigating things. And there has been cases where replicated DNA has ended up on crime-scenes. There should be some specific rights tied to genes. It is in the interest of science that we build a database, but there are so many threats in the horizon that it would be stupid for people to participate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the fact that they are limiting their selection to certain standardized test scores says a lot about the kind of society these people wouldn't mind creating.
No way, I just bought these!
From brutal experience I can attest to the fact that most people on Slashdot, save myself, are not that smart. ;)
GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
From the ad it looks like they are looking at a very narrow definition of intelligence, that is the ability to perform on standardized exams or a PhD in Math, Physics, EE, or theoretical computer science from a "top" U.S. university. Not to be China bashing, but I think China is over emphasizing rote memorization or test taking ability to the exclusion of developing other, more creative forms of intelligence. I think China is in search of the SAT-taking gene, not the smart gene.
I wants subject verb agreement.
Lin Yutang once wrote that if you gave leaders a good meal and a comedy show, they wouldn't get into wars.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Since the researchers are in China...what about DNA piracy? Like creating your clone without you knowing it (assuming they have the capability).
I'm glad someone does, none of the girls I've asked have wanted them...
HeLa cells can multiply ad infitum, unlike any other kind ... but they're not Henrieta's native cells, but cancer-derived cells (as far as wikipedia tells). So, one has to understand that your casual cells have some kind of inbuilt replication limit.
One French MD (sorry, can't remember his name; was an ex nobel Prize winne for some unrelated discovery) hypothecised that cancer is basically those casual cells having reached their mitosis limit; elaborating on that, he suspected that one drug preventing cell mitosis (which used to be routinely administered to children, until its ban around year 2000 under the pretense that it caused harmful effects on rats ... mind you, no side effects in humans where ever found despites its use for the last 40+ years; last time I checked, it was still legal in Japan) was effective at preventing cancer, so he advised routine injection of it (once every 5 years or so), in order to curb down the cell mitosis rate.
His medical theory was flagged as absurd (without anything even remotely ressembling a debunking), and his MD licence revoked.
But I can't help thinking that this is linked to both the economic profitability of Cancer management & the Malthusian dogma saying that Earth is either close to overpopulation of already in the middle of it : you hence badly need, in that view, plenty of people that die from Cancer, for fear that they'll otherwise continue to age slowly.
As a concluding remark, one can see nowerdays an explosion of cancer rates in children (previously scarcely heard of).
What? You want my genes so you can patent them and start charing me a monthly fee, to live?
Screw you!!!!!
Where's a provocative, definitive Captain Picard lecture when you need one?
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Horrid association with Nazi etc.
Eugenics is practiced daily in animal and plant breeding.
Perhaps protest demonstrations should be set up outside your local horse race track, and farmers market.
And don't tell me people don't look to procreate with the hottest looking, smartest woman they can score.
If you like unattractive dumb chicks then you have the rights to criticize.
Anyone remembers Gattaca?
Lets open the History book for a while :
Back at a time where people did not travel as often as today, and more importantly, back when their food was not FDA-approved shit (my favourite quotation from them : "it is a scientific fallacy to say that food intake could have any relation whatsoever with health", that is, it is equivalent, health-wise, to eat rotten meat & dirt, or to eat nice salads & legumes), scientists did a survey of the life span of people.
What they found is that pockets of long-lived people (in the 120s) consume very healthy food, and mostly live either near the ocean or in mountains. Recipe for longevity : uncontamined (think mercury poisonning) seafood, spices (think essential oils' therapeutic properties, ie. Medline's database), \omega3-6 rich oils, nuts, organic legumes.
Granting longevity to luck is about the same thing as granting selflessness to politicians.
Perhaps they might be able to find the gene for severe paranoia!
writing titles in lolspeak
So what you're saying is that the tea party argument is identical to the one advanced by the Nazis? Making Tea Partiers and similar right-wing movements the American equivalent of Nazis?
Niiice.... I wonder who the equivalent of Hitler would be then? Bachmann?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Love this number game
11 sephira + 22 cineroth = 33, qabbalistic eye in the $1 bill, either masonic or jewish
2^2*3^3's better
--
Satyam Eva Jayate
P.S. for our Chinese friends (hey, they buy all of our fake I.O.Us, and made Buddhism spread over the western world) : please don't forget the wisdom part of the brain, i.e mirror neurons ratio, or empathy ability ... but that's only if you want to craft the übermensch.
I'm not a shill or anything, but for those interested in this type of thing you should have a look at 23andMe.
I joined and was very surprised to find that I was carrying a gene for cystic fibrosis (about 1 in 25 white people carries this). So if I have kids with someone else carrying this gene, we'd have a 1 in 4 chance of having a kid with CF. My current girlfriend doesn't have a CF gene but carries a haemachromatosis gene!
As well as these, there have other mutations that are associated with a different risk. For instance I have a 12% lifetime risk of Alzheimer's compared to 7.2% for the average person. Importantly for Slashdotters, you can download the raw data as use it in other sites or software. Then there's the ancestry info and relative finder which is quite interesting. It's strange to think how many hundreds of 5th cousins we all have!
I'm smart enough to ask if there is any money in it, first.
If there isn't, or it isn't enough, they can look elsewhere for synapses to clone, or synapse-patterns to build their androids around.
My highest acheivement abilities go to the highest bidder only. I didn't just fall off some Bush-era Pentagon procurement-truck.
I'm probably one of the most creative and imaginative persons on the planet, when it comes to reasoning and thinking, which I think defines true intelligence. IQs and SATs are weakly related to intelligence, but they are also heavily influenced by social status, upbrining, financial situations, and conformance to the artificial and arbitrary rules of society. I was heavily influence by upbrining, yet my mathematics SAT scores were nearly perfect, although my verbal wasn't stellar. So, my point is that IQs, SATs, and awards do not measure intelligence. In fact, as far as I am aware, we don't yet have a test that actually measures actual intelligence, in terms of being able to solve problems never seen before.
A couple of generations ago, eugenics got a bad name by taking things too far under the Nazi's.
Social liberalism experiments of breading a permanent underclass of welfare recipients should get just as bad a rap.
Unless you love the smell of barbarians burning your civilization.
If they flip the Math and Verbal requirements, would you qualify? Are others in my group?
It seems like they are specifically excluding our type. I'm just under for all the math qualifications and over for the verbal qualifications. My ACT was too long ago (late 80's) to remember so I might qualify there. I stopped at the master's level in theoretical computer science.
tho whom mod this funny, your are stupid and your mother has rectal cancer.
wise man
warning pointless sig
I mean isn't this where this is headed?
Actually, as long as they're doing this, does anyone know if the volunteers get a copy of the sequence? Even for The forseeable future, a full sequencing of your DNA would cost thousands(?) of dollars. Might be worth it! (I wonder if I qualify).
I also wonder if they're trying to obtain the DNA of some very smart people, dead or alive. For example the DNA from Einstein's brain which is preserved somewhere or perhaps Feynman (if they can find any samples, maybe on his bongo drums). My personal favorite would be the indian mathematician who coming from an Indian village around 1900, taught himself math from books and sent a letter (I think) to the chair of mathematics at Oxford who immediately had him come to England (where he died from the bad food! ducks.)
Anyway, sounds like someone could make a comedy out of this; there's a mix up and a supposed genius is introduced to the world (sort of like the Peter Seller's film where he plays "Chauncey Gardner", sorry forget the name of the film).
Read "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" (http://books.google.com/books?id=LBBhikJpLjwC&lpg=PP1&dq=henrietta%20lacks&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false) to find out why you should not necessarily volunteer your genetic material. You may save the world... but will you be remembered?
Banks can't cause hyperinflation, unless you're suggesting that the Germans allowed their banks to print money. You should leave that part out of your rant.
I suppose it shouldn't come as any surprise that you didn't check any of the facts you claim to desire; they're all already available, but you aren't looking because you don't really want to hear them.
to avoid taking those tests or letting the government know how smart I am (or am not).
=)
Be seeing you...
The U.S. put a man on the moon, Americans do not constitute a race (nor do "white people" for that matter).
.8% of the German population. By comparison, Native Americans make up .9% of the population of the United States. Individual Jews may have held some important positions, but even if those individuals made poor decisions, that hardly makes all Jews "guilty".
Hyperinflation in Germany was caused by money being printed by the government in order to cover war reparations. The government made the decisions, and if you want to point to single individual it would be Wilhelm Cuno.
In January 1933, Jews made up about
Want someone to blame for the collapse of the Deutsches Reich? Try Britain, France and the U.S. Congress.
To head off accusations, I'm an atheist of Irish Catholic, German, and French descent.
let me say: You need to work on your subject/verb agreement. "researchers wants"?
While I qualify, I don't think I'll participate. Thanks but no thanks.
and I didn't speak out because I was not a genius.
This is contentious. Do they mean maths/science smart? Or like art/abstract smart. Because it seems you can have different kinds of intelligence. For instance, someone could be a mathematician and be terrible in other subjects that involve different kinds of thought. I think it would be more useful if they got people who were accomplished writers, artists, musicians etc. and mapped their DNA as well, rather than just focussing on one particular kind of intelligence (scientific/analytical intelligence).
"Genome researchers wants" our genes..? I think maybe our genes are belong to them already...
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Reading the bios of the Cognitive Genomics team, I laughed.
Kim Jong Il gets both and still wants to nuke.
to China obviously ISN'T all that smart. You have disqualified yourself. Think about it: The largest communist country in the world doing bioengineering research on our genes. What could possibly go wrong for us?
Just me then.
Who cares what they want it for? An organization that reports to a brutal and oppressive government is asking for intelligent volunteers. Does it really matter if our DNA would be used for research or something else? The gall of doing what they did to Google then asking their employees for DNA is mildly shocking. When you consider what they've done to Democracy activists and Tibetans, for them to ask anyone of conscience is even more ridiculous.
I want my talking monkey!
This is the first step.
Second is altering monkeys vocal capabilities.
Oh sure, they infringe copyrights and duplicate everything from world famous monuments to clothes, but you can trust them with your genes.
Just what we need clones or offspring based upon the spliced DNA.
Give them a sample of my genes so they can find and patent the unique genetic variation that makes me impervious to damage, which would then allow them to make billions curing the worlds various illnesses? I think not.
So... Bread and circuses is good enough for the emperor too.
They can't have my genes. I'm wearing them! O wait... guess I'm not a candidate, anyways.
Am I the only one whose blood runs cold when this is brought up? Seems to be a recurrent meme - find the best genes, breed better humans. The problem comes when you try and dispose of the others..
Chicoms need the information to create a race of test high-scorers incapable of innovation.
Help China? They can suck my dick.
Oh wait...
Of course. Develop a disease or weapon that only effects caucasians. The "high IQ" thing is irrelevant to their actual purpose.
Hate to say it but it's going to happen. No, I don't have a solution.