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发帖数: 41 | 1 BGI Hunts for Genetic Links to High IQ
The Wall Street Journal reports that China's BGI is sequencing around 2,200
samples of individuals with high IQ in order to identify genes associated
with intelligence.
The project is sequencing the genomes of people with IQs of 160 or higher.
As the WSJ notes, "the average Nobel laureate registers at around 145."
These genomes will be compared with sequences from the general population in
the hope of identifying genes linked to high IQ. The scientists expect to
have results in three months.
BGI's Zhao Bowen, who is leading the project, acknowledges that the genetics
of intelligence is a "controversial topic" in the West, but says "that's
not the case in China," where the Shenzhen government is paying for half the
project and BGI the other half.
Most of the samples have come from a project led by Robert Plomin, a
professor of behavioral genetics at King's College, London, who has
collected DNA samples from around 1,600 individuals through a US project
called the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth.
It's worth questioning whether several thousand genomes will be sufficient
to identify genes associated with a complex trait like intelligence. As the
article notes, citing height as an example, "attempts to find height-related
genes didn't yield any reliable hits until the number of DNA samples
exceeded 10,000."
However, Stephen Hsu from Michigan State University, a collaborator on the
project, tells the WSJ that the fact that the scientists are studying an
extreme phenotype — IQs over 160 — will serve as a shortcut for finding
intelligence-related genes.
Most of the participants in the study are the cognitive equivalent of people
"who are 6-foot-9-inches tall," Hsu says, making it relatively easy to
identify IQ-related genes. |
