Single Chinese facility has more DNA sequencing power than the entire USA. | Hacker News Reader

Single Chinese facility has more DNA sequencing power than the entire USA.

economist.com

39 pointsphreeza25 comments

The headline is almost certainly inaccurate. I'm fairly certain that Baylor, the Broad Institute, and Wash U (doing the Thousand Genomes Project) have more than 120 next-gen sequencers among them. This is not to mention the dozens of other medical centers with next-gen machines.

Perhaps it is true that this Chinese facility will have more Illumina-brand sequencers than have been sold in the US.

Edit: Here is just a taste of evidence to support my assertion: Illumina just sold 51 new machines to the Broad -- http://investor.illumina.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=121127&p=ir... I'm beginning to wonder about the fact-checking...

The author conveniently inserted a "so it is claimed" there, which probably means you are right.

Hopefully, China is going to contribute a lot to basic research in the next decade. Shipping cheap junk to the US isn't nearly has beneficial as doing hard science, along with R&D. If they pull it off, we'll look back in the year 2020 and laugh at how little we knew.

Well, R&D is certainly extremely important but extremely difficult to justify with the short focus of the modern corporate world (e.g. "What, you want me to spend billions and in the end it may not even produce anything? How is that increasing share holder value?").

I also don't think you realize just how badly you're addicted to this cheap junk.

I am quite happy with cheap stuff. If you'd rather pay more, I can act as a man in the middle. Just send me an email and we can set something up.

Don't read this as a ding in some way on biotechnology in the US.

The machines were made in the US, in San Diego, CA and Hayward, CA http://www.illumina.com/company/locations.ilmn

China is just buying a bunch of them, but quantity is not a substitute for quality.

The most interesting part of the article: "Part of the reason for building his newest sequencing centre in Hong Kong is to reassure researchers from other countries that the facility will operate inside a reliable legal framework."

This is why, not matter how much capital you inject, more open societies ultimately prevail wrt. innovation.

Yikes! Reddit style submission title editorializing, through convenient quoting.

"tl;dr;hca: Too long, don't read, here is the conclusion I want you to arrive at"

sorry... I didn't mean to suggest any conclusions, but rather highlight the part of the article that struck my interest.

I had a less sensationalist version, which was unfortunately >80 chars.

Also, they are planning to conduct the largest-scale of correlations between intelligence and genetics so far.

I knew there would be something to worry about, but reading the linked article, I think it's more likely they want to be assured that they can maintain a viable food supply. For example, once they have good wheat genomes, they may be able to engineer varieties of wheat that will be resistant to new strains of rust.

Also, they will be in a great position to reverse engineer everything coming out of Monsanto and other big-time GM food producers. Don't underestimate the benefits of being able to stick closely on the coat-tails of some of the World's smartest genetic engineers.

Do you have a source at all for the intelligence vs genetics study?

It's in the Economist's special report. (Maybe not in this article, but in another of the bunch.)

History has taught me enough to be worried about that.

Well what if you could give your self a brain upgrade via gene therapy? What's so bad about that? I guess many would be upset as it would go against our ideology here in America that frowns on any suggestion that intelligence has innate components.

Fun error message - "This update failed to install successfully. Please try again after reboot"

You seem to be making the rather large assumption that people who aren't intelligent are thus due to genetics. In my experience it's usually their ideology that makes them "stupid". No gene therapy is going to fix that, you'll just be putting an F1 engine in a car that spends all it's time idling.

Movies have taught me enough to be worried about that!

Gattica will happen ... in china apparently.

The title is "Gattaca" for a reason: four bases found in DNA are adenine (abbreviated A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). It's fantastic movie IMO.

Gattuca would have been an admissable typo.

History has taught you to be worried about people knowing genes (or clusters of genes) which correlate with intelligence, to various degrees?

The record of scientists in examining the links of race and intelligence is not so good. People tend to jump to conclusions even when they think they're being logical.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craniometry

So just because scientists have been wrong on a topic we should stop exploring it when newer measuring tools become available? I encourage this kind of research, just because it will probably show that there is more genetic variation between individuals than between races ;-)

I wasn't drawing the conclusion that we should not explore the question. But I do think people should wonder: With all the useful, actionable questions arising from genetic research, why are we attracted by an unseen force to the particular question of intelligence and race? Why not try to address a question more likely to help people (e.g., the genetic origin of certain diseases)? Why the fascination with this question?

I'm not talking about forbidding certain investigations, just trying to be smart about prioritizing investigations.

You say "...it will probably show that..." -- already injecting preconceived notions of the outcome into the scientific question. This is an example of why investigations into this question seem to reveal more about the investigator than the question.

If that's true, it's disappointing. I was hoping it would be used for something like identifying genetic risk factors for various diseases, or helping the pharma industry develop drug treatments that could be custom-tailored to someone's genome. Instead it looks like we're going to get navel-gazing.

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