I am in the same position: results expected in May (2013), status page now says July. I sent them an email in August but had no reply. As a non-American I don’t have a GRE or SAT, but when I volunteered I just listed my educational record and career and waited to see what they said. I am wondering what their actual criteria for inclusion are, defined by who they have actually included.
Have any of their participants, on LW or elsewhere, received their data? Or is this whole thing just a ploy to get free DNA samples from smart Westerners in order to, I dunno, craft a deadly virus that only smart Westerners will succumb to? (Joke.)
Have any of their participants, on LW or elsewhere, received their data?
Someone recently asked BGI Cognitive Genomics and received the following response (NB: most of that linked thread is about commercial sequencing using BGI’s lab, not about the BGI Cognitive Genomics study):
Whole genome sequencing is complete, but proper postprocessing of the data is taking longer than we had anticipated.
More precisely, I inspected the files we could have returned in June, and found that they did not distinguish between high-confidence reference genome matches and no-calls. This is a common trait of research pipelines handling WGS data, but it would have made for highly incomplete reports from third-party personal genomics tools. We are currently working on fixing this, but I cannot yet give a reliable ETA (at this point, “July” is a placeholder for “I don’t know yet”).
The website will be updated as soon as I do have a reliable ETA, and you will receive an email when your data is about to be available for download.
I’m often asked about the status of the BGI cognitive genomics project. [...] While I cannot give a comprehensive update, I can state that
Volunteers who qualified for the study via cog-genomics.org and returned their samples by approximately September 2012 have all been sequenced on the Illumina platform, and will receive updates on the status of their genomic data relatively soon.
The relationship between BGI and Illumina has deteriorated since the acquisition of Complete Genomics by the former, which was vigorously opposed (ostensibly on national security grounds, believe it or not) by the latter. Our project has not escaped collateral impact from this development.
USA resident here, I submitted my sample in April 2013 and have not received data. The status page indicates they are still sequencing my genome. I emailed them twice to inquire on the timeframe for completion to no avail.
I inspected the files we could have returned in early summer, and found that they did not distinguish between high-probability reference genome matches and low-certainty sites. While this is fine for some research purposes, it would have resulted in nearly useless reports from third-party tools. We’re currently working on fixing this problem, but we can’t yet give a precise ETA (the website’s mention of “July” has, sadly, become a placeholder for “I don’t know yet”).
We will update the website and send you another email when we are ready.
I believe some other people have received the same. When I log in to their website and look at my status page, it says:
We’re pleased to report that sequencing has completed. We are now extracting high-probability genotype calls from the raw data, and will send you an email when the process is complete. (This is taking longer than we anticipated; apologies for the delay.)
I am in the same position: results expected in May (2013), status page now says July. I sent them an email in August but had no reply. As a non-American I don’t have a GRE or SAT, but when I volunteered I just listed my educational record and career and waited to see what they said. I am wondering what their actual criteria for inclusion are, defined by who they have actually included.
Have any of their participants, on LW or elsewhere, received their data? Or is this whole thing just a ploy to get free DNA samples from smart Westerners in order to, I dunno, craft a deadly virus that only smart Westerners will succumb to? (Joke.)
Someone recently asked BGI Cognitive Genomics and received the following response (NB: most of that linked thread is about commercial sequencing using BGI’s lab, not about the BGI Cognitive Genomics study):
Earlier, on August 18, Steve Hsu wrote:
USA resident here, I submitted my sample in April 2013 and have not received data. The status page indicates they are still sequencing my genome. I emailed them twice to inquire on the timeframe for completion to no avail.
I had a reply from them in October 2013, saying:
I believe some other people have received the same. When I log in to their website and look at my status page, it says: