'Months ... Not Years'

Stephen Hsu at Technology Review's Information Processing blog is visiting the BGI in Shenzhen, where researchers aim to investigate IQ through a GWAS. Hsu says that, after hearing about the project, he "did a few calculations and realized that we are on the cusp of being able to find much of the genetic variance related to intelligence." He also suggests that "it's clear — on the basis of trends in cost and capacity of sequencing — that massive GWAS involving 10⁵ or 10⁶ individuals are right around the corner." Razib Khan at Gene Expression says that he "didn't anticipate the rate of change in this area" and adds that "it looks like we'll hit a genome at the cost of a month's salary for a professional person on the order of months and not years."