This is pretty embarrassing, frankly. Because once g3ene sequencing gets cheap, the money is not in sequencing different species, but in differential genomics on the same species.In the US genomics is friven by the hope of multibillion dollar drug discovery revenues or patents because of this idiot direct-to-consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals. In no other country do I know of so much money spent on selling products to people who are unqualified to buy them. Meantime the real (commercial and scientific) prize of individualized diagnostics and treatment is being ignored.
"“BGI has scaled up very impressively,” says Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which operates the largest academic DNA sequencing center in the United States. “But I think that absolute scale is much less important than what you do with it.”"<p>Why wouldn't those 4000 people would figure out what to do with the data? Surely without the data it's hard to even get started?
Business Week also did a profile on BGI<p><a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-07/bgis-young-chinese-scientists-will-map-any-genome" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-07/bgis-young-c...</a>