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Beijing Genomics Institute

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Genomics_Institute
Beijing Genomics Institute
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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BGI

A sequencing room at BGI Hong Kong

Industry Genome sequencing
Founded September 9, 1999 (Beijing)
Headquarters Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
Number of Shenzhen, Hong Kong,
locations Wuhan, Hangzhou, Beijing,

1
 China;
Boston, USA;
Copenhagen, Denmark
Area served Worldwide
Yang Huanming (Chairman)
Key people Wang Jian (President)
Wang Jun (CEO & Director)
BGI China (Mainland)
BGI Asia Pacific
BGI Americas (North and
Divisions
South America)
BGI Europe (Europe and
Africa)
Subsidiaries List of subsidiaries:[show]
www.bgi-international.com
Website
www.genomics.cn
BGI (Chinese: 华大基因; pinyin: Huádà Jīyīn), known as the Beijing Genomics
Institute prior to 2008, is one of the world's premier genome sequencing centers,
headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China.[1]

Contents

• 1 History
• 2 Key achievements
• 3 Current research projects
o 3.1 Human genetics
 3.1.1 Yan Huang Project
 3.1.2 The 1000 genomes project
 3.1.3 Diabetes-associated Genes and Variations Study
(LUCAMP) Cancer Genome Project
 3.1.4 Cognitive Research Lab
o 3.2 Animals and plants
 3.2.1 1,000 Plant and Animal Reference Project
 3.2.2 Three Extreme-Environment Animal Genomes Project
 3.2.3 International Big Cats Genome Project
 3.2.4 Symbiont Genome Project
o 3.3 Microorganisms
 3.3.1 Ten Thousand Microbial Genomes Project
• 4 Bioinformatics technology
• 5 See also
• 6 References

2
 • 7 External links

History
Wang Jian, Yu Jun, Yang Huanming and Liu Siqi created BGI in November 1999[2]
in Beijing, China as a non-governmental independent research institute in order to
participate in the Human Genome Project as China's representative.[3][4] After the
project was completed, funding dried up. So BGI moved to Hangzhou in exchange
for funding from the Hangzhou Municipal Government.
In 2002, BGI sequenced the rice genome which was a cover story in the journal
Science. In 2003 BGI decoded the SARS virus genome and created a kit for
detection of the virus. In 2003, BGI Hangzhou and the Zhejiang University founded
a new research institute, the James D. Watson Institute of Genome Sciences,
Zhejiang University. The Watson Institute was intended to become a major center
for research and education in East Asia modelled after the Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory in the US.
In 2007 BGI’s headquarters relocated to Shenzhen as "the first citizen-managed,
non-profit research institution in China". Yu Jun left BGI at this time purportedly
selling his stake to the other 3 founders for a nominal sum.[2] In 2008, BGI-
Shenzhen was officially recognized as a state agency.[5] In 2008, BGI published the
first human genome of an Asian individual.[3][6]
In 2010 BGI Shenzhen was certified as meeting the requirements of ISO9001:2008
standard for the design and provision of high-throughput sequencing services,[7] The
same year BGI bought 128 sequencing machines and claimed to be the world's
largest genome center.[3]
In 2010 it was reported that BGI would receive US$1.5 billion in “collaborative
funds” over the next 10 years from the China Development Bank.[8][9] In 2010, BGI
Americas was established with its main office in Cambridge, Massachusetts[10] and
BGI Europe was established in Copenhagen.[11]
In 2011 BGI reported it employed 4,000 scientists and technicians.[1] BGI did the
genome sequencing for the deadly 2011 Germany E. coli O104:H4 outbreak in three
days under open licence.[12]
In 2013 BGI reported it had relationships with 17 out of the top 20 global
pharmaceutical companies[10][13] and advertised that it provided commercial science,
health, agricultural, and informatics services to global pharmaceutical companies.[14]
That year it bought Complete Genomics of Mountain View, California, a major
supplier of DNA sequencing technology, for US$118 million.[12]
The institute has described itself as partly private and partly public, receiving funds
both from private investors and the Chinese government. The laboratory was also
the Bioinformatics Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Key achievements

• First to de novo sequence and assemble mammalian[15] and human genomes

with short-read sequencing (so-called "next generation sequencing")[16]

3
• Sequenced the first ancient human’s genome[17]
• Sequenced the first diploid genome of an Asian individual,[18] as part of the
Yan Huang project
• Initiated building a sequence map of the human pan-genome, estimated to
contain 19-40 million bases not in the human reference genome[19][20]
• Contributed 10% of sequence information for the International HapMap
Project
• BGI's first project was contributing 1% of the Human Genome Project’s
reference genome and was the only institute in the developing world to
contribute
• Produced proof-of-principle study for sequencing the microbiome of the
human digestive system, an estimated 150 times larger than the human
genome[21][22]
• Key sequencing center in the 1000 Genomes Project
• First Chinese institution to sequence the Severe acute respiratory syndrome
(SARS) virus, just hours after the first sequencing of the virus by
Canadians[23]
• Key player in the analysis of the 2011 E. coli O104:H4 outbreak[24]
• Sequenced 40 domesticated and wild silkworms, identifying 354 genes likely
important in domestication.[25]
• Sequenced the first giant panda genome,[15] equal in size to the human
genome, in less than 8 months[26] Sequencing revealed that the giant panda,
Ailuropoda melanoleuca, has a frameshift mutation in a gene involved in
sensing savory flavors, T1R1. The mutation might be the genetic reason why
the panda prefers bamboo over meat. However, the panda also lacks genes
expected for bamboo digestion, so its microbiome might play a key role in
metabolizing its main source of food.[15]
• Key player in the Sino-British Chicken Genome Project
• As of 2010, plant genomes sequenced include rice, cucumber, soybean, and
Sorghum. Animal genomes sequenced include silkworm, honey bee, water
flea, lizard, and giant panda. An additional 40 animal and plant species and
over 1000 bacteria had also been sequenced.[4][25][27]
• Nature in 2010 ranked BGI Shenzhen as the fourth among the ten top
institutions in China with all the others being universities and the Chinese
Academy of Sciences. The ranking was based on articles in Nature research
journals. There were similar results for other tops journals.[28]
• In 2014, BGI was reported to be producing 500 cloned pigs a year to test
new medicines.[29]

4
Current research projects
Human genetics
Yan Huang Project
Started in 2007 and named after two Emperors believed to have founded China’s
dominant ethnic group,[30] BGI planned in this project, to sequence at least 100
Chinese individuals to produce a high-resolution map of Chinese genetic
polymorphisms.[31][32] The first genome data was published in October 2007.[33] An
anonymous Chinese billionaire donated $10 million RMB (about US$1.4 million)
to the project and his genome was sequenced at the beginning of the project.[31][32]
The 1000 genomes project
Main article: 1000 Genomes Project
Diabetes-associated Genes and Variations Study (LUCAMP) Cancer
Genome Project
Nine Danish universities and institutes will collaborate with BGI in this targeted
resequencing project.
BGI explores associated genome and gene variation in complexes diseases in large-
scale studies primarily using two methods: PCR-based resequencing of candidate
genes and exon-capture-based whole exome resequencing.
Cognitive Research Lab
The Cognitive Research Lab at BGI is working with Stephen Hsu on a project to
discover the genetic basis of human intelligence.[34]
Animals and plants
1,000 Plant and Animal Reference Project
BGI is leading an international collaboration to sequence 1,000 plants and animals
of economic and scientific import within two years. It has pledged an initial
US$100 million to start the program.[35]
BGI has already sequenced genomes of 20 species of animals and 9 species of
plants—sometimes for multiple individuals, such as 40 silkworms 19713493, and
has an equal number underway as of March 2010.
Three Extreme-Environment Animal Genomes Project
In 2009 BGI-Shenzhen announced the launch of three genome projects that focus
on animals living in extreme environments. The three selected genomes are those of
two polar animals: the polar bear and emperor penguin, and one altiplano animal:
the Tibetan antelope.[36]
International Big Cats Genome Project
In 2010, BGI, Beijing University, Heilongjiang Manchurian tiger forestry zoo,
Kunming Institute of Zoology, San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research
in California, and others announced they would sequence the Amur tiger, South

5
China tiger, Bengal tiger, Asiatic lion, African lion, clouded leopard, snow leopard,
and other felines. BGI would also sequence the genomes and epigenoms of a liger
and tigon. Since the two reciprocal hybrids have different phenotypes, despite being
genetically identical, it was expected that the epigenome might reveal the basis of
such differences.[37] The project aim was to significantly advance conservation
research and was auspiciously announced for the Chinese year of the Tiger.[38]
Results were reported in 2013 for the genomes of the Anur tiger, the white Bengal
tiger, African lion, white African lion and snow leopard.[39]
Symbiont Genome Project
A jointly funded project announced March 19, 2010, BGI will collaborate with
Sidney K. Pierce of University of South Florida and Charles Delwiche of the
University of Maryland at College Park to sequence the genomes of the sea slug,
Elysia chlorotica, and its algal food Vaucheria litorea. The sea slug uses genes from
the algae to synthesize chlorophyll, the first interspecies of gene transfer discovered.
Sequencing their genomes could elucidate the mechanism of that transfer.[40]
Microorganisms
Ten Thousand Microbial Genomes Project
This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (February 2016)
http://english.cas.cn/Ne/CASE/200908/t20090805_44705.shtml

Bioinformatics technology
De novo sequencing requires aligning billions of short strings of DNA sequence
into a full genome, itself three billion base pairs long for humans.
BGI’s computational biologists developed the first successful algorithm, based on
graph theory, for aligning billions of 25 to 75-base pair strings produced by next-
generation sequencers, specifically Illumina’s Genome Analyzer, during de novo
sequencing. The algorithm, called SOAPdenovo, can assemble a genome in two
days[20] and has been used to sequence an array of plant and animal genomes.
BGI’s 500-node supercomputer processes 10 terabytes of raw sequencing data
every 24 hours from its current 30 or so Genome Analyzers from Illumina. The
annual budget for the computer center is US$9 million.[41]
SOAPdenovo is part of "Short Oligonucleotide Analysis Package" (SOAP), a suite
of tools developed by BGI for de novo assembly of human-sized genomes,
alignment, SNP detection, resequencing, indel finding, and structural variation
analysis. Built for the Illumina sequencers' short reads, SOAPdenovo has been used
to assemble multiple human genomes[16][17][18] (identifying an eight kilobase
insertion not detected by mapping to the human reference genome[42]) and animals,
like the giant panda.[15]

See also
 Chinese National Human Gen
http://english.big.cas.cn/

6
https://next.ft.com/content/9c2407f4-b5d9-11e4-a577-00144feab7de
Chinese innovation: BGI’s code for success

DNA company’s fortunes hint at a new model for nation’s tech industry

February 17, 2015

by: Henny Sender

In 2010, Bill Gates visited an unremarkable building in an industrial estate on the

outskirts of Shenzhen, China. With row after row of high-tech machinery humming
inside, the place could easily be mistaken for an anonymous data warehouse.
But Mr Gates and Ray Yip, head of the Gates Foundation’s China operation, saw
something else that day. As they toured the BGI headquarters, the two men were
stunned by the ambition of the scientists working at the biotech company. Inside,
more than 150 state of the art genetic sequencing machines were analysing the
equivalent of thousands of human genomes a day.
The company is working towards a goal of building a huge library based on the
DNA of many millions of people. BGI executives see this not as the end-game, but
as the springboard for new drug discoveries, advanced genetic research and a
transformation of public health policy.
“We were taken aback,” Mr Yip recalls. “We never thought we would find such an
out-of-the-box approach. They are in their own league — open and liberal.”
Since the initial visit, Gates Foundation staffers have partnered BGI on various
genetic research projects, from sequencing the rice genome to collaborating on the
cancer genome project. The Gates Foundation has also joined a long list of groups
providing funds to BGI — a list that also included Sequoia Capital, the Silicon
Valley venture capital firm. “Most people only see them as a service provider for
DNA analysis,” says a BGI investor. “It is the database they are building that will
make them formidable.”
BGI’s backers say the company symbolises a new type of Chinese tech company.
Chinese companies have long been regarded as copycats — if not outright thieves
— when it comes to innovation and intellectual property. Westerners generally
discount intellectual property creation in China.
But BGI, along with other companies in Shenzhen, may soon change that image.
Many of its executives have been partly educated abroad and have little respect for
the established way of doing things in China. Its scientists contribute to
international journals and regularly file patents. It partners with institutions in
Europe and the US and has a record that international competitors have come to
respect.
US takeover rules a concern for China Inc: read more

7
“We represent a new model of an international Chinese organisation,” says Wang
Jun, BGI’s chief executive, a graduate of Beijing University in artificial
intelligence. “China has a legitimate shot to be a lead player on the international
stage. Our technology can change the world.”
The evolution of BGI is not a straightforward story of Chinese ascendancy, or a
victory for China’s model of state capitalism. In fact, BGI has an ambivalent
relationship with Beijing and represents a challenge to the Chinese model of
education and research.
The company, originally known as the Beijing Genomics Institute, was created
under the aegis of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. (It was one of the participants
in the Human Genome Project.) But its recent success has come despite Beijing as
much as because of it.

BGI researchers
“You can be brilliant here but you can be more brilliant in the US,” says one staffer
who has lived and worked in the US for extensive periods of time. “It’s harder to be
creative in the context of the mindset here.”
That may be an exaggeration, but the structure of China’s education system is seen
by many critics as a constraint on innovation. “The system is very incestuous,” says
one Beijing-based academic. “It is very political. You have two choices, either to
leave China and thrive or to get to the point where you don’t need Beijing’s
money.”
However, the prominence of BGI holds out hope that China can attract back the best
students who often choose to stay abroad after graduating from top US universities.
BGI decided to decamp from Beijing in 2007, choosing to set up its headquarters in
Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong. “Shenzhen is as far from Beijing
as you can get,” says one BGI investor about the move, which he saw as a move by
the company to free itself from political constraints. “You can’t be independent in
Beijing.”
Given Shenzhen’s history, this is perhaps not surprising. Shenzhen was designated a
“special economic zone” where the first experiments with capitalism took place
after Deng Xiaoping began to liberalise the Chinese economy.
Toy companies and running shoe makers built their sprawling factories there, and
workers migrated to the new city. Now, many of those factories are shuttered and

8
their operations moved to locations outside of the country where labour is cheaper,
costs lower and pollution is less of a consideration.
Shenzhen is now the technology incubator for China. Its longer experience of
capitalism and its proximity to Hong Kong have contributed to the speed of the
city’s transition. It is home to BYD, the Chinese maker of electric vehicles, Huawei
Technologies, the telecoms equipment maker, and Tencent, the internet portal.
Local government policy played a big role in the transition. Shenzhen provides
grants to promising companies and offers them cheap space, creating an ecosystem
which extends to Hong Kong. Shenzhen was originally the home of many tech
assembly businesses, so it also had a pool of people who understood the sector and
launched start-ups. Wealthy entrepreneurs then spawned a venture capital industry.
The city’s stock exchange for smaller, younger businesses — offering a contrast to
Shanghai, which prioritised the big state-owned enterprises — allowed venture
capitalists to list the companies they invested in, creating a virtuous circle that keeps
expanding. Some of the best universities also established outposts in Shenzhen.

The southern city attracts the restless and the ambitious, and the mavericks —
among them the founders of BGI. Several dropped out of university, while others
never had formal higher education because the cultural revolution interrupted their
lives. Few are members of the ruling Communist party.
“They exiled themselves to be far away from the traditional government and
scientific funding establishment,” says one investor. “And they have only been
forgiven [by the establishment] because they make China look good.”
The walls of BGI’s austere building are covered with photos of everything from
cloned pigs to Wang Jian, the company’s co-founder, on Mount Everest. Mr Wang
spent years abroad, including as a senior research fellow at the University of
Washington in Seattle. Another co-founder, Yang Huanming, also studied abroad,
receiving his PhD at the University of Copenhagen.
China has a number of advantages in the field of genomics. DNA sequencing is
more about computer power and data mining than it is about breakthroughs in

9
laboratories, investors say. Given its population of 1.35bn people, the potential
database in China is larger than anywhere else. The more extensive the database a
company has, the stronger the competitive advantage. It is also cheaper to gather
and analyse information. Moreover, BGI has about 2,000 members of staff with
PhDs, perhaps the largest concentration of any company in China, and they are
employed at a fraction of what that assemblage of brains would cost in the US.
Most people see them as a service provider for DNA analysis … But it is the
database that will make them formidable
Yet there are also potential issues that make outsiders uneasy, especially the lack of
strong privacy protection, intellectual property rights and strict protocols regarding
clinical trials. But BGI and its backers insist that it complies with best practice in
the industry, although some note that the lack of IP protection means that ideas can
be implemented more quickly.
While BGI’s roots are in China, it is seeking to become more international. In 2013,
it acquired Complete Genomics, a DNA sequencing company based in Mountain
View, California for almost $118m. That deal was consummated in the face of a
belated counter offer from Illumina, a rival of Complete Genomics currently worth
$28bn. It also overcame political opposition, marking the first time a Chinese
company successfully acquired a publicly traded US company.
BGI was the single biggest customer for Illumina, accounting for as much as 40 per
cent of its DNA sequencing machine orders, for machines that cost up to $500,000
apiece. It now accounts for less than 10 per cent of Illumina’s sales of sequencing
machines. With the purchase of Complete Genomics BGI plans to introduce a new
sequencing machine.

Other challenges lie ahead for BGI. It is an unusual company, with one foot in the
world of pure research and another seeking to develop commercial applications for
its work. Such structures were once more common in the US technology industry,
where researchers at Bell Labs and Xerox Parc were given funding and time to

10
pursue ambitious research projects. In recent years, US investors have been less
willing to subsidise large research projects that may not pay off.
Mr Wang says he understands this tension. “If we are too commercial, we lose sight
of the future,” he says. “But if we are only thinking of the future, that isn’t suitable
either.”
That dual mandate means that it is not easy to set priorities. They must be
visionaries and business strategists at the same time, balancing the demands of basic
research with more commercial undertakings such as developing diagnostic kits and
tests.
Competitors are multiplying, both at home and abroad. For big US tech companies
such as Google and Microsoft, which are already in the information business, it is
not a giant leap to genomics. While ecommerce company Alibaba is sharing its data
processing capabilities with BGI, search engine Baidu has bought a data lab,
suggesting the same dynamic may take place in China.
If we are too commercial, we lose sight of the future. But if we are only thinking of
the future, that isn’t suitable either
There have also been doubts raised about how quickly genome sequencing will be
able to produce reliable information that can be developed into products that are
useful — or affordable — to consumers. Neither BGI nor many of its competitors
are very profitable, though that matters less in China where the local government,
government-related investment funds and China Development Bank provide
financial support.
Complete Genomics put itself up for sale in the first place because it was in a weak
financial position, and with the US government reducing funding for basic research
the gap may well widen in the coming years in favour of China.
“They have grown very quickly, they have their fingers in many things,” says Mr
Yip. “They are empowered to test ideas and make mistakes. Now they have to
decide how to maintain their focus.”

Regulation: US takeover rules a concern for China Inc

Not long after BGI said it was trying to buy Complete Genomics, an op-ed appeared
in The San Jose Mercury News, a newspaper in the heart of Silicon Valley, calling
for US regulators to review the proposed transaction “with the strictest scrutiny”.
China’s goal, the piece said, was to “capture the most critical emerging technologies
with potential military or security impact”, adding that the country’s huge foreign
currency reserves would aid it in launching a “shopping spree” for US companies.
Such concerns had blocked other Chinese attempts to buy US companies, including
Cnooc’s bid for US oil group Unocal in 2005. Still, US regulators signed off on the
$118m BGI-Complete Genomics deal, having found little evidence of a national
security threat.
But US companies have become ever more willing to appeal to regulators and
politicians on nationalist grounds to stymie their commercial competitors.

11
Illumina, the better capitalised counter-bidder for Complete Genomics, hired the
lobbying arm of Glover Park Group to help its cause. Earlier in 2012, it had fended
off a bid from pharmaceutical maker Roche.
Before BGI made its bid for Complete Genomics, the company had been struggling,
cutting jobs and hiring an adviser to look for strategic alternatives.
BGI’s deep pockets could help it make future acquisitions as well. In addition to
support from a variety of venture capitalists and other investors on both sides of the
Pacific, it has $1.5bn from China Development Bank, a policy, not a commercial,
lender.
This article was amended on March 3 to reflect that BGI now accounts for less than
10 per cent of Illumina’s sales of sequencing machines

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http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/06/the-gene-factory
Letter from Shenzhen January 6, 2014 Issue
The Gene Factory

A Chinese firm’s bid to crack hunger, illness, evolution—and the genetics of

human intelligence.
By Michael Specter

he twenty-mile drive from Hong Kong International Airport to the center of

Shenzhen, in southern China, can take hours. There is customs to negotiate and a
border to cross, but they aren’t the problem; the problem is the furious pace of
commerce between the former British colony and one of the fastest-growing cities

12
in the world. Trucks, cars, vans, and buses cram the roadways, ferrying laborers of
all kinds at all times. Until the nineteen-eighties, when Deng Xiaoping designated
the area as China’s first special economic zone, Shenzhen had been a tiny fishing
village. Suddenly, eleven million people appeared, seemingly out of nowhere;
factories sprang up, often housed in hastily constructed tower blocks.

Thirty years ago, there were a few guesthouses and little else. Today, a visitor can
stay at the Four Seasons or the Ritz, shop for ten-thousand-dollar handbags at
Hermès, and move around town in a chauffeured Bentley. Yet Shenzhen has
remained a factory town. At various times, the city has served as China’s Detroit, its
garment district, and its Silicon Valley. Now, as the world’s scientists focus with
increasing intensity on transforming the genetic codes of every living creature into
information that can be used to treat and ultimately prevent disease, Shenzhen is
home to a different kind of factory: B.G.I., formerly called Beijing Genomics
Institute, the world’s largest genetic-research center. With a hundred and seventy-
eight machines to sequence the precise order of the billions of chemicals within a
molecule of DNA, B.G.I. produces at least a quarter of the world’s genomic data—
more than Harvard University, the National Institutes of Health, or any other
scientific institution.
Much of modern molecular biology and microbiology has been based on the effort
to decipher the basic code of life, which is made up of four nucleotides: adenine,
thymine, cytosine, and guanine. Specific strings of those molecules—there are three
billion pairs in the human genome—are arranged together to make genes; genes, in
turn, produce the proteins that we need to survive. Since 1995, when Craig Venter
sequenced the first bacterium, biologists have been on a crusade to catalogue the
DNA of nearly every species on earth. No group has been more aggressive in its
attempt to produce those maps than B.G.I.: the company has already processed the
genomes of fifty-seven thousand people. B.G.I. also has sequenced many strains of
rice, the cucumber, the chickpea, the giant panda, the Arabian camel, the yak, a
chicken, and forty types of silkworm. None of those endeavors are quite as odd as
they may seem. Genomic research has shown that the human activity responsible
for climate change has also caused a serious decline in the panda population.
Silkworms have played a central role in the Chinese economy for thousands of
years. B.G.I. has also sequenced the Tibetan antelope, the coronavirus responsible
for SARS, and the DNA of a four-thousand-year-old man, known as Inuk, obtained
from a tuft of his hair that was discovered in Greenland’s permafrost.
The company’s four thousand employees operate out of an eight-story former shoe
factory on the eastern edge of Shenzhen, not far from the inlet to the South China
Sea. Sequencing facilities are sterile places, and the B.G.I. operation looks more
like a call center or the back office of a bank than like the home of China’s most
important biotechnology company. There are no test tubes or vials of blood on
display, no mice or rats, or even much traditional laboratory space. Instead, there
are a series of advanced sequencing arrays, taller than refrigerators and stacked with
hard drives, churning through the carefully packaged DNA samples that arrive

13
every day from every part of the world. To preserve the chemicals needed to
process that DNA, the machines are kept in frigid rooms that few people are
permitted to enter. Racks of parkas line the corridors, where hundreds of determined
young men and women—the average age of B.G.I. employees is twenty-six—
occupy identical powder-blue cubicles, each bathed in the eerie glow of their
computer monitors.

“You creative types—it’s always something.”

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B.G.I., much like Shenzhen itself, seems to have been formed in a single instant:
September 9, 1999, at nine seconds after 9:19 A.M. (In China, even dispassionate
scientists crave auspicious beginnings.) The group got its start in Beijing, first as a
nonprofit organization and then as an affiliate of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
But as Jian Wang, the company’s president, and one of its founders, told me
recently, “We were too crazy for them’’—too independent. “We were kicked out.’’
At fifty-nine, Wang, with gently graying hair on a perfectly round head, and dressed
in an olive-drab B.G.I. camping shirt and matching pants, looks like an avuncular
Zhou Enlai. He considers B.G.I.’s expulsion from the academy to have been an
essential component of the company’s success. The founders, Wang and sixty-one-
year-old Huanming Yang, who is now the chairman, had both received advanced
training in the West. They were eager for China to play a role in the Human
Genome Project, the effort to create the blueprint needed to decode all our genes.
They tried, and failed, to persuade the Chinese government to establish a
sequencing center. So they created a company of their own, raising enough capital
to hire nearly fifty researchers and buy a few basic machines. At first, the scientists
worked out of a crowded apartment in Beijing. Their furniture consisted of the
cardboard shipping boxes that had contained their new equipment. The group was
responsible for only about one per cent of the research that went into the genome
project. In 2000, however, when Bill Clinton announced that a rough draft of the
genome had been completed, he made a point of thanking China. B.G.I. may well
have been the first organization in the country’s history to participate in an
international scientific collaboration.
“It wasn’t a big role, but it got us started,’’ Wang told me when we met in
Shenzhen, where the company established its headquarters in 2007. (It now operates
sequencing centers throughout the world. It opened a facility in Shanghai on
November 11, 2011: 11/11/11, at eleven seconds after 11:11 A.M.) Despite the
company’s limited involvement, the Human Genome Project provided the two men
access to the world’s most accomplished geneticists. Today, the list of scientists
whom B.G.I. counts as advisers reads like a Double Helix Hall of Fame: James
Watson, who, with Francis Crick, discovered the structure of DNA; Eric Lander,
one of the genome project’s leaders, and the director of the Broad Institute, of
M.I.T. and Harvard; and John Sulston, a Nobel Prize winner (as is Watson) and the
founder of one of the world’s largest genomic-research centers, Britain’s Wellcome
Trust Sanger Institute. It took more than a decade, and three billion dollars, for a
team of international experts to map the first human genome. Since then, the costs
have decreased so rapidly that B.G.I., with its relatively cheap and plentiful labor
force, can do that same work in a few days for about four thousand dollars. By the
end of next year, Wang told me, the price of sequencing a genome will fall below a
thousand dollars. Driven largely by those plummeting costs, B.G.I. intends to

15
transform DNA into a common resource, a kind of universal reference library—
freely accessible, wary scientists hope, to anyone who wants to use it.

The order of the four chemicals in each molecule of DNA determines the physical
characteristics of every living organism, and sequencing those molecules has made
it possible for scientists to begin to identify causal connections between diseases
and genes. But a sequencing machine without software is about as useful as a laptop
with no operating system. It works essentially like a molecular version of a paper
shredder, cutting up immense strings of genetic information, then spitting them out
in fragmented piles. Each string produced by a sequencing machine is referred to as
a “read,” and thousands of overlapping reads are created for every genome.
Researchers, relying on software that analyzes patterns, stitch those reads into
comprehensible units. At B.G.I., when DNA samples arrive—usually on FedEx
trucks—workers check to make sure they are packed properly in dry ice. Then they
are taken to a quality-control area, where they are prepared for analysis. Most DNA
samples sent to B.G.I. from labs around the world are processed in Hong Kong;
Shenzhen focusses on submissions and research projects from within China.

The company has bet its future on laying out the genetic codes of as many life-
forms as possible. While I was in Shenzhen, I saw a display that described B.G.I.’s
plans, which include the Million Human Genomes Project, the Million Plant and
Animal Genomes Project, and the Million Microecosystem Genomes Project. “It’s
like fishing,’’ Wang said, explaining the philosophy behind it all. “You can stick a
pole in the water and try to find the fish one at a time. But what we are doing is
drying out the ocean. Then we can count all the fish at once.’’
The company says that the data will help explain the origins and the evolution of
humanity, improve our average life span by five years, increase global food
production by ten per cent, decode half of all genetic diseases, understand the
origins of autism, and cut birth defects by fifty per cent. It’s an audacious list, but
sequencing has become an industrial process, and, as an assembly line, B.G.I. has
no peer. “In Chinese, we have a saying: Reach for the top of the sky,’’ Ming Qi, the
health division’s chief scientist, told me when we met in a small café on the top
floor of the headquarters. Qi, the founding director of the Center for Genetic and
Genomic Medicine, at Zhejiang University, was a protégé of Tan Jiazhen, who is
widely regarded as “the father of Chinese genetics.” Qi acknowledged the
company’s outsized ambitions, but said, “We want to translate all these scientific
findings into our daily lives, including our economy, industry, health, and
environment.”

16
“Well, I’ll be—we just spent all weekend planning to rob a façade.”

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B.G.I.’s finances are murky, but it makes its money in several ways. The company
provides data analysis to pharmaceutical firms, sequences genomes of individuals
for researchers, and has been hired by the American advocacy group Autism Speaks
to sequence the DNA of ten thousand people from families with children who have
some form of autism-spectrum disorder. For scientists in Denmark who are studying
the genetics of obesity and diabetes, B.G.I. has decoded the genomes of a thousand
obese people and a thousand healthy people. The company also had a central part in
the duck-genome consortium, along with colleagues from Britain and from other
Chinese institutes. (Ducks are a common host of influenza viruses, and a better
understanding of their genetics could greatly increase the pace of vaccine
development.) B.G.I. offers a popular, noninvasive test for Down syndrome that
analyzes fetal DNA circulating in the mother’s blood. The test can be performed in
the tenth week of pregnancy. (Amniocentesis, the standard diagnostic, is an invasive
procedure that cannot be carried out until at least the fifteenth week; in rare cases,

17
the needle required to remove DNA for examination causes infection or
miscarriage.)
The goals of such projects have not been challenged. But the company has also
embarked upon studies that Western scientists have trouble even discussing.
Foremost among them is the Cognitive Genomics project, an attempt to explore, in
more complex ways than ever before, the genetic basis for human intelligence.
Wang understands the ethical concerns raised by this kind of research and knows
that discussing the subject makes many people uncomfortable. But he believes the
worries are misguided. “Some words are too sensitive to say, but there has to be at
least some genetic component behind the differences people show,’’ he told me.
Wang is a mountain climber and a serious amateur photographer, and large prints of
his Himalayan landscapes are scattered throughout B.G.I.’s offices. “In the United
States and in the West, you have a certain way,’’ he continued, smiling and waving
his arms merrily. “You feel you are advanced and you are the best. Blah, blah, blah.
You follow all these rules and have all these protocols and laws and regulations.
You need somebody to change it. To blow it up. For the last five hundred years, you
have been leading the way with innovation. We are no longer interested in
following.”

I arrived in Shenzhen the day after Typhoon Usagi had shut down much of
Southeast Asia. Shops were closed, and cars inched along the sodden roads, but
B.G.I. never missed a moment’s activity, in part because many of its staff live in
dormitories not far from the main building. The company is arranged like a campus,
though not one on which people seem to roam freely. Unlike Western research
facilities, such as the National Institutes of Health, B.G.I.’s headquarters has no
easily identified guards, no place to sign in, and no noticeable security cameras.
While I was there, trying to find my way through the maze of identical cubicles that
fill the cavernous first floor, I met Gengyun Zhang, an agricultural expert who is in
charge of the company’s growing life-sciences division; he was dressed casually in
a zippered yellow sport shirt. In 2011, Zhang led a team that sequenced foxtail
millet, and B.G.I. has big plans for the esoteric grain. “You know what Chairman
Mao said about millet,’’ Zhang said. I didn’t. “‘With millet plus rifles we will
emerge victorious.’ ” (I learned later that he was referring to a speech that Mao
delivered in 1955, aimed at the U.S., called “The Chinese People Cannot Be Cowed
by the Atom Bomb.”)

Like many of the company’s leaders, Zhang, a reserved man with thin hair and deep
black eyes, was educated in the United States, earning his doctorate from the
department of plant biology and pathology at Rutgers University. He invited me to
lunch, and we ate in a small room adjacent to the main dining area. It might have
been the cafeteria at Stuyvesant High School, given the age of the workers. Except
for the sounds of hundreds of people eating, however, the room was nearly silent.
At B.G.I., there are none of the frills so common to technology firms in the West; I
saw no lava lamps, nobody wore headphones or Crocs or moved through the

18
building on a skateboard, a pogo stick, or a unicycle. When the workday ends, the
employees stand up and, many hand in hand, walk out toward the giant dormitory
next door. “It’s like ‘Friends,’ for thousands of people,’’ Wang Aizhu, a B.G.I.
press official, said. She explained that “Friends” is popular in China. (While the
living conditions are hardly extravagant, they are nowhere near as austere as those
which have been found at Foxconn, the company nearby that makes iPhones for
Apple—where, owing to many recent suicides, management has installed protective
netting around several of the buildings.)
At lunch, Zhang pushed a small pot of yogurt toward me. Until recently, the
Chinese seemed to show little interest in yogurt, or in dairy foods in general. As the
middle class grows, that situation is changing. “It’s specially developed here,’’ he
said, explaining that the millions of strains of beneficial bacteria contained in yogurt
included a combination of new probiotics. B.G.I. has several teams trying to
sequence the human microbiome, as well as those of other animals. Understanding
bacterial genomes may be as valuable to maintaining good health as learning about
the DNA we inherit from our parents.

19
Jen finally embraces “that stubborn belly fat.”

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During lunch, Zhang talked about millet. China’s one-child policy has prevented the
rapid population growth that has threatened the economic future of many of the
world’s developing countries. But cultivated land is in short supply, and in the

20
coming decades feeding the nation will require sophisticated agricultural
techniques. Archeologists believe that people began cultivating foxtail millet more
than seven thousand years ago, and that for millennia it was more common than rice
in China’s arid north. But rice, with its high yield of grain, gradually won out.
Millet is actually a grass, with thin, leafy stems that can reach six feet, higher than a
stalk of wheat. Zhang is convinced that a properly bred crop could provide an
additional source of food for humans and for livestock.
Researchers at B.G.I. recently planted a test crop not far from their headquarters.
“It’s very drought-tolerant,” Zhang told me. “This plant could be valuable in Africa,
where it will be needed even more than in China, especially with conditions of
global climate change.” The B.G.I. team mapped the location of DNA responsible
for specific traits in the plant; then the researchers bred the plants to create seeds
with the exact mixture of traits they sought. Technically, this millet is not
genetically engineered; no genes were moved around in a laboratory to breed it.
Although the company does work with engineered crops, Zhang says that B.G.I. has
attempted to avoid the controversy that comes with producing G.M.O.s. “Yes, even
in China they are out there,’’ he said, shaking his head mournfully. “It doesn’t make
sense, but there are other ways to breed crops, too.”
Another of Zhang’s projects focusses on cassava, a starchy root that is grown
principally in Asia and Africa. Five hundred million people rely on cassava as a
source of carbohydrates, but it contains few essential micronutrients. Climate
change will make cassava harder to grow, but where it does flourish it will become
more important than ever. B.G.I. has undertaken an effort to engineer nutrients into
the vegetable; that would make it an edible, healthy source of protein that can be
eaten throughout sub-Saharan Africa. The company is also working with the Gates
Foundation and the International Rice Research Institute to sequence thousands of
strains of rice. Farmers could then create crops that might withstand local
challenges, like flooding, drought, or particular pests. The United Nations predicts
that, by 2100, there will be as many as ten billion people living on the planet, and
half of them will rely on rice as a central source of nourishment. There are twenty-
four species and up to a hundred thousand varieties within those species—enough to
find plenty of useful traits. Until recently, “this research would have been
impossible,” Zhang said. “But with today’s technology I have no doubt that we can
feed the world.”

In November of 2002, a mysterious disease sickened thousands of people and killed

scores in Guangdong, China’s largest province, which includes Shenzhen and has a
population of more than a hundred million. Pandemics often originate in the
crowded provinces of southern China, pass through Hong Kong, and then spread to
the rest of the world. For weeks, the Chinese government, preoccupied with its
image abroad, its agricultural exports, and its tourist industry, said nothing. By the
time the disease—severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS—was widely
recognized, it had infected thousands of people, from Shanghai to San Francisco,
and hundreds had died. SARS was an international public-relations disaster for

21
China; if the virus had been more contagious, it would have created the new
millennium’s first grave public-health crisis. The Chinese government was
humiliated; both the health minister and the mayor of Beijing were dismissed for
mishandling the epidemic.

Nearly a decade later, in May, 2011, a rare and deadly strain of E. coli bacteria
appeared in Germany. It quickly spread to Sweden, Denmark, and other European
countries, and eventually to the United States. More than fifty people died, and
thousands got sick. China’s reaction—B.G.I.’s, really—could not have differed
more sharply from the country’s response to SARS. The company deployed its
genomic technology to determine the infectious strain and reveal the mechanisms of
infection. Once a sample of the bacteria had been deposited at a B.G.I. research
laboratory in Hong Kong, it took just three days for the team there to sequence the
bacterial genome; as the work progressed, company researchers posted details on
Twitter. The data were made public under an open license, which meant that any
research team could use the information at no cost. Many did. The episode
underscored the weaknesses of hewing to the usual scientific approach to such
medical issues: produce data, analyze it, publish it in a scientific journal, then
eventually release the information to the public. In a 2012 report on the future of
scientific collaboration, the Royal Society of Britain credited B.G.I. with an
openness that saved lives. “Within a week, two dozen reports had been filed on an
open-source site dedicated to the analysis of the strain,’’ the society wrote. “These
analyses provided crucial information about the strain’s virulence and resistance
genes—how it spreads and which antibiotics are effective against it. They produced
results in time to help contain the outbreak.”

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22
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In public appearances, B.G.I.’s chairman, Huanming Yang, never fails to stress the
collaborative nature of genetics, and American researchers praise the company for
its willingness to work with them. Indeed, many of B.G.I.’s projects are led by
Western scientists. The company routinely offers to sequence data at reduced prices,
or even for free, if researchers share the results of their work. That has helped B.G.I.
churn out many articles for prestigious journals, an important measure of success
for a relatively new company. (As sequencing becomes cheaper, however, the top
scientific publications have begun to regard such research as less worthy of special
recognition.) Nationalism, at least in a rapidly advancing field like genomics, is
increasingly regarded as a vestige of an era before Twitter and the Internet. “If by
nationalism you mean hoarding data, that just isn’t happening,’’ George Church told
me. Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, is an adviser to
B.G.I. and one of the company’s most visible proponents. “I am just glad that there
is somebody in the world who has the priorities and the money to do this—to hold
this in place while the rest of us are getting our act together.’’
B.G.I.’s sequencing data have already produced unexpected insights into human
evolution. In 2010, the company, along with a team of evolutionary biologists at the
University of California at Berkeley, compared the genomes of fifty Tibetans, all of
whom lived in villages at elevations of fourteen thousand feet or higher, with those
of forty Han Chinese who lived in Beijing. Each subject had ancestors who had
lived in the same region for at least three generations. Researchers found significant
genetic differences between the two groups. Ethnic Tibetans appear to have split off
from the Han people about three thousand years ago—an instant, in evolutionary
terms. The Tibetans’ rapid adaptation enabled them to thrive with low oxygen levels
at high altitudes. The research team discovered at least thirty genes with mutations
that had become more prevalent in Tibetans than in Han Chinese. Nearly half of
those genes turned out to be related to the ways in which the body metabolizes
oxygen. One particular variant was discovered in fewer than ten per cent of the Han
but in nearly ninety per cent of the Tibetans. “This is the fastest genetic change ever
observed in humans,” Rasmus Nielsen, a professor of integrative biology at U.C.
Berkeley, said at the time. Nielsen led the statistical analysis. “For such a very
strong change, a lot of people would have had to die simply due to the fact that they
had the wrong version of a gene.”

The influence of heredity on intelligence is complex, involving thousands of genes

interacting in such intricate ways that researchers have not yet managed to draw
genetic patterns. It’s possible that they never will. But B.G.I. has begun to try, and
while scientists at the company take exceptional pains to say there is nothing
secretive or threatening about its Cognitive Genomics project, the work has already

23
raised questions in the West. “In twenty to forty years, at least in the developed
world, most babies could be conceived through in-vitro fertilization, so that their
parents can choose among embryos,’’ Hank Greely, a professor at Stanford Law
School and the director of the university’s Center for Law and the Biosciences, told
me. Greely’s book on the ethical implications of genomics and human reproduction,
“The End of Sex,’’ will be published next year. “That way, the parents or someone
else can select among a limited number of embryos with the combination of genes
they most want to see in their offspring. It’s going to happen. And China will have
fewer cultural and legal barriers to it than we will see in the United States.’’

Genetic screening for some conditions, such as Tay-Sachs disease and Huntington’s
disease, has become routine. Both conditions are caused by a single DNA mutation,
which makes them relatively easy to detect. Soon, much more will be possible.
Already, the entire genome of an embryo can be sequenced; although that
information has limited value today, it raises the prospect of a real-world Gattaca,
where potential fetuses could be selected through genetic diagnosis and implanted
with traits that are considered desirable. “My guess is that we will at some point be
able to say that this embryo has a sixty-five-per-cent chance of scoring in the top
half on S.A.T.s, or is likely to have unusual musical or creative ability,’’ Greely
said. He emphasized that that day is still far off, and that he was talking not about
creating “monsters under the bed” but about selecting the most attractive embryos
based on the characteristics of their DNA. “In the United States, parents will make
those choices, but in China there is more acceptance of government intervention in
personal and family decisions.”

24
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Nearly every person I spoke with at B.G.I. assured me, whether I asked or not, that
cognitive genomics is simply one small project, an arrow in the company’s
mammoth quiver. They described the research mostly as an effort to tease out the
genetic architecture of how the brain works. But it’s a touchy subject; a company
press representative, who sat in on one of my interviews, interrupted several times.
At each point, she repeated that B.G.I. would never engage in eugenics—a term I
had not introduced, but one so freighted with unpleasant connotations that it would
be hard to imagine any company embracing it. Yet complete access to DNA means
complete access to the genetic building blocks of life. Eventually, that information
will almost certainly be free; and the more of it that is gathered and analyzed the

25
closer we come to a day when it might be possible to select a variety of specific
traits in embryos. What might a company connected even tenuously to the Chinese
government do with this information? B.G.I. has often said that all such data will be
shared. There is no reason to believe that anyone there has any other goal. It is
possible, though, that the government won’t leave the choice in the company’s
hands.
Eugenics, the idea that one can breed humans for characteristics like intelligence the
way a farmer would breed chickens for tastier meat or more nutritious eggs, is
widely reviled today, but it was once endorsed not only by totalitarian leaders but
by American liberals. China’s recent history of controlling reproduction provides
the clearest example of where such programs can lead. After three decades, the
country has begun to ease its one-child rule. While the policy succeeded in limiting
population growth, it also encouraged families to abort girls. By 2020, thirty million
more Chinese men than women will have reached adulthood; for many young men,
in a society where marriage still matters greatly, the odds of finding a wife have
become prohibitive. Chinese leaders now worry that such a disparity could lead to
instability and political unrest.
Many Western scientists are concerned that in China, where the needs of the state
come before those of the individual, genomic data could play a central role in
reproductive policy. “Who is the emperor?” Jian Wang, B.G.I.’s president, said
when I asked him to describe his attitudes toward privacy. “I don’t care. George
Bush? Bill Clinton? Or the Communist Party of China? It isn’t my business.
Emperors have been ruling us for thousands of years. I know the government is
watching us at all times. So what? I don’t care about my personal privacy. It just
doesn’t matter.”

B.G.I.’s Cognitive Genomics project has been designed like a typical medical study.
The group will sequence and compare the DNA of two thousand people and hopes
to recruit up to twenty thousand new subjects. Most of the samples came from
people with I.Q.s higher than a hundred and fifty, few of whom are Chinese. So far,
the data have been provided predominantly by Robert Plomin, a professor of
behavioral genetics at King’s College London, who for years has conducted
research on the genetic similarities of twins. Because identical twins share so much
of their DNA, differences between them are more likely to be environmental than
inherited. Through a project called the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth,
Plomin collected DNA samples from two thousand individuals with high I.Q.s.

When the study began, in the nineteen-seventies, researchers simply hoped to

understand the lives of intellectually gifted people. Now B.G.I. is sifting through the
DNA in a hunt for biological clues to what makes them so smart. The team has
travelled to places like Google and Harvard, seeking subjects who score far above
the norm on standard tests. Most genetic studies require tens of thousands of
participants to carry enough statistical power to be considered meaningful. The
B.G.I. team argues that in some cases so many subjects may not be necessary.

26
“We are getting to the point where we are going to be able to make statistical
predictions based on the genomic information about complex traits,’’ Stephen Hsu
told me. Hsu, a theoretical physicist and mathematician, is a vice-president for
research and graduate studies at Michigan State University. He is also one of the
project’s principal scientists. “Those minute differences in our genetic makeup are
probably what determines the difference between whether you are Albert Einstein
or not getting into college,’’ he said. “Everyone is coming around to believe that
things are controlled by many genes, and there has been a tendency in the field to
just throw up your hands and say, Well, this is going to lead nowhere, or this is all a
boondoggle. But I actually think that, at this point, it’s in the hands of people who
are mathematically inclined.’’
Hsu points to predictions about height. More than one study has demonstrated a
genetic correlation between I.Q. and height, though the research is controversial and
constantly disputed. Scientists can now examine a person’s genome, and, assuming
that he or she has been fed reasonably well, determine height within a couple of
inches. (In most cases, though, the best way to predict a person’s height is to look at
the height of his or her parents.) Hsu suggested that one only has to consider the
revolution in breeding cattle to understand how this approach to heredity might
eventually be deployed with humans. Traditionally, breeders who wanted to buy a
bull to inseminate their herds would study the animal’s pedigree. Now they are
likely to receive a genomic chart that shows whether an animal is genetically
predisposed to produce milk, or live long, or gain weight more quickly (and
therefore require less food) than other cattle. In the past forty years, according to a
study carried out by a group of scientists from the United States Department of
Agriculture and the University of Minnesota, nearly a quarter of the DNA of
America’s Holstein cattle had been altered through human selection.

27
“I thought they introduced the witch a little late.”

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Cattle genetics is not human genetics. Cows are heavily inbred, which has made
their genomes easier to decipher. But the implications are not hard to envisage, and
neither are the possible consequences. Will it become possible to build a child, as
some critics of this research have contended? Not soon, and maybe never.
After all, genes play only a partial role in the prevalence of most diseases. Women
with the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation, for example, have a greatly increased risk of
developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer. But no more than ten per cent of
women with breast cancer have a mutated BRCA gene. Nonetheless, Hsu believes
that altering certain genomic characteristics of an unborn child will become highly
desired, and eventually common. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if there were certain
tweaks you could make in utero that would enhance the performance of our brain?’’
he said. “Probably by tweaking a certain number of variants in a positive way, you
could rev up human intelligence quite a bit. Or you can explain the difference
between Stephen Hawking and the average person.’ “

28
In 2009, CNN reported on a summer camp in Chongqing where children were given
DNA tests to try to identify their natural talents so that they could be steered toward
suitable careers. Most scientists in the field, including those at B.G.I., dismiss the
notion that such predictive tests have any credibility. Hsu and many others believe,
however, that genomics will eventually do for humans what it already does for
animals, and then those choices will become political as well as medical.
“We will at some point get there with humans,” Hsu said. “Then some countries
will make it legal or will regulate it loosely, if at all. And other countries will go
nuts and make it illegal. And rich people will still be able to do it. If it turns out
Singapore is the place where it is legal, rich people can have their babies in
Singapore. The idea that only rich people would be able to access this technology is
terrible.’’ But, he continued, “who will make those decisions? There are going to be
countries that say this is part of our national health-care service and everyone is
doing it. And eventually it would become unstoppable, because the countries that
initially outlawed it would have to come around. How could they not?”

Late in October, during the frigid first week of the World Series, seven thousand
members of the American Society of Human Genetics gathered in Boston to present
papers, look for jobs, and attend workshops on the latest developments in their
rapidly evolving field. The ground floor of the city’s Convention and Exhibition
Center, on the waterfront near the Inner Harbor, was filled with booths from what
seemed like every genomics company in the world; it was a carnival of high-tech
medical paraphernalia. The B.G.I. booth was among the busiest. Visitors crowded
around to see what jobs were available and what projects were under way. Chinese
was not the official language, but more than one American researcher pointed out, a
bit defensively, how often it was spoken in hallways and lunchrooms throughout the
meeting.

Many scientists in America have become anxious at the prospect of losing

prominence in a discipline that the West has dominated since Watson and Crick
discovered the helical structure of DNA. Those fears were made palpable late last
year when B.G.I. became more than simply the world’s biggest consumer of
sequencing technology; it also became one of the principal providers. Two major
companies offer that service to places like the Broad Institute and B.G.I. The leader
is Illumina, which is based in San Diego, and has sold some hundred and thirty of
its machines to B.G.I., for more than half a million dollars each. (Until recently,
B.G.I. was Illumina’s biggest customer, and the company maintains a contract to
supply the chemical reagents needed to make the machines work properly.) Last
year, to the outrage of many in the United States, B.G.I. bought Illumina’s main
competitor, Complete Genomics, for a hundred and eighteen million dollars. Jay
Flatley, Illumina’s chief executive, attempted to prevent the merger, appealing to
the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which
monitors the sale of technology that might pose a threat to national security. Flatley
argued that selling such equipment would put powerful industrial secrets into

29
Chinese hands. In December, the CFIUS board rejected Flatley’s argument and
approved B.G.I.’s purchase. It has been easy to read too much into the decision; at a
time when the N.I.H. is cutting back on funding scientific research, China is not.
Recently, the Chinese government published an ambitious fifty-year plan to
advance its technical and scientific position in the world. Few scientists would
claim that they can predict that far into the future. But the fact that China would
even try demonstrates how serious the country is about its technological place in the
world.

“Honey, let me call you back—I’m bored.”December 20, 2010

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While I was in Boston, I met with Flatley, a trim, cheerful man, who had just
announced that a new version of Illumina’s sequencing technology would enable
customers to double the speed with which they can decode genomes. Illumina led
the industry, even before the announcement, so I asked why B.G.I.’s acquisition of
a rival should cause particular concern in the United States. In a field where coming
in second will never be good enough, Complete Genomics poses no great
competitive threat. Flatley said that, with enough help from the Chinese leadership,
the situation could change. “They have direct reaches into the government,’’ he told
me, referring to B.G.I. “We think they are working hard to establish Chinese
dominance in this market, which for the United States would be bad news.’’ For
Flatley and his company, of course, it would be even worse news.
I asked why, if he was so worried about the threat of Chinese scientific dominance,
he had sold millions of dollars’ worth of technology to B.G.I. “It’s one thing to sell
Coke and another to sell the formula for Coke,’’ he said. “And when they bought
Complete Genomics what they were allowed to do is buy the formula.’’ We were
sitting at the open bar in the atrium of the Waterfront Westin—a sort of grand
concourse for people attending the genetics meeting. As Flatley spoke, Jun Wang,
B.G.I.’s chief executive officer, strolled by. Wang, who is thirty-seven, was wearing
a black trench coat that was cinched at the waist, and he looked like a movie star.
He started the company’s bioinformatics department more than a decade ago, and
Fortune recently named him one of the world’s most influential people under the
age of forty. Several years ago, in an interview with Nature, he described B.G.I. as
the “muscle” in the world of genomic research and was quoted as saying, “We have
no brain.” The first thing he said to me when we met was that he hoped I
understood the remark was meant as a joke.
The two men nodded but maintained a physical distance, like rival gang leaders
running into each other at a night club. Flatley told me that he regards B.G.I.’s
emergence as a sign of America’s waning investment in science. “We think it is
critically important, as does B.G.I., to get a million genomes into a database as fast
as we can,’’ he said. “But that database needs to be open and universally accessible
to researchers around the world. B.G.I.’s goal, I believe, is to have a million people
in a database that they control.’’ While nothing I saw at B.G.I. or heard from either
company officials or any American scientist suggested that that was true, B.G.I.
does have a $1.58-billion loan from the China Development Bank. Jian Wang says
that the company has no official ties to the government, but it is not always easy to
know what constitutes such a tie. As one prominent American scientist told me after
he visited Shenzhen, “I asked, Are you a nonprofit, are you a government entity, or
are you a private company? The answer was yes. In China, these are not meaningful
distinctions.’’
While B.G.I.’s ambitions are as great as those of any Western institution, it is not
yet clear where they will lead. Many scientists in the field consider the company
little more than a high-end version of the nearby Foxconn factory, often referred to

31
as “iPod City,” where three hundred and fifty thousand employees turn out millions
of Apple products each year. No sequencing project seems too small for B.G.I. to
bother with or too big to handle. But sequencing is merely a first step. It leaves the
company with a list of the chemicals found in a given stretch of DNA; those lists
have often been compared to the letters of a book. Letters alone don’t produce
“Hamlet” or “War and Peace.’’ Shakespeare and Tolstoy had to put that “code”
together in meaningful ways. That has not been B.G.I.’s primary goal, and it is
uncertain whether the company can turn the data from billions of DNA sequences
into the kind of scientific insight more frequently associated with places like the
Broad Institute and the National Institutes of Health.
B.G.I.’s leaders are aware of the perception that the company is little more than a
biological data mill. The next afternoon, before leaving Boston, I attended a
luncheon hosted by the company. Three hundred people filled a lecture hall that
usually holds far fewer. Most had come to hear Huanming Yang, the B.G.I.
chairman, deliver a long, emotional presentation that included a PowerPoint display
with ninety-one slides. Yang is warm and self-effacing, and he thanked a roster of
American biologists for their help and “collaboration.’’ In talking about the promise
of genomics, he invoked Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s “I Have a Dream” speech and
the Declaration of Independence. It was a “Kumbaya” moment in a field where the
soul is rarely mentioned. Yang referred to his company as “an unruly adolescent,’’
and ended his talk by saying, “Please do me a favor: Take the young B.G.I.’ers as
your friends, as your students. To treat them as you treated me, to teach them as you
taught me. I assure you it is very rewarding. It is not only for a successful project; it
is also for the brilliant future of mankind.”

32
“The Court will allow the cape but will draw the line at the wind machine.”May 10,
2010

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Two weeks earlier, in Hong Kong, I had met with Chris Chang, a visiting scholar at
B.G.I., who expressed similar sentiments, saying that these were early days for
Chinese biotechnology. Chang, an American with a Chinese heritage, works on the
Cognitive Genomics project. He is eager to see B.G.I. grow beyond its genetic-
assembly-line phase, and he thinks the intelligence research can help the company
to do it. “There are ethical concerns about this research in China, too,’’ he told me.
“But it’s just not the career-killing type of project that it would be in the United
States.”
We were sitting in a noisy café in Wan Chai. He shook his head and smiled. “I do
get bewildered,” he said. “Embryo selection is one aspect of this kind of research,
but there are so many others. Do you want to figure out Alzheimer’s disease, or

33
schizophrenia? Because to do that we need to understand the brain, but right now
we are taking little stabs in the dark. That won’t stop until we map the brain. We
will have to make difficult ethical choices. But don’t ignore the enormous potential
of this research. At some point, though I don’t know when, people will look back
and wonder what all the fuss was about.” ♦

Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.

Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998, and has
written frequently about AIDS, T.B., and malaria in the developing world, as well
as about agricultural biotechnology, avian influenza, the world’s diminishing
freshwater resources, and synthetic biology.

• MORE »

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/511051/inside-chinas-genome-factory/
Biomedicine

Inside China’s Genome Factory

Sequencing a complete human genome may soon cost less than an iPhone. Will
BGI-Shenzhen decode yours?

• by Christina Larson
• February 11, 2013
W
Biomedicine

Inside China’s Genome Factory

Sequencing a complete human genome may soon cost less than an iPhone. Will
BGI-Shenzhen decode yours?

• by Christina Larson
• February 11, 2013
When he was 17 years old, Zhao Bowen dropped out of Beijing’s most prestigious
high school. Like many restless young people in China, he headed south to
Shenzhen, the country’s factory capital, for a job. As a teenage science prodigy,
however, he wasn’t bound for an assembly-line floor; instead, he was on his way to
the world’s largest production center for DNA data. Now, a few years later, in a
retrofitted shoe factory that is the headquarters of BGI-Shenzhen, the 21-year-old is

34
orchestrating an effort to decipher the genetic makeup of some 2,000 people—more
than 12 trillion DNA bases in all.
BGI-Shenzhen, once known as the Beijing Genomics Institute, has burst from
relative obscurity to become the world’s most prolific sequencer of human, plant,
and animal DNA. In 2010, with the aid of a $1.58 billion line of credit from China
Development Bank, BGI purchased 128 state-of-the-art DNA sequencing machines
for about $500,000 apiece. It now owns 156 sequencers from several manufacturers
and accounts for some 10 to 20 percent of all DNA data produced globally. So far,
it claims to have completely sequenced some 50,000 human genomes—far more
than any other group.
BGI’s sheer size has already put Chinese gene research on the map. Those same
economies of scale could also become an advantage as comprehensive gene
readouts become part of everyday medicine. The cost of DNA sequencing is falling
fast. In a few years, it’s likely that millions of people will want to know what their
genes predict about their health. BGI might be the one to tell them.
The institute hasn’t only initiated a series of grandly conceived science projects. (In
January, it announced it had determined the DNA sequence of not one but 90
varieties of chickpeas.) It’s also pioneered a research-for-hire business to decode
human genomes in bulk, taking orders from the world’s top drug companies and
universities. Last year, BGI even started to install satellite labs inside foreign
research centers and staff them with Chinese technicians.
BGI’s rise is regarded with curiosity and some trepidation, not just because of the
organization’s size but also because of its opportunistic business approach (it has a
center for pig cloning, dabbles in stem-cell research, and runs a diagnostics lab).
The institute employs 4,000 people, as many as a midsize university—1,000 in its
bioinformatics division alone. Like Zhao, most are young—the average age is 27—
and some sleep in company dormitories. The average salary is $1,500 a month.
Ten years ago, the international Human Genome Project was finishing up the first
copy of the human genetic code at a cost of $3 billion. Thanks to a series of clever
innovations, the cost to read out the DNA in a person’s genome has since fallen to
just a few thousand dollars. Yet that has only created new challenges: how to store,
analyze, and make sense of the data. According to BGI, its machines generate six
terabytes of data each day.
Zhang Yong, 33, a BGI senior researcher, predicts that within the next decade the
cost of sequencing a human genome will fall to just $200 or $300 and BGI will
become a force in assembling a global “bio-Google”—it will help “organize all the
world’s biological information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

BGI quotes prices as low as $3,000 to sequence a person’s DNA.

Some outsiders, however, question whether BGI is anything more than biology’s
version of Foxconn, the giant assembler of iPads and other gadgets designed
elsewhere, whose largest factory, employing some 240,000 workers, is also in
Shenzhen. While BGI has done important science—a recent paper on sequencing

35
the bacteria in the human gut made the pages of Nature—it’s seen more as a mass
producer of data than as an instigator of original research that can explain what the
results mean.
“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.”
“Don’t Worry, Be Happy”
BGI’s president, Wang Jian, 59, cofounded the company with Yang Huanming, 61,
in 1999. They managed to persuade the leaders of the Human Genome Project, then
in full swing, to let them handle 1 percent of the work, making China the only
developing nation to play a major role. In 2002, BGI turned heads by publishing the
complete sequence of the rice plant in Science. Research in the national interest has
been a BGI mainstay: it decoded the DNA of the giant panda, and it discovered the
genetic mutation that makes Tibetans so well suited to life at high altitudes. Outside
work hours, Wang is known for having scaled Mount Everest in 2010. (“It’s a
national park—so what? Not a big deal,” he says.)
A quirky, informal logic governs BGI. That has made it a puzzle to observers; it’s
very different from hierarchical Chinese institutions, where credentials and
connections can matter most. Deputy director Xu Xun, 29, who oversees the 1,000-
strong bioinformatics group, says it’s why BGI attracts so many talented young
people. “You get [to play a role in] a lot of exciting things here,” he says. In 2010,
Nature cited BGI’s model in an editorial questioning whether scientists really need
PhDs. Xu himself came to BGI after abandoning his PhD studies. He’s what’s
known admiringly around the company as a “leaver”—impatient with school and
eager for real-world experience.

Blood samples are fed into automated

DNA sequencing machines.
In Wang’s cubicle, which is in the middle of a long bay of identical blue cubicles
backed by windows overlooking a mountainside construction site, is a hand-signed
letter from Bill Gates announcing a partnership on agricultural genomics that BGI
and the Gates Foundation agreed to last fall. “He loves the dropouts,” Wang says of
the Microsoft chairman. He grins and then sings a few bars from Bobby McFerrin’s
“Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” adding, “I love that song.”

36
BGI bills itself as China’s first “citizen-managed” research institute. With strong
political support from Beijing, it became part of the vaunted Chinese Academy of
Sciences in 2003. But it was an uneasy fit. The conservative academy limits the size
of its institutes, yet BGI was on a hiring spree, and it was thumbing its nose at
university credentials, too. In 2007, the government of Shenzhen offered BGI $12.8
million to move to the port city and become an independent institute.
Today, Wang says, only about 10 percent of BGI’s revenue comes from
government projects—and that’s largely from local municipalities, not from
Beijing. The rest is a mix of grants, some anonymous donations, and fees from
clients, including as little as $3,000 to $4,000 to sequence a human genome.
And even though it’s a nonprofit, BGI operates several businesses. That’s left
Westerners guessing at the true nature of the Chinese institute. Wang says they
shouldn’t worry. “We like science; we need money. We put the two things
together,” he says. “I use my left hand to make money and my right hand to do
basic research.” At a recent biotechnology conference in Shenzhen, cosponsored by
BGI, Wang gave the opening presentation. One of his slides read: “World-Class
Science = World-Class Business.”
Thousands of Genomes
In its scientific work, BGI often acts as the enabler of other people’s ideas. That is
the case in a major project conceived by Steve Hsu, vice president for research at
Michigan State University, to search for genes that influence intelligence. Under the
guidance of Zhao Bowen, BGI is now sequencing the DNA of more than 2,000
people—mostly Americans—who have IQ scores of at least 160, or four standard
deviations above the mean.
The DNA comes primarily from a collection of blood samples amassed by Robert
Plomin, a psychologist at King’s College, London. The plan, to compare the
genomes of geniuses and people of ordinary intelligence, is scientifically risky (it’s
likely that thousands of genes are involved) and somewhat controversial. For those
reasons it would be very hard to find the $15 or $20 million needed to carry out the
project in the West. “Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t,” Plomin says. “But BGI
is doing it basically for free.”
From Plomin’s perspective, BGI is so large that it appears to have more DNA
sequencing capacity than it knows what to do with. It has “all those machines and
people that have to be fed” with projects, he says. The IQ study isn’t the only mega-
project under way. With a U.S. nonprofit, Autism Speaks, BGI is being paid to
sequence the DNA of up to 10,000 people from families with autistic children. For
researchers in Denmark, BGI is decoding the genomes of 3,000 obese people and
3,000 lean ones.
Beyond basic science, BGI has begun positioning itself as the engine of what’s
expected to be a boom in the medical use of genome scans. In 2011, for instance, it
agreed to install a DNA analysis center inside the Children’s Hospital of
Philadelphia, a leading pediatric hospital. Ten bioinformatics experts were flown in

37
from Shenzhen on temporary visas to create the center, which opened six months
later with five sequencing machines.
As the technology enters clinical use, the number of genomes sequenced in their
entirety could catapult into the millions per year. That is what both the Philadelphia
hospital and BGI are preparing for. “They have the expertise, instruments, and
economies of scale,” says Robert Doms, pathologist-in-chief of the children’s
hospital. He says it will pay BGI a fee for each genome it sequences, and will offer
the service to parents of young patients with undiagnosed diseases. The hospital will
also be developing new types of genetic tests, an area where the Chinese agree they
have much to learn. Although BGI operates a genetic testing center in China, the
degree of regulation seen in the United States is new to its researchers. “It’s a whole
additional level of rigor,” says Doms.
BGI is also proving it can be nimble in seeking business opportunities. Last fall, it
made a surprise bid to purchase a faltering U.S. company, Complete Genomics of
Mountain View, California. The company operates a complex technology for
sequencing human DNA; in 2012 it accounted for perhaps 10 percent of all human
DNA data generated globally. But it was losing money.
BGI’s bid to buy the company, for the fire-sale price of $118 million, has stirred
competitive worries in the U.S. The main supplier of DNA sequencing instruments,
Illumina, tried to break up the deal with a counter-bid and appealed to Washington
to block the takeover. Letting BGI snap up the company would be equivalent to
selling China the “formula for Coke,” said Illumina’s CEO, Jay Flatley. Flatley
cautioned that the Chinese, until now dependent on U.S. machinery, could dominate
next-generation technology—and that they could even somehow make “nefarious”
use of American DNA data flowing through their computer servers by the terabyte.
U.S. regulators have dismissed the national security concerns, and approval of the
deal is pending.
BGI’s leaders know that resistance to its expansion is real, but they shrug off the
concerns. The joke in the cubicles is that if BGI were truly a tool of Beijing, it
would probably have nicer office space. More matter-of-factly, Xu, the head of the
bioinformatics team, says of the acquisition: “This is a good technology. The
company is bankrupt; we think it’s a good chance to do something.”
Wang, the Everest climber, is still frequently asked to explain BGI’s strategy and its
intentions. He says to think of a wandering migrant worker—looking for
opportunity and occasionally irritating the authorities. That is what BGI is like. But
its only core mission is to do work that will be socially useful, he says: its strategy
is to “do good.”
Tagged

BGI, BGI-Shenzhen, DNA, genetic sequencing, genomics

38
 Credit

Philipp Engelhorn

Christina Larson Guest contributor

27 comments

Biomedicine

Gene Therapy’s First Out-and-Out Cure Is Here

A genetic therapy for “bubble boy” disease completes a 27-year journey.

• by Antonio Regalado
• May 6, 2016

Above: An artist’s illustration of gene therapy shows a retrovirus harboring a

correct copy of a human gene.

A treatment now pending approval in Europe will be the first commercial gene
therapy to provide an outright cure for a deadly disease.
The treatment is a landmark for gene-replacement technology, an idea that’s
struggled for three decades to prove itself safe and practical.
Called Strimvelis, and owned by drug giant GlaxoSmithKline, the treatment is for
severe combined immune deficiency, a rare disease that leaves newborns with
almost no defense against viruses, bacteria, or fungi and is often called “bubble
boy” disease after an American child whose short life inside a protective plastic
shield was described in a 1976 movie.
The treatment is different than any that’s come before because it appears to be an
outright cure carried out through a genetic repair. The therapy was tested on 18
children, the first of them 15 years ago. All are still alive.
“I would be hesitant to call it a cure, although there’s no reason to think it won’t
last,” says Sven Kili, the executive who heads gene-therapy development at GSK.
The British drug giant licensed the treatment in 2010 from the San Raffaele
Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy, in Milan, Italy, where it was developed and
first tested on children.
On April 1, European advisers recommended that Strimvelis be allowed on the
market and if, as expected, GSK wins formal authorization it can start selling the
drug in 27 European countries. GSK plans to seek U.S. marketing approval next
year.

39
An artist’s illustration of gene therapy shows a retrovirus harboring a correct copy
of a human gene.
GSK is the first large drug company to seek to market a gene therapy to treat any
genetic disease. If successful the therapeutic could signal a disruptive new phase in
medicine in which one-time gene fixes replace trips to the pharmacy or lifelong
dependence on medication.
“The idea that you don’t have to worry about it and can be normal is extremely
exciting for people,” says Marcia Boyle, founder and president of the Immune
Deficiency Foundation, whose son was born with a different immune disorder, one
of more than 200 known to exist. “I am a little guarded on gene therapy because we
were all excited a long time ago, and it was not as easy to fool Mother Nature as
people had hoped.”
Today, several hundred gene therapies are in development, and many aspire to be
out-and-out cures for one of about 5,000 rare diseases caused by errors in a single
gene.
Children who lack correct copies of a gene called adenosine deaminase begin to get
life-threatening infections days after birth. The current treatment for this immune
deficiency, known as ADA-SCID, is a bone marrow transplant, which itself is
sometimes fatal, or lifelong therapy using costly replacement enzymes that cost
$5,000 a vial.

40
Eighteen children were cured of immune deficiency using gene therapy at the
Ospedale San Raffaele in Milan.
Strimvelis uses a “repair and replace” strategy, so called because doctors first
remove stem cells from a patient’s bone marrow then soak them with viruses to
transfer a correct copy of the ADA gene.
“What we are talking about is ex vivo gene therapy—you pull out the cells, correct
them in test tube, and put the cells back,” says Maria-Grazia Roncarolo, a
pediatrician and scientist at Stanford University who led the original Milan
experiments. “If you want to fix a disease for life you need to put the gene in the
stem cells.”

41
Some companies are trying to add corrected genes using direct injections into
muscles, or the eye. But the repair-and-replace strategy may have the larger impact.
As soon as next year, companies like Novartis and Juno Therapeutics may seek
approval for cancer treatments that also use a combination of gene and cell therapy
to obliterate one type of leukemia.
Overall, investment in gene therapy is booming. The Alliance for Regenerative
Medicine says that globally, in 2015, public and private companies raised $10
billion, and about 70 treatments are in late-stage testing.
GSK has never sold a product so drastically different from a bottle of pills. And
because ADA-SCID is one of the rarest diseases on Earth, Strimvelis won’t be a
blockbuster. GSK estimates there are only about 14 cases a year in Europe, and 12
in the U.S.
Instead, the British company hopes to master gene-therapy technology, including
how to manufacture viruses. “If we can first make products that change lives, then
we can develop them into things that affect more people,” says Kili. “We believe
gene therapy is an area of important future growth; we don’t want to rush or cut
corners.”

To protect him from germs, David Vetter lived inside a plastic chamber for 12
years. He was born without an immune system and died in 1984 from the
complications of a bone marrow transplant.

42
Markets will closely scrutinize how much GSK charges for Strimvelis. Kili says a
final decision hasn’t been made. Another gene therapy, called Glybera, debuted
with a $1 million price tag but is already considered a commercial flop. The
dilemma is how to bill for a high-tech drug that people take only once.
Kili says GSK’s price won’t be anywhere close to a million dollars, though it will
be enough to meet a company policy of getting a 14 percent return on every dollar it
spends on R&D.
The connection between immune deficiency and gene therapy isn’t new. In fact, the
first attempt to correct genes in a living person occurred in 1990, also in a patient
with ADA-SCID.
By 2000, teams in London and France had cured some children of a closely related
immune deficiency, X-linked SCID. But some of those children developed
leukemia after the viruses dropped their genetic payloads into the wrong location of
the genome.
In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration quickly canceled 27 trials over
safety concerns. “It was a major step back,” says Roncarolo, and probably a more
serious red flag even than the death of a volunteer named Jesse Gelsinger in a U.S.
trial in 1999, which also drew attention to gene therapy’s risks.
The San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy presented its own results in
ADA-SCID in 2002 in the journal Science. Like the French, they’d also apparently
cured patients, and because of differences in their approach, didn’t run the same
cancer risk.
GSK says it is moving toward commercializing several other gene therapies for rare
disease developed by the Italian team, including for metachromatic
leuckodystrophy, a rare but rapidly fatal birth defect, and for beta-thalassemia.
Kili says the general idea is to leapfrog from ultra-rare diseases to less rare ones,
like beta-thalassemia, hemophilia, and sickle cell disease. However, he doubts the
technology will be used to treat common conditions such as arthritis or heart disease
anytime soon. Those conditions are complex, and aren’t caused by a defect in just
one gene.
“Honestly, as we stand at the moment, I don’t think gene therapy will address all the
ills or ailments of humanity. We can address [single-gene] disease,” he says. “We
are building a hammer that is not that big.”
Tagged

GlaxoSmithKline, gene therapy, SCID

Credit

Top images courtesy of Grant Thompson, GlaxoSsmithKline; last image courtesy of

Baylor College of Medicine Photo Archives

43
Antonio Regalado Senior Editor, Biomedicine

I am the senior editor for biomedicine for MIT Technology Review. I look for stories
about how technology is changing medicine and biomedical research. Before
joining MIT Technology Review in July 2011, I lived in São Paulo, Brazil,… More

Biomedicine

Zika Vaccine May Come Too Late

U.S. scientists could know by early 2018 whether they have a working vaccine for
Zika virus, according to Anthony Fauci, the head of the U.S. National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Disease. But that’s the best case scenario, and uncertainty
over how rapidly the mosquito-borne disease will spread in the coming months and
years makes it difficult to predict how quickly a vaccine could be developed.
Collecting necessary data about a potential vaccine’s effectiveness will depend in
part on the incidence of the disease in the communities that participate in the tests.
But if enough people who have already been exposed to the disease naturally
develop immunity, it could cause the virus to spread less quickly and hamper data
collection.
Zika has been spreading rapidly in Latin America for several months. Thus far,
there have been 426 reported cases of Zika on the U.S. mainland, all associated with
travel from affected regions, according to the Centers for Disease Control. There
have also been 599 cases in U.S. territories Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the
U.S. Virgin Islands. Of those cases, 596 were acquired locally, and 570 of those
were in Puerto Rico. Fauci said yesterday it is “very likely” that the mainland will
see local outbreaks as the weather gets warmer.
Most people who get the disease will experience only mild symptoms or may not
even be aware that they have it, but the virus is known to cause birth defects if it
infects pregnant women.
Fauci said the $1.9 billion the White House has asked Congress to devote to
addressing the Zika outbreak is “absolutely essential.” A debate over the funding
has stalled in the Senate.
The urgency of the outbreak has led some scientists to suggest more radical
approaches than a vaccine, like deploying gene drives. That technology, the risks of
which are not well understood, could theoretically eliminate whole populations of
mosquitoes by using the gene editing tool CRISPR to induce a genetic change that
spreads as the insects reproduce. And it might only take months to a year to
develop.

44
(Read more: Science, NBC News, “We Have the Technology to Destroy All Zika
Mosquitos”)

•
•
•
•

Tagged

Zika virus, zika, gene drives, vaccines

Mike Orcutt Research Editor

I’m MIT Technology Review’s research editor. I spend my days taking things
extremely seriously and attempting with all my nerdy might to piece together bigger
pictures from the bits and shreds of truth I manage to filter from the information…
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Biomedicine

The World’s Most Expensive Medicine Is a Bust

The first gene therapy approved in the Western world costs $1 million and has been
used just once. The doctor who tried it says the price is “absolutely too high.”

• by Antonio Regalado
• May 4, 2016

The most expensive drug in history is a money loser that’s not reaching patients. In
fact, it’s only been paid for and used commercially once since being approved in
2012.
The medication in question is alipogene tiparvovec, better known as Glybera, a
medicine widely heralded as the “first gene therapy” in the Western world and

45
whose approval helped ignite an explosion of investment and excitement around
treatments that correct DNA.
But when the Berlin physician Elisabeth Steinhagen-Thiessen wanted to give a
patient Glybera last fall, it wasn't so easy. She says she had to prepare a submission
as thick as “a thesis” for German regulators and then personally call the CEO of
DAK, one of Germany’s large sickness funds, or insurers, to ask him to pay the $1
million price tag.
Last September, she gave 40 injections to the muscles of a 43-year-old woman with
an ultra-rare disease called lipoprotein lipase deficiency. Such patients don’t process
fat correctly. “You draw blood and you are astonished, there is no red blood, it's
cream,” Steinhagen-Thiessen says. One symptom is debilitating abdominal pain.
Her patient had been hospitalized more than 40 times.
A dose of Glybera contains trillions of viruses harboring correct copies of the
lipoprotein lipase gene. And Steinhagen-Thiessen says the treatment, at Charite
Hospital in Berlin, was a success. The woman hasn’t been back to the emergency
room since the treatment and is now “living like you and me.”
But this single use of the drug just proves that Glybera is a flop. The problem is its
staggering million-dollar price tag, too few patients, and questions about how
effective it is.
The company that developed Glybera, UniQure, based in Amsterdam and
Lexington, Mass., last fall dropped plans to get it approved in the U.S. and has
turned over European sales to the Italian drug maker Chiesi Farmaceutici, which
calls selling the drug "challenging."
“I think we learned a tremendous amount about what to do and what not to do, but
commercially it has not been a success. It still drains a lot from the company,” says
Dan Soland, UniQure's CEO. UniQure is now focused on developing other gene
therapies, including one to treat hemophilia.
How Glybera turned into a money loser is a cautionary tale for gene therapy, a
resurgent technology that has been drawing investor interest because of its promise
to cure rare, inherited diseases with one-time repairs to a person’s DNA. A single
dose of gene therapy can change the genetic instructions inside a person's cells in
ways that last many years, or even a lifetime.
In addition to Glybera, there is at least one form of gene therapy approved in China
to treat cancer by adding a gene to tumors, and late last year Amgen won U.S.
approval for Imlygic, which uses the herpes virus to shrink skin cancers.
But reversing inherited genetic disease remains gene therapy's great promise. And
more treatments will reach the market soon. In April, European authorities gave a
preliminary green light for a gene therapy for severe combined immune deficiency,
to be sold by GlaxoSmithKline. And by 2017, handicappers expect, a Philadelphia
company called Spark Therapeutics could win approval in the U.S. for a gene fix
that partly reverses one form of blindness. Like the metabolic condition Glybera
treats, both these diseases are incredibly rare. Glaxo estimates that only 14 cases of
severe combined immune deficiency come to light each year in Europe.

46
The combination of rare diseases with a costly new technology that needs to be used
only once is what could lead to exorbitant prices. Analysts have said Spark’s
treatment might cost $500,000 per eye. And with nearly 670 gene-therapy trials
under way, and 68 in the later stages, known as Phase III, it’s becoming “urgent” to
understand how these therapies will be paid for, says Morrie Ruffin, managing
director of the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, a trade and advocacy group.
The current system “was not established with these types of products in mind,” he
says.
Executives at Glaxo say they don’t expect to charge anything near a million dollars.
But with $35 billion a year in revenue, they don’t need to rely on gene therapy for
profits. “From a pure business, money-making perspective, it’s a challenge,” says
Sven Kili, head of gene-therapy development at Glaxo. “It’s a single treatment that
lasts indefinitely and patients don’t come back. And there aren’t many of them. It is
not something that would make a venture capitalist jump with joy.” He says Glaxo
is thinking of a price “way below” what people might expect for once-in-a-lifetime
therapy and “nowhere near” that of Glybera.

47
48
There isn’t much doubt that Glybera’s approval in 2012 was important. It showed
that gene therapy, once branded as too risky, could be safe and was ready to be
commercialized. Since then, a large number of new companies have been formed
and more pharmaceutical firms have shown interest. Piper Jaffray, the investment
bank, says 2015 was the most “momentous” year yet for gene therapy. About $2
billion was raised by 10 public gene-therapy companies in the U.S. last year.
“No one knew whether this was going to be a viable strategy,” says David Schaffer,
an expert on gene-therapy viruses at the University of California, Berkeley, who is
also on UniQure’s board. “It was just a huge boost for the field to know someone
got something over the finish line. “
UniQure started out as Amsterdam Molecular Therapeutics, a 1998 spin-off from
the University of Amsterdam. Doctors there had zeroed in on an enzyme,
lipoprotein lipase, that muscles produce and which digests fat in the blood. In some
people, both copies of the gene to make the enzyme are mutated, and don’t work
correctly.
The Amsterdam company spent more than $100 million testing the drug and
carving a path through Europe’s medical rules and regulations, which weren’t
geared to consider a new technology like gene therapy. Initially, for instance,
regulators said they expected a clinical trial of 342 patients. Executives wryly noted
that there were only 250 people with the disease in all of Europe. “The filing was a
nightmare experience,” says Sander van Deventer, a biotech investor who was once
the company’s chief medical officer. “They didn’t have the know-how to approve
an advanced therapy.”
But the data for Glybera wasn’t rock-solid either. The drug was given to just 27
people in three “open-label” experimental studies, meaning no patient got a placebo.
Those tests never showed a lasting change in fat levels in their blood—though the
company argued that people who got the drug had fewer episodes of pancreatitis,
the painful complication of the disease.
By 2012, the company had failed twice to convince European regulators. It decided
to reorganize, incorporating as UniQure, and mounted a last, successful attempt to
get the drug approved. “We didn’t want to give it up even though the commercial
outlook was not good,” says Van Deventer.
A year after the approval by Europe’s top medicines' body, UniQure was able to go
public on the Nasdaq, raising $82 million. Although it called the commercialization
of Glybera a top priority, by last fall UniQure instead chose to scrap its plans to sell
the drug in the U.S. after the Food and Drug Administration said new, expensive
trials would be needed.
Nor has Glybera convinced the national regulators in Europe who decide what
drugs get reimbursed. Last year, French authorities said they would not pay for the
drug. Germany judged Glybera’s benefits “non-quantifiable.” It leaves doctors and
insurers to make decisions on a case-by-case basis. In the Netherlands, where the
technology was invented and supported by R&D grants, the health minister
complained that Glybera was part of a pattern of price gouging by drug companies.

49
The decision to charge around $1 million for Glybera (the exact amount depends on
the patient’s weight) does raise questions. Some people think gene therapies should
be paid for in yearly installments, and only so long as they keep working. But that
wasn’t possible with Glybera because there was no clear-cut way to track the effects
of the drug. “There is pressure to pay all at once—the payers said they wanted to
pay up front,” says Van Deventer. “But that created a lot of anger in Europe. It’s a
shame. It became the 'one-million' therapy. There is an anti-innovation climate and
people don’t want to pay for it at all.”
Even modest expectations for Glybera’s sales now look much too rosy. (Early last
year, one analyst projected peak revenues of $57 million a year.) Part of the reason
is that the disease is so rare, just one in a million people, that it’s often not
diagnosed correctly, and finding customers is hard work. Following its
reorganization, UniQure sold European marketing rights to Chiesi, a small Italian
drugmaker with little experience selling such a complex therapy.
That means even the few patients who want the West’s first gene therapy can’t
easily get it. Steinhagen-Thiessen says she knows of a man in Luxembourg and a
family in Czechoslovakia who are interested, but they don’t yet have a way to pay
for it. A Chiesi spokesperson says it is working to create a registry of patients in
Europe.
Eventually, the German insurer DAK did pay 900,000 euros, or about $1 million, to
cover the cost of treating Steinhagen-Thiessen’s patient. Most of that went to pay
for Glybera. “I think the price is absolutely too high. I am not sure that other
insurance companies are willing to pay that,” says the doctor. “From an ethical
point of view we should have a lower price. I don’t think the companies can make a
profit by it in any case.”
Schaffer, the Berkeley professor, says gene-therapy companies still have work to do
demonstrating their concepts. It may be too soon to turn a profit. “I think that the
field should focus on disease targets which are well known, where there is a big
chance for medical success, whether or not there is commercial success,” he says.
“People who are investing in early stage biotechs are doing it because of the
promise of the future, not immediate returns tomorrow.”

•
•
•
•

Tagged

UniQure, Glybera, ASGCT UniQure, Spark Therapeutics

50
 Credit

Illustration by Eric Petersen

Antonio Regalado Senior Editor, Biomedicine

I am the senior editor for biomedicine for MIT Technology Review. I look for stories
about how technology is changing medicine and biomedical research. Before
joining MIT Technology Review in July 2011, I lived in São Paulo, Brazil,… More

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Biomedicine

First Biological Superlens Created Using Spider Silk

Spider silk has the ability to resolve features smaller than any ordinary microscope
can see, say materials scientists.

• by Emerging Technology from the arXiv

• May 3, 2016

Back in 1873, the German physicist Ernst Abbe discovered a fundamental limit in
the performance of imaging systems such as microscopes or camera lenses. These
systems simply cannot resolve features smaller than a critical size determined by the
wavelength of light.
For visible light, this resolution limit is about 200 nanometers; anything smaller
cannot be resolved. That includes viruses, features inside cells such as microtubules
and DNA molecules, even the grooves on a standard Blu-ray DVD disc.
But in recent years, physicists have discovered a way around Abbe’s limit.
Whenever light bounces off an object, it diffracts and interferes, causing any fine
details to be lost. For visible light, this process takes place in the first few
nanometers from the surface.

51
The way round Abbe’s limit is to record the pattern of reflected light before it
interferes. This so-called near-field, or evanescent, light contains all the fine detail.
The trick is to find a way to transmit this near field light beyond its usual range.
And that’s exactly what physicists have done. They’ve discovered various exotic
substances that can transmit near-field light. Place one of these in contact with the
surface to be imaged and it can convey the light to a conventional imaging system.
Such a material is known as a superlens.
These superlenses are obviously small but also often delicate and tricky to make.
What’s more, they tend to work only at specific frequencies of light. So finding new
robust ones that work with white light is an important task.
Today, James Monks and pals from Bangor University in Wales show that spider
silk is capable of resolving details in white light smaller than Abbe’s resolution
limit. Their work is the first demonstration of a biological superlens.
The technique is straightforward. The team begins with silk spun by the Nephila
edulis, a large spider better known as the Australian Golden Orb Weaver. This
produces silk about 6,800 nanometers in diameter which it weaves into a web about
one meter across.
Silk is transparent and cylindrical in structure, a shape that allows it to focus light.
And because it is tiny, it does the focusing on the nanometer scale which matches
that of near-field light.
Monks and co simply lay a strand of this spider silk across a Blu-ray DVD disc,
illuminate it with white light, and photograph it through a standard 100x microscope
objective.
The surface of this disc is made up of channels that are 200 nanometers wide, each
separated by a distance of 100 nanometers.
That’s smaller than an optical microscope can ordinarily resolve using white light.
So any detail showing these channels is clear evidence that the spider silk is acting
as a superlens.
The images show exactly these details. “This provides evidence of the super-
resolution capability of spider silk to overcome the optical diffraction limit,” say

52
Monks and co. “This is the first biological superlens system that has successfully
overcome the diffraction limit.”
That’s interesting work, not least because spider silk is easy to come by,
wonderfully flexible, and hugely robust. That means it could be used in a wide
range of situations.
Monks and co suggest running the silk back and forth to create a two-dimensional
array, which could be encapsulated in a transparent medium such as a tape of some
kind. This could then be placed on any sample that needs to be resolved.
Clearly biological superlenses have significant potential for the future.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1604.08119: Spider Silk: The Mother Nature’s
Biological Superlens

•
•
•
•

Tagged

optics, miscroscopes, spider silk

Emerging Technology from the arXiv Contributor

Emerging Technology from the arXiv covers the latest ideas and technologies that
appear on the Physics arXiv preprint server. It is part of the Physics arXiv Blog.
Email:… More

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Biomedicine

Biotech Dumb Money Looks Smart in $6 Billion Stemcentrx Sale

AbbVie’s purchase of the cancer fighting startup backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders
Fund bodes well for biotech funding.

• by Antonio Regalado

53
 • April 28, 2016
The largest ever investment bet by the storied venture firm Founders Fund has paid
off.
The drug company AbbVie, based in Massachusetts, said it would pay $5.8 billion
in cash and stock to take over Stemcentrx, a little-known biotech backed by
Founders Fund and whose strategy for treating cancer we first wrote about in
September.
The deal includes another $4 billion in cash payments if Stemcentrx’s experimental
drugs, still in clinical trials, actually pan out. According to Business Insider, the full
value would make it one of the very largest acquisitions of a private, venture-
backed company in history, possibly trailing only the $19 billion acquisition of
WhatsApp by Facebook.
The head-turning price tag reflects intense demand for new cancer drugs, but
AbbVie is also taking a big risk. “I think that this deal is going to end up looking
either very smart or very stupid,” writes Derek Lowe, the well-known drug blogger.
About $100 billion worth of cancer drugs are sold annually worldwide and new
cancer treatments dominate the list of medicines in clinical trials.
Stemcentrx was unusual because its financial backers weren’t well-known biotech
VCs. Instead, its largest single investor was Founders Fund, better known for
backing outfits like SpaceX and Palantir Technologies, but which believed it could
improve the typically low odds of drug success. Brian Singerman, a partner at
Founders Fund, tells Fortune the fund managers aren’t space experts either, but still
invested in Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Now the biotech “dumb money” looks pretty smart, and that could tempt other
venture funds to shift their cash away from social media and software and into
biotech, too. "There’s a tsunami brewing," Stuart Peterson, a founder of Artis
Ventures and an early investor in Stemcentrx, told Business Insider. "[Cancer] is a
big problem that’s meaningful for us on a global basis. This is where we should be
focused."
Stemcentrx was founded on the theory that certain cancers have stem cells that drive
them to spread. It built a slick manufacturing center and a huge colony of more than
18,000 mice. The setup allowed them to try and launch a large number of drugs
against different cancers. So far, it has reported results for only one drug, to treat
small-cell lung cancer, but has several others in early testing.
Clearly, with the sale, Stemcentrx has decided it’s not going to try to be the next
Amgen or Genentech on its own. That could be seen as an astute move by Peter
Thiel, the investor who leads Founders Fund, and his partners. They and other
investors will net several billion dollars in profit, but are letting AbbVie now take
on most of the risk, since drugs generally fail in costly human trials.
As Thiel told us last year:
There is disturbingly little intuition into what biotech companies are worth. If you
are able to produce a drug that cures some sizable disease for which there is no cure

54
at all, that is worth billions, or tens of billions of dollars. And if you don’t succeed
it’s worth nothing.
(Read more: Fortune, Business Insider, Founder’s Fund statement on Medium,
“Peter Thiel Backs Biotech Unicorn Fighting Cancer Stem Cells,” "Peter Thiel
Explains Biotech Investing Rationale: Get Rid of Randomness")

•
•
•
•

Tagged

Peter Thiel, Stemcentrx, Founders Fund, cancer, stem cells

Antonio Regalado Senior Editor, Biomedicine

I am the senior editor for biomedicine for MIT Technology Review. I look for stories
about how technology is changing medicine and biomedical research. Before
joining MIT Technology Review in July 2011, I lived in São Paulo, Brazil,… More

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/why-china-is-a-
genetic-powerhouse-with-a-problem/article6399668/?page=all
Why China is a genetic powerhouse with a problem

CAROLYN ABRAHAM AND CAROLYNNE WHEELER

TORONTO and SHENZHEN, CHINA — Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Saturday, Dec. 15, 2012 4:51AM EST

Last updated Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2012 4:52PM EST

55
In the South China city of Shenzhen, a thriving manufacturing hub known for cheap
goods and high-tech electronics, the genetic secrets of life roll off machines by the
minute.Here at the global headquarters of BGI-Shenzhen, housed in a former shoe
factory, the genomic revolution runs on an industrial scale. Powered by an army of
young lab technicians and banks of high-end, U.S.-made sequencers that hum 24/7,
the DNA of human kind is decoded with conveyor-belt speed and brute force.

Interactive
The DNA Dilemma: Why science wants your genome

Video
The Personal Genome Project: A brave new world for science and privacy

DNA Dilemma
Cancer in the family: Sisters search for answers

But not just human DNA. Once known as the Beijing Genomics Institute, BGI is on
a mission to sequence the genomes of a vast array of living things. It has already
done rice, the cucumber, the Giant Panda, the Arabian camel, the chicken, the
coronavirus behind severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), 40 strains of
silkworm and the Tibetan antelope, to name just a few.

Its services are in high demand. It has unravelled the DNA of a 4,000-year-old
Greenlander dubbed Inuk, teamed with Saudi Biosciences to sequence Arab
genomes and with the University of Edinburgh to decode plants, animals and people
in Scotland. Canadian and U.S. research groups are repeat customers.

As with many things made in China, the price is hard to beat. Drug companies,
doctors and researchers around the world are in awe, and more than a bit envious of
BGI’s resources.

As a Canadian government scientist tweeted: “China’s big push in genomics. 128

Illumina sequencers in an old shoe factory and I can’t get a single one for my lab.”

56
But along with the envy, there is discomfort and, in the United States, outright fear
that an enterprise backed in part with bank loans supported by the Chinese
government has unfettered access to the genetic building blocks of humanity. DNA,
after all, contains the chemical hallmarks of what makes each of us unique – the raw
material that may hold the keys to the next breakthroughs in science and medicine.

What might China – with its poor record of enforcing intellectual property laws and
history of human-rights abuses – do with this information?

U.S. officials first raised eyebrows after BGI snapped up a record-breaking order
for 128 cutting-edge sequencers made by San Diego-based Illumina. but the
concerns are more urgent now that the authorities are deliberating whether to allow
the Chinese company to buy Complete Genomics of California, a major U.S.
sequencing company.

The acquisition would help to cement China’s supremacy as the world’s top
genome sequencer, boost its technical prowess and give it a strong U.S. base, but
the deal has officials there fretting over both the security of genetic data and
national security.

Because the technologies involved “have national security implications related to

bioweapons, this bears strict scrutiny,” says Michael Wessel, who sits on the U.S.-
China Economic and Security Review Commission. “Are there capabilities here that
can be adverse to American interests?” he told the Washington paper Politico last
week.

But some feel that such fears have more to do with trade than security. Last week,
The Associated Press reported that China has overtaken the United States as the
world’s largest trading partner. This week, the United Nations found it also has
surpassed the U.S. in patent applications, although the quality of its patents is often
disputed.

Harvard University geneticist and entrepreneur George Church, an adviser to many

biotech companies, dismisses concerns over China’s dominance in genomics as
“misplaced nationalism.” Mark Poznansky, head of the Ontario Genomics Institute,
agrees: “There’s recognition that we just can’t compete. I think that’s part of the
paranoia.”

BGI argues that there’s “absolutely no basis for such a wild and speculative claim”
of national-security threats and bioweapons risks. It says those fears are sour grapes
seeded by Illumina, which also bid for Complete Genomics but lost to out to BGI.

57
Writing to Complete Genomics directors last month, Illumina said BGI is a “foreign
state-owned entity,” and the deal raises “national security, industrial policy,
personal identifier information protection and other concerns.”

BGI denies that it is state-owned, but, ironically, even as it makes a big play for the
world’s DNA, China is cracking down to ensure that the genomes of its own
citizens stay home. Its state council is now drafting regulations to protect the
country’s “human genetic resources,” fearing that it will lose intellectual-property
rights over its citizens’ genetic information.

Despite the international trade tangles over DNA, Canadian scientists familiar with
BGI generally feel that the biotech giant should inspire, rather than intimidate, the
rest of the world. Tom Hudson, president and scientific director of the Ontario
Institute for Cancer Research, says many countries are more talk than action when it
comes to research, but China makes things happen – “there’s extreme momentum.”

BGI’s list of goals tells the story: It aims to improve the human lifespan by five
years, increase global food production by 10 per cent, decode half of all genetic
diseases to seek treatments and cut birth defects by 50 per cent.

“We are a little bit ambitious,” says Wang Jun, BGI’s 36-year-old executive
director, “but we are ambitious for good reason.”

Rise of a global player

It has grown up by the sea in Shenzhen since 2007, but the Beijing Genomics
Institute was born in the Chinese capital on Sept. 9, 1999 (considered auspicious
because the numbers are associated with longevity). It was the brainchild of three
academics who had returned from the United States determined that China join the
international effort to map the first human genome.

It was a daring move, as the researchers had yet to persuade the government –
essentially China’s only source of research funding – that their cause was
worthwhile. Even then, the Human Genome Project drew little attention in China;
only when its completion was announced at the White House in June, 2000, did
China’s president learn by watching CNN that his country had played a role.

Since then, BGI – which officially operates as a private non-profit company – has
grown astronomically, luring back postdoctoral fellows trained in the West and
hiring science grads by the hundreds straight out of school. The average age of its

58
more than 4,000 employees is 26, and one-quarter of them are bused to and from
company dorms, complete with cafeterias, a medical clinic and a gym.

The youthful labour force gives BGI an edge: Employees make a paltry sum by
Western standards (but competitive for China) and they bring a youthful energy to
the floor of what has been called “the sequence factory.”

Ontario’s Dr. Hudson considers such youth an asset: “What they lack in seasoned
expertise they make up for in their boldness.” But he notes that there are two sides
to BGI. One is the founding group of seasoned scientists, still big contributors to
major collaborations, including the International Cancer Consortium, which he
helped to launch (a 17-nation bid to decode the DNA of 25,000 cancer patients).
BGI also has its flagship effort, called the 3M project, a bid to map, with
international help, a million plant and animal genomes, a million human genomes
and a million micro-ecosystems.

The other arm is the one fuelling BGI’s rapid growth – the global sequencing
service – announced with a full-page ad in a leading science journal shortly after its
2010 sequencer shopping spree (each was worth about $500,000). The purchase was
financed largely by the China Development Bank, and most of the machines now
run non-stop in Shenzhen or in nearby Hong Kong, where regulations for importing
samples are less restrictive than on the mainland.

As the ability to decode DNA becomes faster and cheaper, BGI expects to sequence
40,000 to 50,000 genomes this year – more than 10 a minute. And quantity isn’t the
only improvement, says Dr. Poznansky of the Ontario Genomics Institute, He
visited Shenzhen in 2010 and, “within a year, the quality of the data coming from
BGI went from being horrible, to pretty darn good.”

Yet as BGI cements its role as the world’s sequencer, uneasiness persists about just
how much genetic information it will collect and be the first to mine. Dr. Poznansky
is familiar with the security concerns: “What if the Chinese keep the data … If they
make the discoveries, they will own it. … Are we confident they won’t steal the
data?”

This view, he says, stems largely from the ethos of the pharmaceutical industry:
“We won’t go into China or India and build labs there because they won’t respect
intellectual property laws.”

Dr. Wang, its executive director, says BGI is well aware of such concerns. He
insists that it takes extra precautions to ensure that intellectual-property rights are
respected: “We align with all international standards, because we are very
international too.”

59
To that end, it has strived to demonstrate that it is independent of state control, in
part by distancing itself from Beijing and the government-affiliated Chinese
Academy of Science by moving to Shenzhen.

However, Dr. Wang does acknowledge the need for government support. And,
along with government grants, the company’s major loan of $1.5-billion over 10
years from the state-backed development bank came amid a state infusion of
investment designed to ward off economic recession. Not only does the bank lend
on generous terms to projects deemed to be in the national interest, repayment is
frequently extended significantly to let Chinese companies grow without fear of
defaulting.

As well, several of BGI’s senior researchers are still with the science academy,
dividing their time between government and company work, and its agriculture
operation has been designated a “key state laboratory.” And the company is
Beijing’s major partner in a new national gene bank to be housed nearby and to help
China protect and make use of its “precious genetic resources,” according to state
media.

Like most sizable enterprises in China, state-owned and private, BGI has a
Communist Party committee. A banner in the sequencing lab reads: “Only with data
can you find truth, and only with truth can you serve the country.”

Ethical debate just beginning

In the West, genetic research has long fuelled debates over ethics, privacy and the
need to protect data – but less so in China, where the needs of the state have
historically trumped individual rights. For instance, some wonder just how China,
with its one-child policy, might use genetic technologies on its own people.

“We’ve seen other sorts of human-rights abuses in China,” says Marcy Darnovsky
of the non-profit Center for Genetics and Society, based in Berkeley, Calif., noting
the risk that prenatal tests could be used to phase out birth defects. “It starts to
smack of … eugenics.”

In 2009, CNN reported on a unusual summer camp in Chongqing where children

were given DNA tests to try to identify their natural talents so that they could be
steered toward suitable careers. Most scientists, including those with BGI, dismiss
the notion that such predictive tests have any credibility, but the program indicates
how genetic technology could be deployed in the world’s most populous country.

60
At the same time, U.S. officials keep a constant vigil for examples of intellectual-
property theft, and scandals of misappropriated medical data are rampant. This
week, the dean of Nanjing University’s pharmacy school was accused of using
blood samples from local hospitals without permission to create a private genetic
data bank.

But even as the scandal plays out – and BGI staffers await word on the acquisition
of Complete Genomics – the mood at the old shoe factory in Shenzhen is brimming
with optimism. Researchers here see a new era dawning for China to make a major
contribution to global health – one that includes sound ethics.

Qi Ming, the company’s deputy general manager, says BGI is diligent with patient
consent forms, has an institutional review board for projects involving humans, and
requires that its researchers adhere to standards required by international scientific
journals.

“The bigger goal,” Dr. Wang adds, “is, ‘Can we do something good for society?’ ”

Dr. Qi, also director of Zhejiang University’s Centre for Genetic and Genomic
Medicine, says BGI’s founders are well equipped to find their way through the
ethical minefield. “We started from day one to pay attention to these issues. We all
came from the U.S. or European schools so we all have that training.”

Single page
More Related to this Story

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• Why your DNA is a gold mine for marketers
• Our Time to Lead Would you make your DNA and health data public if it
may help cure disease?

Topics

• Bgi Inc.
• University of Edinburgh
• United States of America
• Shenzhen
• China
• California
• Weekend readin

Despite the international trade tangles over DNA, Canadian scientists familiar with
BGI generally feel that the biotech giant should inspire, rather than intimidate, the

61
rest of the world. Tom Hudson, president and scientific director of the Ontario
Institute for Cancer Research, says many countries are more talk than action when it
comes to research, but China makes things happen – “there’s extreme momentum.”

BGI’s list of goals tells the story: It aims to improve the human lifespan by five
years, increase global food production by 10 per cent, decode half of all genetic
diseases to seek treatments and cut birth defects by 50 per cent.

“We are a little bit ambitious,” says Wang Jun, BGI’s 36-year-old executive
director, “but we are ambitious for good reason.”

Rise of a global player

It has grown up by the sea in Shenzhen since 2007, but the Beijing Genomics
Institute was born in the Chinese capital on Sept. 9, 1999 (considered auspicious
because the numbers are associated with longevity). It was the brainchild of three
academics who had returned from the United States determined that China join the
international effort to map the first human genome.

It was a daring move, as the researchers had yet to persuade the government –
essentially China’s only source of research funding – that their cause was
worthwhile. Even then, the Human Genome Project drew little attention in China;
only when its completion was announced at the White House in June, 2000, did
China’s president learn by watching CNN that his country had played a role.

Since then, BGI – which officially operates as a private non-profit company – has
grown astronomically, luring back postdoctoral fellows trained in the West and
hiring science grads by the hundreds straight out of school. The average age of its
more than 4,000 employees is 26, and one-quarter of them are bused to and from
company dorms, complete with cafeterias, a medical clinic and a gym.

The youthful labour force gives BGI an edge: Employees make a paltry sum by
Western standards (but competitive for China) and they bring a youthful energy to
the floor of what has been called “the sequence factory.”

Ontario’s Dr. Hudson considers such youth an asset: “What they lack in seasoned
expertise they make up for in their boldness.” But he notes that there are two sides
to BGI. One is the founding group of seasoned scientists, still big contributors to
major collaborations, including the International Cancer Consortium, which he
helped to launch (a 17-nation bid to decode the DNA of 25,000 cancer patients).

62
BGI also has its flagship effort, called the 3M project, a bid to map, with
international help, a million plant and animal genomes, a million human genomes
and a million micro-ecosystems.

The other arm is the one fuelling BGI’s rapid growth – the global sequencing
service – announced with a full-page ad in a leading science journal shortly after its
2010 sequencer shopping spree (each was worth about $500,000). The purchase was
financed largely by the China Development Bank, and most of the machines now
run non-stop in Shenzhen or in nearby Hong Kong, where regulations for importing
samples are less restrictive than on the mainland.

As the ability to decode DNA becomes faster and cheaper, BGI expects to sequence
40,000 to 50,000 genomes this year – more than 10 a minute. And quantity isn’t the
only improvement, says Dr. Poznansky of the Ontario Genomics Institute, He
visited Shenzhen in 2010 and, “within a year, the quality of the data coming from
BGI went from being horrible, to pretty darn good.”

Yet as BGI cements its role as the world’s sequencer, uneasiness persists about just
how much genetic information it will collect and be the first to mine. Dr. Poznansky
is familiar with the security concerns: “What if the Chinese keep the data … If they
make the discoveries, they will own it. … Are we confident they won’t steal the
data?”

This view, he says, stems largely from the ethos of the pharmaceutical industry:
“We won’t go into China or India and build labs there because they won’t respect
intellectual property laws.”

Single page

• Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next
• Dr. Wang, its executive director, says BGI is well aware of such concerns.
He insists that it takes extra precautions to ensure that intellectual-property
rights are respected: “We align with all international standards, because we
are very international too.”
• To that end, it has strived to demonstrate that it is independent of state
control, in part by distancing itself from Beijing and the government-
affiliated Chinese Academy of Science by moving to Shenzhen.
• However, Dr. Wang does acknowledge the need for government support.
And, along with government grants, the company’s major loan of $1.5-
billion over 10 years from the state-backed development bank came amid a

63
 state infusion of investment designed to ward off economic recession. Not
only does the bank lend on generous terms to projects deemed to be in the
national interest, repayment is frequently extended significantly to let
Chinese companies grow without fear of defaulting.
• As well, several of BGI’s senior researchers are still with the science
academy, dividing their time between government and company work, and
its agriculture operation has been designated a “key state laboratory.” And
the company is Beijing’s major partner in a new national gene bank to be
housed nearby and to help China protect and make use of its “precious
genetic resources,” according to state media.
• Like most sizable enterprises in China, state-owned and private, BGI has a
Communist Party committee. A banner in the sequencing lab reads: “Only
with data can you find truth, and only with truth can you serve the country.”
•
• Ethical debate just beginning
• In the West, genetic research has long fuelled debates over ethics, privacy
and the need to protect data – but less so in China, where the needs of the
state have historically trumped individual rights. For instance, some wonder
just how China, with its one-child policy, might use genetic technologies on
its own people.
• “We’ve seen other sorts of human-rights abuses in China,” says Marcy
Darnovsky of the non-profit Center for Genetics and Society, based in
Berkeley, Calif., noting the risk that prenatal tests could be used to phase out
birth defects. “It starts to smack of … eugenics.”
• In 2009, CNN reported on a unusual summer camp in Chongqing where
children were given DNA tests to try to identify their natural talents so that
they could be steered toward suitable careers. Most scientists, including
those with BGI, dismiss the notion that such predictive tests have any
credibility, but the program indicates how genetic technology could be
deployed in the world’s most populous country.
• At the same time, U.S. officials keep a constant vigil for examples of
intellectual-property theft, and scandals of misappropriated medical data are
rampant. This week, the dean of Nanjing University’s pharmacy school was
accused of using blood samples from local hospitals without permission to
create a private genetic data bank.
• But even as the scandal plays out – and BGI staffers await word on the
acquisition of Complete Genomics – the mood at the old shoe factory in
Shenzhen is brimming with optimism. Researchers here see a new era
dawning for China to make a major contribution to global health – one that
includes sound ethics.
• Qi Ming, the company’s deputy general manager, says BGI is diligent with
patient consent forms, has an institutional review board for projects

64
 involving humans, and requires that its researchers adhere to standards
required by international scientific journals.
• “The bigger goal,” Dr. Wang adds, “is, ‘Can we do something good for
society?’ ”
• Dr. Qi, also director of Zhejiang University’s Centre for Genetic and
Genomic Medicine, says BGI’s founders are well equipped to find their way
through the ethical minefield. “We started from day one to pay attention to
these issues. We all came from the U.S. or European schools so we all have
that training.”

https://www.linkedin.com/company/beijing-genomics-institute-shenzhen
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BGI (formerly known as Beijing Genomics Institute) was founded in Beijing on
Sept 9th, 1999, with the mission of supporting the development of science and
technology, building strong research teams, and promoting the development of
commercial scientific services. With a goal of excellence, high efficiency, and
accuracy, BGI has successfully completed a large numerous projects. These include
sequencing 1% of the human genome for the International Human Genome Project;
contributing 10% to the International Human HapMap Project; carrying out
research to combat SARS; being a key player in the Sino-British Chicken Genome
Project; and completely sequencing the rice genome, the silkworm genome; the first
Asian diploid genome, the giant panda genome, and many more. Much of this
research has been published in the top international academic journals Nature and
Science. In conjunction with carrying out these projects, BGI has established its
own technical platforms based on large-scale genomic sequencing, efficient
bioinformatics analyses and innovative genetic health care initiatives. In the course
of attaining these goals, BGI has undergone a historic breakthrough from a small
sequencing center in 1999 to the largest genomics institute in Asia in 2009, and
become one of the leading genomics institutes in the world.
Specialties
business, life science, sequencing, Genomics, Bioinformatics

65
 • Website

http://www.genomics.org.cn

• Industry

Biotechnology

• Type

Non Profit
 Headquar ter s

Beishan industry zone,Yantian dist. Shenzhen, GuangDong 518083 China

 Company Size
1001-5000 employees
 Founded
1999
http://www.nature.com/news/visionary-leader-of-china-s-genomics-powerhouse-
steps-down-1.18059

Visionary leader of China’s genomics powerhouse steps down

Jun Wang leaves post as chief executive of BGI and will pursue research in
artificial intelligence.

• Ewen Callaway
• & David Cyranoski

24 July 2015

66
Genomics pioneer Jun Wang will now pursue research in artificial intelligence
Update, 28 July: Since this article was published, Nature has interviewed Jun Wang
about his plans, which include building an AI-based health monitoring system
based on a million genomes. Read the full interview here.
The revered head of a world-leading genomics research centre in China abruptly
stepped down last week.
Jun Wang is leaving his post as the chief executive of BGI in Shenzhen, and will
pursue research into artificial intelligence, according to a statement posted on the
BGI website on 17 July. He will remain affiliated with the genomics powerhouse,
the announcement says. Wang also holds faculty positions at the universities of
Copenhagen and Aarhus in Denmark and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Related stories

• Flock of geneticists redraws bird family tree

• Chinese project probes the genetics of genius
• China buys US sequencing firm

More related stories

The statement credits Wang for his role in BGI’s major scientific accomplishments
over the past 16 years, which include sequencing the genome of an Asian person1,

67
the giant panda2 and the human gut microbiome3, as well as contributions to the
Human Genome Project and the rice-genome-sequencing initiative4.
“He’s had a huge role, really. I think it’s been his drive and enthusiasm that’s been
the reason why there are so many large-scale genomic projects around,” says Tom
Gilbert, an evolutionary geneticist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in
Copenhagen, who has collaborated with BGI and Wang on numerous sequencing
projects. Wang was not immediately available for comment.

Surprise move
The 39-year-old has worked at BGI since it opened in 1999 in Beijing. It was
previously known as the Beijing Genomics Institute, and moved to Shenzhen in
2007. Wang founded the institute's bioinformatics department, employing legions of
young computer scientists to make sense of the mountains of data that BGI’s
sequencers — which make up the world’s largest DNA sequencing centre —
churned out.
He rose to the top of BGI, and led its transformation from a plucky sequencing
outfit to a research powerhouse. In 2012, Nature included Wang in its Nature 10, an
annual list of people who mattered in science that year.
Erich Jarvis, a neuroscientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, says
that Wang told him in person at a meeting in the United States last week that he was
stepping down as BGI’s head. “It was all a surprise,” says Jarvis. “His reasoning
was that he felt like he’s done a lot for BGI already, and that he would like to now
move on to try new horizons.”
Commenting on the switch to artificial intelligence, Jarvis says that Wang has a
long-term interest in the area, but “running a genome company, he couldn’t get to it
as much as he liked”. Jarvis adds: “He was always interested in the brain.”

Bird genomes
Jarvis is part of international collaborations with BGI — one that aims to sequence
the genomes of 10,000 vertebrates and another that is focussed on 10,500 bird
species. He expects these efforts to go ahead in Wang’s absence. “He won’t have as
much weight, but he will have some influence in making sure these projects go
through,” says Jarvis.
Researchers contacted by Nature had nothing but praise for Wang. “He is really the
brains behind the operation,” says Rasmus Nielsen, a population geneticist at the
University of California, Berkeley, who collaborated with Wang and BGI to
identify genetic adaptations to high altitude among Tibetans5, 6.
Several years ago, Jarvis travelled to Shenzhen to discuss the bird-genomes effort
with Wang and other key collaborators. The international team had sequenced about
40 genomes but needed more species to determine how different bird groups relate
to one another7. Wang proposed sequencing every bird species on the planet — not
realizing that their numbers exceed 10,000. “After a half-hour of talking he said,
‘Let’s just do it. Let’s do all 10,000. That’s going to be a game changer’,” recalls

68
Jarvis. “That’s really his spirit. If it’s something big — something difficult — then
his answer is, ‘Let’s do it’.”
Nature
doi:10.1038/nature.2015.18059
References
Đây là nguyên văn bài phỏng vấn:
http://www.nature.com/news/exclusive-genomics-pioneer-jun-wang-on-his-new-ai-
venture-1.18091
Exclusive: Genomics pioneer Jun Wang on his new AI venture
Visionary leader of China's BGI tells Nature why he is stepping down to build a
health-monitoring system based on a million genomes.

• David Cyranoski

28 July 2015

Article tools
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BGI

69
Jun Wang.
Jun Wang is one of China’s most famous scientists. Since joining the genome-
sequencing powerhouse BGI when it started up 16 years ago, he has participated in
some of its biggest accomplishments. These include sequencing the first genome of
an Asian person1, the giant panda2 and the human gut microbiome3, as well as
contributions to the Human Genome Project. Wang has led BGI since 2007 (when it
stopped using the name Beijing Genomics Institute and moved its headquarters to
Shenzhen). But on 17 July, the institute announced that he will give up that position
to pursue research into artificial intelligence (AI).
In an exclusive interview, Wang tells Nature why he now plans to devote himself to
a new “lifetime project” of creating an AI health-monitoring system that would
identify relationships between individual human genomic data, physiological traits
(phenotypes) and lifestyle choices in order to provide advice on healthier living and
to predict, and prevent, disease. This interview has been edited and condensed for
clarity.

What is the concept behind your AI project?

Basically, I am just trying to feed an AI system with masses of data. Then that
system could learn to understand human health and human life better than we do.
The AI will try to draw a formula for life. Life is digital, like a computer program
— if you want to understand the results of the programming, how the genes lead to
phenotypes, it is sufficiently complicated for you to need an AI system to figure out
the rules.
“I am a risk-taker. I am betting all of my credibility on this.”
The AI system will basically consist of two components. The first is the big
supercomputing platforms. We already have access to those through cloud
computing and supercomputing centres. These will run or devise algorithms that
look for relationships between genes, lifestyle and environmental factors, and
predict phenotypes. The other thing is big data. We want to have data from one
million individuals. And we want the data to be alive, in the sense that they can
update their phenotype information at any time point. Other big computing
companies, such as Google, could eventually do this, but we want to do it first. And
we have the experience with the big data.

You need a million genomes for this?

To really understand complex traits that are determined by a lot of genes, such as
height, you will need a million samples. We have 100,000 now, and it is just not
enough. But I don’t want to end at one million. Ten million, 100 million will be
next. And it is not just the genome. We will get data at many levels — genomics,
proteomics, metabolomics and lipidomics. As well as the other ‘omics’ data, we
will include your life information, how much you exercise, environmental data. All
this will be part of it. We will have one terabyte per person, so one exabyte for a
million people.

70
Everything from the genotype to the phenotype can be digitized. To make AI work,
we have to make it digital. I am more concerned with digital life in general than just
genomics. It’s not a million-genome project, it’s a million-digitized-lives project.

What is the end goal?

Related stories

• Visionary leader of China’s genomics powerhouse steps down

• Chinese project probes the genetics of genius
• China buys US sequencing firm

More related stories

The end goal is to develop an ecosystem. It will be a virtual village. When people
‘stay’ in the virtual village, it will advise them on how to live more healthily and for
longer, including hints about what they should eat and what exercise they should be
taking. It could tell them about warning signs before they get depressed; when they
are stressed, it could tell them how to release the stress. All the advice will be based
on various factors including genetic make-up and lifestyle. Individuals, doctors,
researchers, pharma companies will all be part of it.
Even if the AI system can’t find the answers, maybe the pharma companies will.
The data will still be valuable.

How will you finance the project?

I am thinking that I may try to raise 10 billion yuan (US$1.6 billion) to make the
first prototype [based on a million samples]. I don’t really think about how to get
the money. If you do the right thing — if you have a virtual village where people
live longer and are healthier — the money will follow. I will test the water on
several business models. Each one will have ways of trying to make people stick to
the platform. I don’t know which will win. Maybe we will have to recruit 10 million
people to get a 1-million-person complete dataset. But who cares. Let’s just do it.

Is this project the only reason that you stepped down from leading BGI? There
are rumours that you were forced out because you failed to bring the company to
an IPO [initial public offering].
People speculated a lot on the reasons, and it was quite annoying. The plans for an
IPO are on the right track. One of the main reasons I resigned as chief executive is
that the current BGI model is increasingly a diagnostics or research-service model,
and it is quite stable now. I want to do more than that. But BGI will still be a very
important part of the new initiative.

71
What do you say to the concern that this sounds too ambitious?
I don’t know. I just do it. I’ve been through that a lot. People have told me I had
crazy ideas before — the rice genome project or the short-read assembly of the
panda genome [an influential demonstration of next-generation sequencing that
used small fragments, or ‘short reads’, of DNA]. But you know, it turned out pretty
good.
This is my lifetime project. Before I retire, I want to make this happen. I’m 39, so I
hope to make the whole thing happen in the next 20 years. I’m a little bit nervous,
but also excited, because I know I'm doing the right thing. I am a risk-taker. I am
betting all of my credibility on this.
Nature
doi:10.1038/nature.2015.18091
References
http://www.darkdaily.com/chinas-genome-mapping-giant-bgi-is-poised-to-become-
an-international-leader-in-gene-sequencing-and-may-play-major-role-in-
interpretation-of-genetic-test-results#axzz47rUVKcC6
China’s Genome-Mapping Giant BGI Is Poised to Become an International
Leader in Gene Sequencing and May Play Major Role in Interpretation of Genetic
Test Results
Tweet
15
Category: Digital Pathology, Instruments & Equipment, Laboratory Instruments &
Laboratory Equipment, Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News,
Laboratory Operations, Laboratory Pathology
Published: April 6 2015
However, China has a shortage of well-trained pathologists, which is why some
American lab organizations are establishing medical lab testing ventures in
China
If experts are right, a company in China is poised to become the world’s largest at
gene sequencing. In addition, the huge volume of genetic data it generates is
expected to give this company the world’s largest database of genetic information.
Such developments could mean that, in just a few years, many pathologists and
molecular Ph.D.s in the United States will be accessing this trove of genetic data as
they conduct research to identify new biomarkers or work with clinical specimens.
The company at the center of all this attention is genome-sequencing giant BGI,
located in Shenzhen, China. It owns 230 of the largest, high-throughput gene-
sequencing machines and wants to become the world’s largest genome-mapping
company.
Launched in 1999 as the Beijing Genomics Institute, BGI’s first success was a small
role in the International Human Genome Project, the only developing nation to do
so. That initial foray onto the world stage was followed by a string of achievements,

72
including sequencing the rice genome, which landed BGI on the cover of the
journal Science.
BGI has also carried out research on the SARS virus and E. coli, contributed to the
International Human HapMap Project, and mapped the genomes of species ranging
from the giant panda to 40 types of silkworms, according to a story in The New
Yorker. Identifying the genes associated with extremely high I.Q. is among the
company’s latest goals.
“We represent a new model of an international Chinese organization,” stated BGI
Director Wang Jun, Ph.D., in a recent article in the Financial Times. “China has a
legitimate shot to be a lead player on the international stage. Our technology can
change the world.”

BGI executive Wang Jun, Ph.D., predicts the gene-sequencing giant’s

“technology can change the world” and make China a leading player in an era
of healthcare big data. (Photo copyright BGI Americas)

Becoming a Major Player in Gene-Mapping

The company’s footprint has grown since it moved its headquarters in 2007 to
Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong. In addition, to the 4,000 employees
at its main facility, BGI has labs in Hong Kong, Children’s Hospital of
Philadelphia, University of California Davis, Vancouver Prostate Center, and the
European Genome Research Center in Copenhagen, Denmark.
BGI collaborates with dozens of organizations ranging from the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation to the Genome 10K Project.
BGI became a major player in genomic research in 2010 when it purchased 128 of
San Diego-based Illumina’s (NASDAQ:ILMN) then state-of-the-art DNA
sequencing machines, each of which came with a half-million dollar price tag,
according to the MIT Technology Review. Today, it owns more than 230 sequencers
from several manufacturers, a collection of technology that enables BGI to
sequence 30,000 human genomes a year, the BGI Americas website states.
Sharing Its Findings with the World

73
BGI, with its research and service divisions, is creating a gigantic repository of
genomic sequencing information. What will come of those mountains of data? The
New Yorker article indicates the company may share its findings with the world
scientific community, replicating the openness it exhibited in 2011 when BGI
sequenced the deadly E. coli outbreak in Germany in three days and tweeted the
results to the public.
In February, BGI was among 70 organizations, including the Broad Institute of
MIT, Harvard, the Wellcome Trust, and the National Institutes of Health, that
formed an alliance to improve how genomic and clinical data are managed and
shared. This collaboration may eventually lead to creation of “standards and
technology for sharing big data from sequencing on a global scale,” a recent article
in FierceBiotechIT states.
“Big data has the potential to play an important role in the transformation of
medical care,” Peteris Zilgalvis, J.D.,, head of Unit ICT for Health and Well-being
in the European Commission, stated in a brief in HIMSS Insights.
Chinese Dominance in the Genomics Marketplace
Yet concerns remain that the Chinese government may shut the door on the free
flow of information out of BGI.
“BGI has often said that all such data will be shared,” Michael Specter wrote in The
New Yorker. “There is no reason to believe that anyone there has any other goal. It
is possible, though, that the government won’t leave the choice in the company’s
hand.”
The genomic landscape changed in 2013 when BGI paid $117 million to buy
Complete Genomics, a California-based competitor to Illumina. This created
concern that BGI, the “world’s biggest consumer of sequencing technology,” could
“become one of its principal providers,” Spector said in the New Yorker article.
Since American biologist James Watson, Ph.D., and English physicist Francis
Crick, Ph.D., O.M., F.R.S., discovered the helical structure of DNA in 1953, the
United States has held a pre-eminent position in genomic research. Illumina CEO
Jay Flatley, who has navigated his sequencing platform company to a leadership
position, is leery of its rising Asian rival.
“We think they are working hard to establish Chinese dominance in this market,
which for the United States would be bad news,” he told The New Yorker. “It’s one
thing to sell Coke and another to sell the formula for Coke. And when they bought
Complete Genomics what they were allowed to do is buy the formula.”

74
Jay Flatley, CEO, Illumina, says BGI is “working hard to establish Chinese
dominance in this market.” (Photo copyright Forbes)

BGI, however, will have some catching up to do. A year ago, Illumina launched two
new platforms, the NextSeq500 System, a $250,000 machine that can sequence a
human genome and up to 16 exomes in a single day, and can switch to lower
throughput sequencing when needed, and the HiSeq X Ten Sequencing System, a
new high-throughput platform that Flatley says delivers on the long-sought goal of
producing a human genome for under $1,000.
“It is rare that you find a company that has 80% to 90% share of anything and is
driving the technology so fast that nobody can catch up,” stated Cathie Wood, chief
investment officer at ARK Investment Management, in a Forbes magazine story
that looked at Illumina’s growth and stock performance in recent years.
The emergence of a Chinese company as a world leader in the field of gene
sequencing and genomic big data is consistent with the progress Chinese companies
are making in many different fields and industries. At the same time, China’s
healthcare system has major deficiencies, particularly in having adequate numbers
of pathologists.
The shortage of trained pathologists in China is one reason why a number of
pathology and medical laboratory organizations in the United States are establishing
joint ventures with Chinese organizations. The goal is to provide sophisticated
clinical laboratory testing services in selected Chinese cities.
At some future point, these medical laboratory collaborations will probably also
involved genetic testing and the interpretation of genetic data for diagnostic and
therapeutic purposes. As that happens, BGI’s steadily-growing warehouse of
genetic data may make it the “go to” player for these applications.
—Andrea Downing Peck
Related Information:
Perspectives: Will Big Data Improve Medical Care?
The Gene Factory
NIH, BGI, Others Ally to Share Big Data in Genomics
Chinese Innovation: BGI’s Code for Success

75
Disruptive Genomics: Is China’s BGI the Epicenter of the World’s Biotech
Revolution?
BGI Americas: Leveraging leading technologies
Inside China’s Genome Factory
Illumina Launches Two New Platforms at JP Morgan Conference: Claims $1,000
Genome
NIH, BGI, others ally to share Big Data in genomics
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Read more: China’s Genome-Mapping Giant BGI Is Poised to Become an

International Leader in Gene Sequencing and May Play Major Role in Interpretation
of Genetic Test Results | Dark Daily http://www.darkdaily.com/chinas-genome-
mapping-giant-bgi-is-poised-to-become-an-international-leader-in-gene-
sequencing-and-may-play-major-role-in-interpretation-of-genetic-test-
results#ixzz47rUgv4lF

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/07/head-chinas-leading-genome-
sequencing-organization-steps-down-discusses-what-s-next

•
•
•
•

76
Jun Wang

BGI

Head of China's leading genome sequencing organization steps down,

discusses what’s next

By Dennis NormileJul. 28, 2015 , 1:00 PM

SHANGHAI, CHINA—Surprising many in the worldwide genomics community,

the head of Shenzhen-based sequencing powerhouse BGI stepped down earlier this
month. Jun Wang will now concentrate on research into artificial intelligence (AI),
the institute announced on 17 July.
Wang, 39, has been with BGI from its 1999 inception as the Beijing Genomics
Institute. While still a Ph.D. candidate at Peking University, Wang led the
bioinformatics team as BGI completed China's contribution to the Human Genome
Project and then sequenced the rice genome on its own. Wang took on additional
responsibilities as BGI launched more ambitious projects, including sequencing the
giant panda as well as multiple silk worms to identify genes selected for during

77
domestication. He became executive director in 2008 as BGI pushed into providing
sequencing services to other research groups, diagnostics, and applications in
agriculture. Along the way, BGI moved from Beijing to the southern Chinese city of
Shenzhen and grew into a global operation, with 5000 employees working at offices
scattered around the world.
Wang gained fame throughout the community for his quick decision-making and a
willingness to take on ambitious projects, such as an ongoing effort to sequence the
genomes of all 10,500 or so bird species.
With BGI firmly established, "I don't see myself continuing doing the same thing,"
Wang says. He will lead a new BGI initiative focusing on applying AI to the
challenges of analyzing and managing increasingly huge data sets in an effort to
help understand diseases and make the lives of ordinary people healthier. Wang
discussed his decision and his plans with ScienceInsider. His comments have been
edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: What led to this decision?
A: There were several reasons. The biggest is that I trained in AI even as an
undergraduate. To me both life science and genomics have now run into a
bottleneck in handling data from tens of thousands of samples, yet that is still not
enough to understand the genetics of disease. These huge data sets need new tools
for analysis. AI and machine learning could do something with big data and for
peoples' health.
Q: How will work on AI fit into BGI's overall strategy?
A: AI is only one way to analyze data. BGI will be involved but I'll be looking for
strategic partners, large information technology companies, and small data
companies. The strategy will evolve. The goal is a system to serve ordinary people
by making data accessible throughout [a health care] system. This will need both
science and service. It may eventually have some business model. Like the old BGI,
there will be research but also a commercial product.
Q: What aspect of AI will you focus on?
A: AI is a sexy word people use. The first goal is to digitalize the "omics" data for 1
million individuals—DNA, RNA, proteins, the metabolomics—and follow up with
clinical and even behavioral data. This needs new networks and the use of machine
learning, things I started to play with 20 years ago.
Q: When you started at BGI, did you ever envision it becoming what it is
today?
A: I can't say we designed BGI to become what it is. But we followed strategic
thinking at certain time points and it evolved. I'm a risk-taker. I'm always aiming for
something bigger, more challenging, for something to change the world. With BGI
where it is, it's a good time for me to move on.
Posted in:

• Asia/Pacific
• Scientific Community

78
DOI: 10.1126/science.aac8920

Dennis Normile

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https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/01/07/is-chinas-bgi-the-epicenter-of-
the-world-genomics-revolution/
Disruptive genomics: Is China’s BGI the epicenter of the world’s biotech
revolution?
Tabitha M. Powledge | January 7, 2014 | Genetic Literacy Project
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Image via Asian Scientist.

What is the world’s largest genomics organization? According to its own proud web
site, it’s BGI, the Chinese sequencing giant formerly known as the Beijing
Genomics Institute.
BGI seems to come by that expansive claim honestly. It possesses 178 sequencing
machines (purchased at half a million dollars each), and they churn out at least 25
percent of the world’s genomic data. That’s more sequence production than any
other single institution. BGI has sequenced the genomes of many thousands of
people, plus a great motley of other genomes: plant, animal, and microbial.
Those data come from Michael Specter’s piece on BGI in the January 6 New
Yorker. Given the New Yorker‘s famed fact-checking system, there seems no reason
to doubt them. For GLP readers, the article is a must-read.
However, “The Gene Factory” is paywalled. If that means it’s inaccessible for you,
much of the same information can be had in two earlier open-access articles by

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other writers: “Inside China’s Genome Factory,” Christina Larson’s Tech Review
piece from last winter and John Bohannon’s “Why Are Some People So Smart? The
Answer Could Spawn a Generation of Superbabies” in Wired last summer.
Technical challenges and hot-button issues
Specter’s piece has an added dimension, though: It’s a case study in how to place an
enormous amount of scientific information before a largely non-technical audience
with no pedagogical seams showing. While telling the BGI story, Specter has
achieved a compact and uncomplicated primer on genetic basics, genes and their
molecules. He even explains, very simply to be sure, how a sequencing machine
works.
Tech Review put BGI on its list of 50 Disruptive Companies for 2013. It’s an
uncommon mix of commercial biomedical services and basic genomic research
funded by those services. Larson quotes BGI’s president Wang Jian thus: “I use my
left hand to make money and my right hand to do basic research.” According to
Specter, BGI has 4,000 employees at its main facility, an 8-story former shoe
factory in Shenzhen with an associated dorm where many of them sleep. It also has
outposts around the world, from just-announced Chile to Abu Dhabi.
The New Yorker piece manages to touch on nearly all the technical challenges and
hot-button issues surrounding genomics—namely the potential impact of cheap
sequencing, future prospects for agricultural genomics, the frustrating quest for
disease genes, the genetics of obesity, infectious disease organism genomics,
reducing birth defects, the possibility of predictive genomics, finding genes for
intelligence, studies of human evolution and issues of scientific infrastructure such
as sharing of data and other genomic information and even the loss of US pre-
eminence in genomic research.
Intelligence genes and embryo selection
One topic missing from this comprehensive catalog is direct-to-consumer genetic
testing–although it might be argued that the piece does consider DTC services
tangentially. That’s because it takes up a development Specter and others see as
inevitable: embryo screening and selection, especially embryo screening and
selection for intelligence genes.
I guess I agree that embryo selection, a procreative technology already here in, well,
embryonic form, will before long be an everyday occurrence, at least in wealthier
parts of the world. Selecting a single embryo from a bunch of them on account of its
genes will be just one more baby-making methodology. It will join IVF and other
forms of ART–the non-ironic acronym for assisted reproductive technology–that are
now all but routine.
The well-off will certainly be inclined to pay extra for a child that is potentially new
and improved over any old offspring achieved by the usual coital lottery. And note
that BGI already offers preimplantation genomics testing services. So when its
research teams do identify intelligence genes, BGI will be well placed to purvey
ways of making sure your kid has them.
Searching for intelligence and genetic commerce

85
But first things first, and the first thing is that genes influencing intelligence are still
to be discovered. BGI is trying to find them via its Cognitive Genomics project.
(The Cognitive Genomics Lab is also studying a particular brain defect called
prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize familiar faces. It’s not clear why this study
is part of its portfolio. Prosopagnosia seems mostly to result from damage to a
particular brain area during adult life; it appears to have little or nothing to do with
general intelligence or with genes, although perhaps there are some exceptions.)
The general intelligence project has plans to sequence the genomes of thousands of
super-smart people. You could be one of them; BGI is calling for volunteers. You’ll
need near-perfect SAT or GRE scores or a Ph.D. in physics or some other math-
related field (and from a top program at that). Get details here.
BGI officials cheerfully acknowledge that IQ enhancement, especially enhancement
that involves discarding embryos deemed inadequate, is a thorny issue. But they
brush aside the ethical complexities. And yet, Specter says, BGI declares that its
agricultural work does not involve GMOs because it does not want to get entangled
in GMO politics. BGI’s distinction between the two seems oddly contradictory. I
can’t help wondering if these conflicting assessments are based on BGI conjectures
about potential consumer demand–strong in the case of embryo selection, far more
unpredictable with GMOs.
Genes and their environments
Specter emphasizes the role of genes as determinants of a creature’s traits, including
intelligence. Perhaps that’s unavoidable in a piece about the world’s largest
producer of genomes, but it would have been nice–and instructive for the no doubt
large number of New Yorker readers who don’t know much about genetics–to see
some acknowledgment that genes do nothing except in context.
In his Wired piece, Bohannon notes that BGI discussions of intelligence genes
neglect to mention epistasis, the interaction of genes with one another. I would add
that it is even more important to point out that epigenetic events are central to what
genes do, a fact becoming increasingly obvious the more scientists learn about
them.
An organism’s functioning, especially its brain functioning, is affected dramatically
by epigenetics, a catchall term for the many molecular activities that turn genes off
and/or on in particular cells at particular times in life. There’s evidence that some
especially critical epigenetic events happen very early in development, even before
implantation. It is not enough to identify genes that influence intelligence or any
other trait; scientists will also need to learn what factors shape gene activity.
Hoping for open access
What will BGI do with the terabytes of data that pour out of its sequencers? Specter
reports that BGI says all its data will be freely available to anyone. “BGI intends to
transform DNA into a common resource, a kind of universal reference library—
freely accessible, wary scientists hope, to anyone who wants to use it.”
BGI made a lot of friends when its researchers swung into action on the deadly E.
coli strain O104:H4 that surfaced in Germany in 2011. They sequenced it in 3 days.

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They tweeted details. They made the data freely available. This openness was a
huge contrast to the Chinese government’s previous secretive response to the SARS
virus.
Such generous BGI behavior is an encouraging sign that its gigantic databases
really will be open to all. But what the government will have to say about such
openness is a cause for uncertainty. Specter notes, “BGI has often said that all such
data will be shared. There is no reason to believe that anyone there has any other
goal. It is possible, though, that the government won’t leave the choice in the
company’s hands.”
GLP columnist Tabitha M. Powledge is a long-time science journalist. She
writes On Science Blogs for the PLOS Blogs Network, and has new posts on
Fridays.
https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/12/09/personal-genomics-and-gene-
editing-revolutions-begs-for-global-regulatory-rethink/
Personal genomics and gene editing revolutions beg for global regulatory
rethink
Meredith Knight | December 9, 2014 | Genetic Literacy Project
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169

Under current regulations, location determines the changes we can make to human
genomes and the degree to which we can sequence them. While it may seem like
there is some ethical middle ground to which all countries would naturally
converge, when one looks at the specifics, that is certainly not the case.
In the United States, we allow screening of embryos for sex, and are comfortable
letting parents pick gender before implantation. American parents seem to pick girls
more, citing health concerns. In India and China, its unlawful to find out the sex of
an embryo because parents historically selected male children out of preference.

87
The United Kingdom has gone beyond the question of screening and is now
undertaken consideration of so-called “three parent babies.” In reality, this is IVF
using a two eggs, one that contains the nuclear DNA of a child’s mother and a
donor egg that contains mitochondrial DNA from a second woman. There are some
extremely rare and severe genetic disorders affecting mitochondria, the energy
generators of all our bodies’ cells. Using donor mitochondria allows women with
these diseases to have children. Critics say the use of donor genetic material in the
creation of an embryo is unethical.
And here is where it starts to get complicated because genetic editing is going far
beyond donor mitochondria and fast. We can already readily alter the genomes of
organisms for experimentation and agriculture in the lab. We use the technologies to
create food and medication. But there is little to stop us from turning that capability
to editing our human genomes likely beginning with single-gene diseases like cystic
fibrosis, then moving on to more complicated poly-genetic disorders and
potentiality traits, like intelligence.
And without an international regulatory framework, will culture-specific norms also
guide what is permissible for editing human genomes asks Foreign Affairs Jamie
Metz:
As the stakes increase, these types of differences will only be exacerbated.
Although Christian-majority countries like the United States may join the Vatican
and others in pushing for strong restrictions, and countries like Germany may have
strong reservations for historical reasons, others, such as China and Korea, whose
worldview is based less on the concept of a divine plan, will continue to be more
comfortable moving forward with human genetic engineering, as polling data has
shown.
Metz uses Chinese company BGI as an example. The company’s goal is to identify
genes associated with extremely IQ, then offer technologies to parents who want to
make sure their potential children have them. So far, the genetics of intelligence has
been a difficult problem to work out. But there is the potential this will happen
within decades. And, once these edits enter the gene pool, they will be heritable
Metz notes, creating generations of higher IQ individuals:
It doesn’t take a gene-ius to realize that if China started enhancing its population
and the United States did not, there could be serious competitive repercussions.
That doesn’t mean that international competitive pressures would force societies to
take up genetic enhancement against their will, just that those who don’t enhance,
like those who do, will need to face the consequences.
In the past, I’ve considered the discrepancies that the relatively high-cost of human
embryonic genetic engineering would create within a society, likely falling on
wealth and class lines and furthering societies’ inequality. But Metz’s point brings
up the very real possibility of huge shifts in the balance of world power between
first adopter societies and reluctant followers. The United Nations has a preliminary
and vague guidelines for use of human genetic technologies that center around
‘protecting the dignity of the genome’, but it is already outdated.

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Based on the pace that these technologies are coming on line, the time to think
about the international impacts is now, Metz says:
While this issue may seem far off to some and there are still serious scientific
hurdles to be overcome, it is approaching far faster than most people think. Maybe
we have five years to get serious, maybe ten. But given the velocity of scientific
progress, we don’t have 20… Although shorter-term issues such as terrorism and
regional crises dominate today’s headlines, the ongoing revolution in human
genetics will ultimately prove far more significant to our future. It deserves much
more attention than we are affording it currently and a global process that can, over
time, help us avoid dangerous conflict and guide us in a positive direction.
Meredith Knight is editor of the human genetics section for Genetic Literacy
Project and a freelance science and health writer in Austin, Texas. Follow her
@meremereknight.
Additional Resources:

• Disruptive genomics: Is China’s BGI the epicenter of the world’s biotech

revolution? Genetic Literacy Project
• Call it what it is: Mitochondrial replacement does not a three-parent baby
make, Genetic Literacy Project
• Three parent baby debate: FDA ponders mitochondrial manipulation and,
perhaps, germline modification too, Genetic Literacy Project

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 Three parent baby debate: FDA ponders mitochondrial manipulation
and, perhaps, germline modification too

February 18, 2014

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April 11, 2014

• Digital

https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/02/18/three-parent-baby-debate-fda-
ponders-mitochondrial-manipulation-and-perhaps-germline-modification-too/
Three parent baby debate: FDA ponders mitochondrial manipulation and,
perhaps, germline modification too
Tabitha M. Powledge | February 18, 2014 | Genetic Literacy Project
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3155

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 Image via The Daily Mail
Next week, the Food and Drug Administration is meeting to consider how a very
controversial new form of assisted reproduction and gene therapy should proceed in
the United States. The FDA calls it “mitochondrial manipulation technologies,” and
others call it mitochondrial replacement. The point of mitochondrial manipulation is
to prevent transmission of diseases wrought by mutated mitochondrial DNA
(mtDNA) and to get around some forms of female infertility.
The approach is controversial mostly because it could result in genetic alterations
that can be passed on to subsequent generations. Up to now, policy in the US and
some other countries has been not to approve gene therapies that would affect the
germline, the cells that give rise to eggs and sperm. Mitochondrial replacement has
been under consideration in Britain for some time and may be approved there soon
if Parliament agrees.
The FDA is trying to avoid getting into the hot topic of germline modification, but
that may not be possible. It has declared ethical and public policy issues to be
outside the scope of the meeting, which is supposed “to consider scientific,
technologic, and clinical issues that would be relevant to future applications in this
field.”
Lots of luck with that. It’s a public meeting, and will be webcast too, which surely
invites comment from opponents of this work as well as those who want it to go
forward. Not to mention the obvious fact that germline modification is a scientific,
technologic, and clinical issue as well as a matter of ethics and public policy.
What are mitochondrial manipulation technologies?
Mitochondrial manipulation technologies are those that change the normal
distribution and inheritance of mitochondria, tiny DNA-containing structures in a
cell. The media love to describe the product of this approach to assisted
reproduction as a baby with three parents. It’s true enough in a strictly genomic
sense.

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The three-parent baby has Mom and Dad’s combined nuclear DNA in the usual
way, DNA from a cell’s nucleus being what we usually mean when we speak of
“the genome.” But our cells contain another genome too: the DNA in mitochondria,
known as mtDNA. That DNA is supplied by a third person in the form of an egg
from a donor.
The simplest way to correct mitochondrial disorders (conceptually simplest at least,
it’s quite a technical feat) is to eliminate the defective mtDNA from the mother’s
egg before in vitro fertilization. This is done by removing the nucleus from a donor
egg containing normal mitochondria and inserting a nucleus from the prospective
mother’s egg instead.
Thus the fertilized egg has both mother and father’s nuclear DNA, but donor
mtDNA. The resulting triparental embryo is then implanted in the mother’s uterus,
just as in the usual sort of IVF. There are other mitochondrial replacement
possibilities of varying complexity as well; see the FDA briefing paper (available
free at the site) for descriptions. Much of the background information used here is
from this paper.
Mitochondria and mitochondrial diseases
Mitochondria, small and numerous, are usually described as the cell’s power plant.
Their DNA contains only 37 genes, compared with the nucleus, which has 21,000
or so. But there are hundreds or even thousands of copies of mtDNA in a single cell,
whereas there is only one nuclear genome. The nuclear genome is essential for
mitochondria, however: a mitochondrion requires about 1500 proteins to do its
work, and most of these are made by DNA in the nucleus, not the mitochondria.
MtDNA has a much higher mutation rate than the nuclear genome’s, and some
mitochondrial diseases are serious or even fatal. Individual mitochondrial diseases
are rare, but it’s not clear how common they are in the aggregate. The
Mitochondrial and Metabolic Disease Center at the University of California San
Diego estimates 1000-4000 children born in the US each year with mitochondrial
disorders. In adults, mitochondria seem to be involved in aging and diseases
associated with aging such as diabetes, dementia, cancer and others, but the exact
role(s) mtDNA plays is unknown. The FDA document wisely avoids prevalence
data, which are squishy at best.
In mammals, sperm contain nuclear DNA alone; mitochondria are only in the egg
and therefore are inherited only from the mother, who passes them on to all her
children. But because of the high mutation rate, the mitochondria in an egg can be
very variable. It is not possible to predict whether a child will have a mitochondrial
disease even if the mother does.
The reverse is also true; a healthy woman can pass mitochondrial disease genes to
her descendants. Because only female children created via mitochondrial
replacement will have their germlines altered and could pass on the donor
mitochondria, the FDA will be considering whether clinical trials of mitochondrial
replacement should take precautions against that possibility, for example by
creating only male children.

92
The Cleveland Clinic says most mitochondrial diseases are caused by mutations in
nuclear DNA, not the mitochondria, and therefore can be passed to children by Dad
as well as Mom. So it appears that mitochondrial replacement in the egg would be
therapeutic for only a minority of mitochondrial diseases.
Germline modification: ethics and politics
Heaven knows there are enough immediate issues of safety and efficacy
surrounding mitochondrial modification to keep the FDA occupied for two full
days. But the reason this approach to assisted reproduction is so fraught is that for
the first time it could make possible the ability to create changes that can be passed
to descendants.
As you probably know, enthusiasm for introduction of heritable changes into the
human species, usually called eugenics, has been around since the 19th century. In
the 20th, forced sterilization of the mentally retarded in the US, plus Nazi
Germany’s espousal of race improvement, gave eugenics a deservedly bad name. A
few decades ago, as genetic science became more precise, talk about germline
modification revived. There was lots of discussion in the ’90s, pro and con,
followed by comparative silence–perhaps because the technical hurdles for doing
germline modification made clear that it was not just around the corner.
Now it is, and in unexpected fashion. The talk is of modifying mtDNA, not the
nuclear genome. Germline modification would be a side effect of intricate attempts
to eliminate mitochondrial disease. This is not a formal program of genetic
improvement imposed by the state. If successful at preventing disease, it will be a
medical consumer product available from the assisted reproduction industry.
Germline modification has created strange bedfellows; critics come from both left
and right. On the left, we have organizations such as the Center for Genetics and
Society in Berkeley, CA, and the Council for Responsible Genetics in Cambridge,
MA. CGS’s Marcy Darnovsky has argued in Nature that mitochondrial replacement
is a slippery slope, “a door-opening wedge towards full-out germline manipulation,
putting a high-tech eugenic social dynamic into play.” CRG says, “There is no way
to be accountable to those in future generations who are harmed or stigmatized by
wrongful or unsuccessful germline modifications of their ancestors.”
On the right, political theorist Francis Fukuyama believes that biotechnology, and
specifically germline modification, may change human nature for the worse.
Scientists and bioethicists cannot be trusted to alert us to the dangers, he says,
scientists because they want to conquer nature and bioethicists because they are the
complacent lapdogs of science.
Nonetheless, there continues to be enthusiasm for intentional germline modification.
In a recent article reviewing potential techniques for deliberately changing human
genomes, three British researchers argue that major benefits are likely to accrue
through safe and effective genetic modification. It would be unethical, they say, to
take a precautionary stance against it.
Jon Entine, executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, has argued here that
left-wing critics, “regularly present the most exaggerated and implausible scenarios,

93
suggesting catastrophic consequences unless society embraces their recommended
policy solution—shut down all germline research. Scientists do not work in a social
and regulatory vacuum. They necessarily will be responsive to reasonable oversight,
which is not what hyperbolic critics have in mind.”
It’s not at all clear whether the FDA deliberations will end in ruling against
mitochondrial modification or in reasonable oversight. The briefing paper supplied
to committee members (and available free at the FDA site) is, in its quiet technical
way, fairly alarmist about the potential risks of mitochondrial modification–alarmist
not about exotic futurist risks like germline modification, but about more immediate
concerns, such as research risks to patients.
Still, the staff has produced draft guidelines for clinical trials, also available free at
the site. The existence of the guidelines suggests that FDA expects trials of
mitochondrial modification to go forward and simply wants to set some boundaries
for the ways they should be conducted.
Tabitha M. Powledge is a long-time science journalist and a contributing
columnist for the Genetic Literacy Project. She writes On Science Blogs for the
PLOS Blogs Network. New posts on Fridays.
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 British '3-parent' IVF babies could come as early as 2015

February 28, 2014

Slate slashes New York Times and Center for Genetics and Society for
faux 'designer baby' scare tactics

February 28, 2014

• First Officer

https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/02/28/slate-slashes-new-york-times-
and-center-for-genetics-and-society-for-faux-designer-baby-scare-tactics/
Slate slashes New York Times and Center for Genetics and Society for faux
‘designer baby’ scare tactics
Jessica Grose | February 28, 2014 | Slate
Printer Friendly
7

Photo by Angela Waye/Shutterstock

The Food and Drug Administration this week began considering mitochondrial
manipulation technology. The procedure, which thus far has been performed

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successfully in monkeys and could be a dramatic advancement to help infertile
couples have their own babies, involves replacing defective mitochondria in one
woman’s egg with healthy mitochondria from another woman’s eggs.
Opponents of the procedure, led by the Berkeley, California-based Center for
Genetics and Society–widely known for its ultra-conservative rejection of human
gene therapy or genetic tinkering–argue that any genetic modification of embryos
should be verboten because it crosses what CGS claims is a “strong and long-
standing international consensus” against such procedures, although the evidence in
support of that hyperbolic position is questionable.
“Otherwise, we risk venturing into human experimentation and high-tech eugenics,”
wrote Marcy Darnovsky, CGS executive director, in a New York Times op-ed earlier
this week. She refers to the procedure as “three-person embryo fertilization”
because it involves combining the genetic material of three people to make a baby
free of certain defects, which she writes “could lead to the creation of designer
babies.”
There are legitimate safety-based concerns about the procedure, which are among
the issues being considered by the FDA. But according to Slate, echoing the views
of more moderate experts, groups like CGS present a distorted picture of a
procedure that is both safe and does not involve any significant manipulation of the
germline–our genetic material passed along from generation to generation.
When a woman’s eggs have severe mitochondrial abnormalities, they can have
many miscarriages, stillborn children, or extremely sick babies who are unlikely to
survive past early childhood. Fixing this huge amount of suffering for both mother
and child seems like a far cry from creating “designer babies,” and paramount to
any hyped-up concern about a slippery slope.
Nita A. Farahany, a law professor at Duke University and a member of the
Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, says that there is a big
difference between replacing defective mitochondria and making sure all babies are
blue-eyed and blonde–the designer baby scare that Darnovsky invokes. The
overwhelming majority of the genome, the traits that are passed on from parent to
child, are in the nuclear DNA, not in the mitochondrial DNA.
As Slate writer Jessica Grose notes, despite the extremist views represented by
Darnovsky, “We’re extremely far from a world in which we could—or would want
to—manipulate embryos so that they have a variety of “perfect” traits, like our
babies were made at the Build-a-Bear workshop.”
Read full original article: “Designer Babies” Aren’t Coming. The New York Times
Is Just Trying to Scare You.

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 Related Stories

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their-mission-to-change-the-world-20150129-131fm1.html
Chinese genome mappers BGI explain their mission to change the world
Date
February 15, 2015

Sian Powell

The egalitarian employees of the genomics giant want to make human lives longer
and freer of disease, writes Sian Powell.

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Scientists such as Professor Jenny Graves are using genetic research to try and help
the Tasmania Devil which is suffering from a dangerous facial tumour that threatens
to make the species extinct. Photo: Supplied
From most vantage points, this one-time shoe factory in southern China looks like a
one-time shoe factory.
Squeezed between other factories in this bleakly industrial zone of Shenzhen, just
across the border from Hong Kong, it has a flavour of the ordinary. The lobby is
functional and unornamented. Thousands of young workers tramp and up down
slightly shabby flights of stairs to get from floor to floor. The pounding at a
construction site out the back rattles the windows.
Within two or three years, the procedure for handling those patients with those
diseases will be totally changed.
Zhang Gengyun, BGI vice-president
But despite the lack of ostentation, this is the world's largest genetic research
organisation. Here massive super-computers and arrays of ultra-sophisticated gene
sequencers churn out the genetic data of anything from an echidna to a human
tumour, from a microbe to a tapeworm to a strain of ultra-productive rice. This is
the razor-edge frontier of gene science, where scientists produce and ponder the
new genetic maps that may change the world.

Professor Jenny Graves of Latrobe University is collaborating with BGI and the
University of Canberra to find out more about dragon lizards. Photo: Supplied
Founded by Chinese geneticist Yang Huanming in 1999, and once known as the
Beijing Genomics Institute, BGI started operations in Beijing. Lured by a
substantial start-up state grant, the firm subsequently moved its headquarters to the
then rapidly-growing southern metropolis of Shenzhen. The company has been

99
steadily increasing its revenue and In 2011, in the most recent figures available,
BGI earned a reported revenue of 1.2 billion yuan ($250 million).
Advertisement
A giant in genomics sequencing, the company doesn't seem to be in thrall to the
Chinese government. BGI says it is a non-profit research organisation, owned by
BGI employees. Certainly, it appears to be one of the world's more admirable
corporate citizens, rushing to help sequence the SARS virus when scores of Hong
Kong citizens were dying of the disease a decade ago and to work on the E. coli
strain that attacked Germans in 2011. With far more sequencing capacity than many
countries, including Australia, BGI shares massive sets of sequencing data via the
website of its Gigascience journal.
These days, BGI leads the world in genomics; mapping literally thousands of
genomes (a genome is the entirety of genetic information in any organism). Yet
these BGI labs and workrooms in Shenzhen are remarkably casual and egalitarian.
No one wears a suit or tie. Workers live together and play together. And there's a
quasi-collegiate do-good feel. Human health is a BGI priority – both in the
theoretical realms of advanced biological investigation, and at a practical level.

BGI harnesses huge computing power to churn out the genetic data on anything
from a tapeworm to a tumour. Photo: Bloomberg
Here at the BGI headquarters, one lift only goes to the fifth and eighth floors, and
one only to the eighth floor. The small on-site supermarket in this blocky eight-
storey building sells fruit and yoghurt, but no cake, no ice-cream, no lollies. The
wall menus in the canteen list the kilojoule value of the meals on offer; and they are
all on the lean side. Sport is encouraged – basketball, soccer, badminton - and team
photographs are prominently displayed.

100
This preoccupation with physical fitness is easily understood: some of BGI's leaders
have taken advantage of BGI's enormous genome sequencing capabilities: they've
had their own genomes sequenced and they know whether they carry the genes that
render them susceptible to certain kinds of cancer, or diabetes, some auto-immune
disorders, Huntington disease, heart disease or Alzheimer's. Unlike most of us, they
have peered into a crystal ball and seen the shadows.
Most common human diseases and disorders are caused by a complicated interplay
between genes and life risks (smoking, a poor diet, excessive drinking, a lack of
exercise): but reading the genes can provide an indication of future health concerns,
and the BGI leaders have taken note. Their physical health, and the health of the
BGI staff, has become a priority.

Genetic research may unlock new medical treatments. Illustration: Harry

Afentoglou
Zhang Gengyun, one of BGI's vice-presidents, says it's not easy to decide to have
your genome sequenced. Not everyone wants to know if they have a better-than-
average chance of developing, say, cancer. It might mean decades of anxiety; fear
of the apparently inexorable arrival of a tumour. On the other hand, sometimes the
knowledge can give people the chance to fight back while there's still a chance.
"It's hard to say whether that's worse or not," Zhang says thoughtfully. "Even the
BGI leaders, we don't have agreement about whether that's worse or not. Some
people say, 'Hey, why should I worry about something that could happen'."
He has yet to take the plunge. "I haven't," the 48-year-old adds with a grin. "I want
to know, but I can wait. I'm not so worried about my health."

101
BGI leads the world in genomics, sharing information with researchers in less well-
resourced countries such as Australia. Photo: Bloomberg
Sitting in a sunny meeting room in BGI's Shenzhen headquarters, Zhang looks
tanned and healthy, casual in an open-necked olive-green shirt and beige trousers;
but he says he knows he has at least one genetic weak point: "Like me, I cannot
drink alcohol. That's not a good allele [form of a gene]."
Some high net worth individuals turn to sequencing after they have fallen ill.
Battling cancer, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs reportedly paid $US100,000 for the
sequencing and analysis of his entire genome and the tumour in his pancreas. He
was upbeat about the science, but the tumour killed him in 2011. The essayist,
polemicist and outspoken atheist Christopher Hitchens also turned to sequencing
when he was diagnosed with cancer. He, too, died in 2011, but the sequencing
helped doctors determine his body's responsiveness to certain drugs, helping them
find a way to modify his gruelling treatment regime.
With a doctorate from Rutgers University in the US, Zhang's specialty is
agriculture: using genomics to find higher-yielding and more drought- and pest-
resistant plant crops; but he stays abreast of human health developments in
sequencing. He's confident the science will revolutionise cancer treatment.
"Within two or three years, the procedure for handling those patients with those
diseases will be totally changed," he says. "Steve Jobs: with the current technology
we could sequence his samples perhaps every three months, even every month, to
see what's changed, what's new that's happening; whether the medicine is
controlling some of those cancer cells. We can tell pretty clearly. I think that will be
very good news for those patients."

102
These genomics advances are proceeding at a rocketing pace. The first human
genome sequence, the product of the international Human Genome Project, was
completed in 2003. It took 10 years and it cost about $US2.7 billion ($3.9 billion).
BGI took part. Since then the price of full sequencing and analysis has plummeted.
Jobs might have paid a six-figure sum for his sequencing, but these days the $1000
genome is in sight.
The price slide is so steep and so fast that soon this new "personalised medicine"
could become routine. Scientists are even speculating on the potential of sequencing
the genomes of newborn babies and predicting how the knowledge might change
their lives.
The complete set of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, in any given organism (a human,
a koala, a parasite, a mosquito, a virus), a genome is sometimes known as the
blueprint for life. Genes are made of DNA, which consists of about 3 billion
chemical bases, and 99 per cent of them are the same in every human. Each base, or
nucleotide, is one of four chemicals, and the order, or sequence, of these four
chemicals in each molecule of DNA determines the characteristics and development
of all organisms.
Various methods can be used to map these strings of DNA sequences from tiny
samples of matter. A speck of blood at a crime scene. A fragment of pollen. The
root of a single human hair.
Genomics seems to have developed in an admirable way. Since the Human Genome
Project, publicly funded research has to be made public, embracing the notion that
important genetic data should be free, and freely available, to let others build on it.
This sharing ethos has accelerated the pace of discovery and innovation and
genomics rattles along much faster than, say, branches of chemistry research.
Still, (all too naturally), some firms are looking to cash in. In Australia, many
scientists were startled and dismayed when the full bench of the Federal Court last
September ruled that a corporation could patent a breast cancer gene, running
counter to a decision by the US Supreme Court, which in June last year decided the
opposite. "A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature," the
Supremes held, "and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated."
But even without patenting genes, there's money to be made. The US-based firm
23andMe (the name refers to the pairs of human chromosomes – the packaged
bundles of genes in cells) offers limited sequencing for $US99.
Consumers can buy a pack and send in a saliva sample. But, right now, 23andMe
will provide only uninterpreted raw genetic data, or ancestry genetic reports. The
US Food and Drug Administration blocked the firm's health-targeted genetic reports
late last year because it feared consumers would seize on the information and begin
to self-medicate. Other companies though, provide the genetic information to
doctors, and the FDA is fine with that.
Meanwhile, BGI forges on with more and more genetic discoveries, collaborating
with universities, institutes and organisations around the world, including more than
200 in Australia. There are now BGI branches in the US and in Europe and a global

103
staff of 5000 people. The company's aims are lofty: BGI wants to increase the
average life span by five years, increase global food production by 10 per cent,
decode half of all genetic diseases, understand the origins of autism, and cut birth
defects by half.
"We want to sequence more, and understand more about our genome," Zhang says,
with a gleam in his eye. "To provide more clues, more insight, about disease and
treatments. That would give us a lot of new knowledge about our health and more
insight about other species. The real idea to expand knowledge, that's our top
target."
BGI in Shenzhen has a staff of nearly 2700: scientists, lab workers and clerks. The
average age is 27, and the atmosphere is university/YWCA/science club. Two-
thirds of the employees live in sex-segregated dormitories near the BGI building,
and many of them spend much of their leisure time following BGI team pursuits:
sport and more sport, singing competitions, rock climbing.
Some geneticists have raised an eyebrow at BGI: noting this army of young and
often not formally qualified workers, and the sheer output of this "gene factory".
Producing long streams of sequencing data is not the same as making the intuitive
leaps needed to nose out unseen evolutionary paths or assemble the puzzles of
disease control. Yet BGI is collaborating with respected scientists around the world
and learning and developing all the time.
As well as the not-for-profit work, some divisions of BGI make money, from
contracted sequencing and from revenue streams like the overseas sales of a pre-
natal blood test. Older pregnant women have long been routinely advised to
undergo an amniocentesis test, whereby amniotic fluid is drawn from the uterus via
a fine, hollow needle and the fluid then tested to see whether the baby had Down
syndrome, spina bifida or cystic fibrosis.
"Amnio" tests, though, carry risks, and can trigger miscarriages. The BGI test is a
simple blood test, and BGI scientists say it has been proven almost 100 per cent
accurate. It is likely to shake up the current standards of pre-natal testing.
Profits from this and other projects, Zhang says, will be used to pay costs and fund
more research. "We want to sequence more, and understand more about our
genome. To provide more clues, more insight, about disease and treatments," he
says. "That would give us a lot of new knowledge about our health and about other
species."
Genome sequencing has revolutionised the study of evolutionary biology.
"Everybody is using genomic data," says Australian geneticist Professor Jenny
Graves, 71, now with La Trobe university's Institute for Molecular Science.
"Whether they're looking at evolutionary relationships; how tusks develop in
elephants; how things work in the microbial world; the relationships of different
animals in the population, whether they're endangered or inbred - everyone is using
this kind of genome data."
"We're working on the Tasmanian devil, among many other things."

104
The devil is in trouble, with a devastating facial tumour disease, contracted via
bites, which is ripping through the population. "The species doesn't have a lot of
genetic variation, particularly in one area. They're almost clones of each other. You
can transfer a cancer from one animal to another. That's very rare. Tumours can
pass from animal to animal. It's not a virus or a bacterium, it's an actual cell from a
devil that gets passed."
Graves, who is also Thinker-in-Residence at the University of Canberra, has been
collaborating with BGI for the past three years to sequence and analyse the genome
of the dragon lizard (the ones with green horns and beards) to track down how this
animal determines the sex of its young.
"It's particularly interesting because although we discovered perfectly normal sex
chromosomes, at high temperature they all hatch out as females, so there must be a
temperature over-ride. Of course everybody wants to know how temperature effects
sex because with global warming we might find all our crocs are male and all our
turtles and lizards are female!"
BGI is a prolific contributor within the Genome 10K community: scientists who are
co-ordinating the sequencing of thousands of representative vertebrate species,
Graves says. So far the Genome 10K project has managed to stack up 245
sequences for this genomic zoo, including the emu, black flying fox, short-beaked
echidna, and the platypus. "It's not just mammals, but a lot of birds, more and more
fish, and reptiles: it's sort of putting together the big jigsaw pieces so we can really
understand vertebrate evolution", Graves says.
Another Australian scientist, Professor Arthur Georges, director of the University of
Canberra's Institute of Applied Ecology, has twice visited BGI in Shenzhen to work
on the whole genome sequencing of the dragon lizard.
Impressed with the BGI work assisting with the dragon genome sequencing, he
enjoyed the BGI scientists' youth, enthusiasm and egalitarian spirit. "The guy at the
top, in research, his desk is the same as everyone else's [in a large open room]; the
only difference is that he has a running machine next to his desk."
More generally, he was struck by BGI's evident passion to improve the world.
"They're on a mission," he says. "They've got this incredible enthusiasm about the
future; almost as if anything can be achieved."
Genetic science is racing into the future, leaving the lawyers and ethicists panting a
long way behind. One controversial BGI project to catalogue the genetic sequences
of hundreds of ultra-intelligent people was written up around the world, prompting
critical comments about eugenics, and headlines like "Get Ready for the
Superbaby".
BGI now won't grant interviews with the lead scientist on the project. Another
scientist on staff feels the publicity was overblown, pointing out that the project was
the work of only three people, from a pool of 5000 BGI staff worldwide, and
perhaps distrust of China and its population-control policies came into play.
Bicheng Yang, BGI's director of communication and public engagement, (who has
a doctorate in life sciences), says a certain share of controversy is inevitable. Yes,

105
personalised medicine can make people healthier, she says, but each new
development is a double-edged sword. "There are a lot of benefits and advantages
for people, but on the other side there will always be some controversial problems,"
she says. "Some people accept this, some people don't."
Speaking very softly and deliberately, Yang, now 31, makes it clear it is up to the
individual to decide which course to pursue for their health, and she is confident
various governments around the world will carefully regulate the various types of
genetic information.
Would-be parents, Yang believes, will probably not be able to simply choose to
have a blonde, tall, intelligent baby with dimples and an artistic nature. "In the
future, if it's possible for you to select the characteristics of your baby, I think there
will be certain kind of regulations about what kind of information you can get from
the genome," she says. "You need to have some kind of regulation or restriction."
Anyway, she points out, geneticists are a long way from pinpointing the genes or
the series of genes that code certain characteristics. Smiling, she shakes her head.
"Currently we can only detect a few diseases," she says. "Such characteristics like
the IQ, the colour of the eye, colour of the hair, the height, are more complex
reasons that you cannot predict."
For his part, Gabor Vajta, a 63-year-old embryologist and pathologist at Central
Queensland University, admires BGI's energy. Working with BGI and spending a
few months every year in Shenzhen, he has seen the work close up. "These people
are cowboys, they are freelancers, they are going here, making contracts with these
people, with those people, all around the world," he says, adding that the formula is
a success and a year ago BGI bought a large competitor in the US.
"I have collaborations all over the world. This is by far the most fruitful
collaboration for me. BGI is the future." He pauses and smiles broadly. "As you
know, China is the synonym of low-level things, of cheap things, but this is
absolutely the top."

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/chinese-genome-mappers-

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 Genomic Dreams Coming True In China

Forbes Asia

Special Reports

•
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Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

This story appears in the September 2013 issue of Forbes Asia. Subscribe

By Shu-Ching Jean Chen

Wang Jian is proud of scaling Mount Everest in 2010 at age 56, but the Shenzhen
genomicist has been climbing new scientific heights with the firm that he set in
motion with three fellow young castoffs from the Cultural Revolution more than 30
years ago.
Today what is known as BGI has the world’s biggest capacity for sequencing the
human genome, bringing credit to China and hope of mass affordability for a
process that can identify an individual’s DNA and thus make it possible to take
steps toward a longer, healthier life.
Just as mountaineering can take long preparation, determined advances and
occasional bold steps, so has BGI’s reach for preeminence under Wang–its
president–and two remaining cofounders.

107
One big advance came this past March, when it acquired, for $118 million,
Complete Genomics GNOM +% of California. The combined entity is capable of
sequencing up to 80% of the whole human genomes the world has processed,
according to George Church, a genetics professor at Harvard University. That’s still
a small total; if you include partial genomes done for ancestry and health DNA such
as focusing on a faulty gene responsible for breast cancer at the publicized outfit
23andMe, you’d still reach only a few hundred thousand to date. But that’s why the
scale of operation that Wang and his associates are reaching is so meaningful.
BGI is akin to a giant assembly line in gene sequencing, stretching its arms,
octopuslike, to different parts of the fast-evolving genome business universe, from
discovery research (its clients: big pharmas and research institutions) at the top end
to gene-sequencing services in the middle (such as academic and commercial labs).
And it is now positioning itself in what many scientists recognize as the most
promising area of all: diagnostics clinics such as hospitals.
With Complete Genomics, BGI has acquired not just superior technology in
sequencing human genomes but also the know-how for producing the boxes, or the
machines that process the data, giving it an edge in a rapidly evolving landscape.
“In other industries such as automotive and electronics, the first companies to get to
the highest-quality manufacturing also tend to retain the highest market share. This
should be a big wake-up call [for BGI’s competitors],” says Church.
Recommended by Forbes
BGI’s archrival, Illumina, the global leader in making gene-sequencing machines
and which two years ago started building up a sequencing service business, lobbied
fiercely against BGI’s acquisition of Complete Genomics after its rival bid failed.
Even before the acquisition, BGI had become the world’s leader in gene-sequencing
services, which cover not just the human genome but also that of animals and plants
such as pandas and rice.
Ross J. Muken of New York investment research firm ISI Group, which specializes
in life sciences, put BGI at having at least 25% of the world’s total in gene-
sequencing services, followed by Illumina of San Diego and the Broad Institute of
Harvard and MIT.
Wang and his crew in Shenzhen are readying an IPO of the institutional-client
business, more than 60% of its revenues, while they plan to keep the retail side.
Meantime, the company and its backers, including Sequoia Capital and Shenzhen
Capital, which helped finance the Complete Genomics deal, would have it be an
exit for their sizable minority stake. That placement valued all of BGI at a modest
$820 million.
BGI has sequenced 57,000 human genomes to date, mostly following its 2010
purchase of 128 HiSeq 2000 gene-sequencing machines, still the world’s most
powerful. That purchase, value not disclosed, was backed by a ten-year loan of $1.5
billion from China Development Bank.

108
The hardware helps BGI compose the “book of life,” the code of each individual’s
genetic makeup. Large-scale sequencing the way BGI does it not only drives down
costs of such discrete profiles but also deepens understanding of complex diseases.
“Sequencing human genomes is all about two things—discovering what these
variations mean and, once we understand them, sequencing the genomes of
individual patients to personalize their medical treatment,” explains Adam
Felsenfeld of the U.S. government’s National Human Genome Research Institute.
Each human being, barring close relatives, differs by 3 million base pairs of genes,
out of 3 billion, he notes.
The quest is of such scale and has such promise that it’s hard to believe that as
recently as 2007 BGI was on the brink of extinction, one of several points of travail
as it has navigated China’s state-dominated eco-system.
Wang and three pals founded it in 1999 in an industrial zone near the Beijing
airport. They set out to create a nonprofit research outfit, only to find no such
private entity was countenanced in China. Only registering as a business venture
was possible, so for eight years it had no board, shareholders or meaningful returns.
“We were a group of people trying to do fun things,” Wang says. Previously, he had
returned to China from the U.S. to set up a company developing diagnostic kits. The
outfit, GBI Biotech Beijing, grew to 100 staffers and later was made part of what
today is BGI. But the fun Wang had in mind was to be part of the Human Genome
Project.
Page 1 / 2 Continue
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• ontinued from page 1
• The route to BGI’s role in that led through Seattle’s University of
Washington. There Wang was doing a post-doc in genetic science, and a
friend from China, Yu Jun, was involved in the genome project as a
researcher under one of its founders, professor Maynard Olson. The project
wanted more Chinese participation.
• So Wang and Yu hatched the idea that led to BGI. They recruited Yang
Huanming, now the company’s chairman, who was well connected to the
Chinese science establishment. Also joining in 1999 was Liu Siqi, a protein
scientist trained in Texas. Wang and Liu go back to the 1970s at a medical
school in Hunan, and before that to competing in youth sports.
• But as it happened, all four founders had failed to finish high school because
the Cultural Revolution upended their lives like so many others’. They all
had managed to scramble back to college afterward and then to pursue
advanced research at U.S. universities in the late 1980s. Wang was the glue
binding them together.

109
• Selling Chinese participation in the genome project was not easy at home,
however. Most domestic scientists were skeptical about such a costly
endeavor. But 50 million yuan, not quite $10 million, in initial funding was
raised, and a staff of 400 in Beijing was quickly exhausting that sum.
• When former U.S. President Bill Clinton touted the landmark mapping of the
first genome in 2003, and Chinese President Jiang Zemin heard him, on
CNN, mention China’s participation, it opened a new door. Jiang ordered up
further funding and help from the scientific hierarchy.
• Then known as the Beijing Genomic Institute, Wang’s operation took on an
adjunct from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The two worked in
parallel, but the institute’s original enterprise kept advancing and was
increasingly at odds with the government apparatus. By 2007 the research
was being starved of funding and other state support, and a divorce loomed.
Shenzhen’s administration stepped in with an offer of a former shoe factory
as offices, but Wang & Co. would have to produce results that brought in
revenue.
• Recommended by Forbes
• They took the gamble and relocated to the southern China growth town,
rebranding the institute as BGI Shenzhen. By then it had shrunk to fewer
than 20 staffers, all going without pay. Only six months later, when BGI
mapped out the world’s first gene sequence of an Asian individual, would
Shenzhen award a total of 90 million yuan spread over the next four years.
At least the lights would stay on.
• The move caused a split among the founders. Yu exited by selling his stake
for a token sum. The remaining trio has kept a majority stake in BGI.
• At headquarters in Shenzhen, now an eight-floor nondescript white building,
President Wang often climbs up flights of stairs to his top-floor office—a
desk, actually, by the windows in the middle of a labyrinth of numerous
identical blue cells. “I am good at high-speed skiing. I am good at sports,” he
declares. “You need to stay on balance.”
• Cubicles on each floor are taken up by half of BGI’s 2,000-plus employees,
with an equal number of staff scattered at a dozen labs around the world, in
what Science magazine described as “the only genome enterprise with a
global footprint.” Chairman Yang presides over this fast-expanding research
and education network, which he describes as focusing on “applications in
health care, agriculture and environment.”
• Early in April Bill Gates visited BGI’s Hong Kong office for four hours,
discussing cooperation possibilities. The Gates Foundation sought out BGI,
and last September it agreed to join in global health and agricultural
development, a partnership that may have helped grease approval of BGI’s
acquisition of Complete Genomics.

110
 • Wang spends most of his time overseeing BGI’s for-profit businesses. The
company broke even in 2011, with $192 million in revenue, roughly ten
times what Complete Genomics brought in that year.
• About 90% of its business is done with private clients, split equally between
overseas and domestic. Among the most lucrative are long-term contracts,
lasting two to three years, with more than 17 of the world’s top 20
pharmaceutical companies.
• But the founders still do not look at theirs as a conventional business. The
partial IPO can satisfy the outside investors, but, says Wang, “we will
reinvest our earnings. We do commercial projects, but in some cases, it’d be
no fun if we just think about making money.” Climbing genomic mountains
is more like it.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-02-07/bgis-young-chinese-
scientists-will-map-any-genome
BGI's Young Chinese Scientists Will Map Any Genome

In an old shoe factory in Shenzhen, thousands of young scientists have set out to
map the DNA of ... pretty much everything
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BGI's Young Chinese Scientists Will Map Any Genome

In an old shoe factory in Shenzhen, thousands of young scientists have set out to
map the DNA of ... pretty much everything
Lauren Hilgers
February 9, 2013 — 5:46 AM WIB
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

Deng Wenxi with plant genomes

Photograph by Luke Casey for Bloomberg Businessweek

When the workday ends at BGI’s factory in Shenzhen, the headquarters of the
largest genome mapping company in the world, it’s like a bell has gone off at math
camp. The company’s scientists and technicians spill out of the doorways of the

113
building, baby-faced and wearing jeans and sneakers. Some still have braces.
Several young women link arms and skip toward a bus line. Others head next door
to the dorm or over to the canteen where young couples are holding hands across
plastic trays. “This work we do is tiring and requires focus,” says Liu Xin, a 26-
year-old team leader in the bioinformatics division, as he sinks into a couch in one
of BGI’s conference rooms. “So it’s good that they allow us to date.”

Liu is one of a small army of recent college graduates at BGI’s largest facility, a
former shoe factory. Two gray buildings, the factory and the dorm, are wedged
between one of Shenzhen’s industrial zones—a grid of high-rises, apartment
buildings, and several hospitals and medical equipment companies—and a lush,
jungly hill that’s in the process of being bulldozed. Liu is stocky and serious, glad
that he already has a steady girlfriend so he can focus on his career. He arrived at
BGI three years ago, a biology major from Peking University with little experience
in the study of the genome, the term for the entirety of an organism’s genetic
information. Now he’s one of the senior people in his department. He works 12-
hour days and oversees the sequencing of multiple genomes at a time. He
specializes in plants—his team is currently sequencing a species of orchid. The
bioinformatics teams around him are picking through the genomes of animals,
microbial organisms, humans, and anything else that comes with a genetic code.
“Everyone is just out of college,” he says. “I am now more sophisticated than most
of the newcomers.”

Ten years after the mapping of the human genome, BGI has established itself as the
world’s largest commercial genetic sequencer. The ranks of China’s college
graduates are expanding faster than the country can employ them, and BGI is
leveraging this cheap, educated labor pool. At the factory in Shenzhen, more than
3,000 employees (average age, 26) spend their days preparing DNA samples,
monitoring sequencing machines, and piecing together endless strings of A’s, C’s,
T’s, and G’s, the building blocks of genetic material.

“This is big data analysis,” says Wang Jun, BGI’s 36-year-old executive director.
Wang, who regularly wears tennis shoes and untucked polo shirts, has published
more than 35 articles in Science and Nature magazines and also teaches at the
University of Copenhagen. Genomics, he says, is a new field and experts are being
created from scratch. “We don’t need Ph.D.s to do this work,” Wang says. Instead,
he believes genomics is best learned the old-fashioned way. “You just throw them
in,” he says of BGI’s technicians. “The best way is hands-on experience.”

When the first draft of the human genome was released in 2000 as part of the
international Human Genome Project, it seemed inevitable that scientists would
soon crack the codes of disease, health, and human development. But the genome
has proved more complicated. What scientists produced in 2000 was a long list of
nucleotides, the combinations of markers in DNA that specify the makeup of an

114
organism. It was just a list, and only a fraction of it is understood. Scientists were
quick to identify fragments of the genome that translate into proteins, which control
things like eye color, but these make up only 1.5 percent of the entire thing. As
geneticists like to put it, they produced a map without a legend. This is where BGI
comes in.

Executive director Wang Jun (left)

Photograph by Luke Casey for Bloomberg Businessweek

The company was founded in 1999 with state funding to lead China’s participation
in the Human Genome Project. “We didn’t think about any business model; we
basically didn’t plan further than the human genome,” says Wang, who was brought
on in the early days of BGI to provide expertise in computers. China, he points out,
was the only developing country working on the international project, and although
the BGI team contributed only 1 percent of the finished project, it did it quickly and
with little previous experience. “Even Bill Clinton thanked us for our participation,”
he says. Wang joined the project when he was just 22 and worked under BGI’s two
founders, the scientists Wang Jian, then 45, and Yang Huanming, then 47.

For its next challenge, BGI decided to tackle rice, whose genome is significantly
shorter than that of humans but still large enough to impress. “We recruited a bunch
of undergraduates, and lots of them had no working experience on any project,”
Wang Jun says. The schedule was tight; Wang and his team barely slept. “We can
do these kind of crazy things in BGI,” he says. “We can get 100 people together,
very fresh, no experience at all, and get it done.”

In 2002, BGI published a paper on the rice project in Science and again attracted
attention and money from the Chinese government, though it’s a private company.

115
The company was rewarded with entry into the state-run Chinese Academy of
Sciences, a distinction that secured additional funding. As part of CAS, however,
BGI was limited to only 90 scientists. Its leaders had their eyes on expansion. “Our
boss wanted to buy more sequencing machines,” says Deng Wenxi, a 24-year-old
communications officer at the BGI factory. “But the Beijing government would not
support us.” In 2007 the company found a solution by way of Shenzhen’s city
government, which offered the factory 10 million yuan (about $1.6 million in
today’s exchange rates) to cover startup fees and 20 million yuan in annual grants.
The company changed its name from Beijing Genomics Institute to BGI Shenzhen
and moved to the shoe factory. “Beijing is more strict,” says Deng. “Shenzhen
wanted to welcome us.” The factory, she says, actually belongs to the Shenzhen
government. When asked about the move, Wang Jun answers the question a little
more vaguely, “Well,” he says, “the weather is definitely nicer here.”

Today, BGI organizes its operations into three categories—health care, agriculture,
and the environment. When scientists look at the genome, they’re looking for
variations from one individual to another, from species to species, or population to
population. They’re looking to understand which variations link to specific traits or
diseases.

As Wang Jun says, decoding any genome is a big data endeavor, and there’s no
other research institution or for-profit sequencing company in the world that has the
capacity of BGI. In health care, it offers straightforward sequencing services for
universities and corporations globally, which ask BGI to sequence a genome and
send it back for analysis. More often than not, BGI works in partnerships to map,
analyze, and publish the findings.

When Deng meets me in the morning, the first place we visit is a kind of trophy
room on the top floor of the factory where the walls are decorated with copies of
Science and Nature magazines, each containing a paper from BGI. The subjects
include the company’s part in the ICGC Cancer Genome Projects; its work with
2,000 families to map the genomes of children with autism; its mapping of the
epigenetic differences (differences in gene expression not the result of a variation in
the genetic code) between 5,000 twins; and a project to increase the number of
identified Mendelian, or inherited, genetic disorders.

In addition to linking more disorders to variations in the genome, BGI’s research

could change the way medical providers and governments understand and respond
to outbreaks of disease. BGI’s partners include GE Healthcare, Merck, and Novo
Nordisk, and the work they’re doing will help pharmaceutical companies
understand why some drugs are more effective in some populations and less so in
others. In May 2011, BGI flexed its muscle during a deadly outbreak of E. coli in
Germany. As soon as the outbreak began, BGI began to piece together the genome
of the strain from samples provided by the University Medical Center Hamburg-

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Eppendorf. Within five days, the company released sequencing reads on the strain,
leading to the crowd-sourced assembly and analysis of the genome. In the future,
BGI’s expertise could be applied to viruses.

Wang Jun says BGI’s first goal is to “find ways that genomics can serve society.”
The company, he emphasizes, is not state-owned, and the profits it makes are cycled
back into research. The company has been steadily increasing its profits in the past
few years. In 2011, BGI reported revenue of 1.2 billion yuan. Many projects the
company takes on reflect this policy of for-profit science. In agriculture, BGI is
mapping genome sequences it considers proprietary and using them to engineer
superior strains of rice, millet, and even fish. Technicians do this by using genomic
information to breed for certain traits. Hybrid millet, says Deng, could improve
yields and help alleviate hunger in Africa. Balsa trees designed by BGI can
withstand colder temperatures, which means they could be grown in China. Sharing
the trophy room with the BGI published papers is a single large fish, mottled green
and gray, swimming in a tank. “That is our hybrid grouper,” Deng says. It grows
three times as fast as a regular grouper, she says, and according to a BGI brochure,
it tastes better. When I ask Wang how BGI determines which plants and animals to
sequence as part of its “1,000 Plants and Animals” project, he answers, “We start
with anything tasty.”

BGI technicians
Photograph by Luke Casey for Bloomberg Businessweek

The company is also taking part in the sequencing of the earth’s microbiome,
meaning all microscopic organisms. This is an effort to identify the functional and
evolutionary diversity of microbial organisms across the globe. (BGI has sequenced

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more than 1,000 such organisms in the human gut.) Many of the plant and animal
genomes it has sequenced, such as the giant panda and Liu’s orchid, are beneficial
mainly to scientists studying the traits and evolution of animals.

BGI has also made forays into cloning and has invented a simplified technique.
Called “handmade cloning,” it cuts costs and makes large-scale cloning more
realistic for use in animal and plant research. So far BGI has applied the technique
to clone mice, sheep, and a mini pig that glows in the dark. In an office, a slightly
desiccated stuffed piglet sits in a small display case. A better-looking piglet, Deng
says apologetically, had been misplaced.

BGI’s footprint is expanding. It recently received approval from the U.S.

government to acquire its biggest competitor, Mountain View (Calif.)-based
Complete Genomics, which also provides commercial DNA sequencing. The go-
ahead for the $117 million deal came after a counterbid and regulatory challenge
from San Diego-based Illumina. The majority of BGI’s sequencing machines, at the
moment, are purchased from Illumina, and the acquisition of Complete Genomics
could give BGI a new source of technology. The complaint of Illumina’s chief
executive officer, Jay Flatley, however, is about national security. In a memo
addressed to Complete Genomics, Flatley warned the deal would give BGI access to
American DNA, possibly posing “national security, industrial policy, personal
identifier information protection, and other concerns.”

Complete Genomics will extend BGI’s reach, not only in terms of customers and
sequencing power, but also in terms of data storage. Complete Genomics has
established its own database of genetic information, complementing BGI’s efforts to
build a cloud computing platform capable of holding large amounts of genomic
data.

Even as BGI improves its technology, its biggest strength remains all those cheap,
highly educated analysts. The amount of data available on the genome has
outstripped the ability to analyze it. Laboratories around the world are in need of
more experienced and reliable bioinformatics experts—people such as Liu.

“It’s the Wild West,” says George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard
University and an adviser to BGI. “This is a field that has arisen overnight, and the
number of discoveries is going up exponentially.” A single genome contains a
massive amount of data (a human genome, for example, contains about 3 billion
nucleotides, or data points), and a bioinformatics expert’s work requires sifting
through, comparing, and testing the information in multiple genomes. While
sequencing costs have dropped dramatically in the last 10 years, the process is far
from automated. Companies that offer personalized genetic testing, such as
23andMe, typically test only for a sampling of 100 traits and diseases, or about

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1/3,000th of the entire genome, Church says. For about $4,000, BGI does the whole
thing.

BGI’s electronic sequencers—11 are in Shenzhen, 77 in Hong Kong, and more than
66 scattered throughout the rest of China and the world—are imposing-looking
black-and-white boxes, slightly taller than the technicians that run them. They don’t
churn out fully formed genomes; rather, they handle fragments, reading each
nucleotide from signals emitted as the machine resynthesizes a template DNA
strand. These out-of-order sections of the genome require piecing together. Once
assembled, a genome sequence still has to be interpreted to find the source of
whatever trait or disease a particular study aims to find. This process, even with a
reference genome fully in place, is difficult to hand over to a computer program.
“The software basically doesn’t exist yet,” Church says.

BGI’s Shenzhen factory is organized so that a genetic sample travels from floor to
floor as it goes through the sequencing process. When a sample first arrives—it
usually comes in a test tube—it’s taken to the fourth floor, where workers in
different colored coats prepare and expand the genetic material (coat color signifies
the kind of DNA being handled). Workers bend over tiny vials, mechanically
separating genetic material with a syringe. They’re splitting DNA samples into
single strands and will soon put them through a chemical process called polymerase
chain reaction, or PCR. This will copy a single DNA fragment about 10 million
times. Microscopic chains of beads holding the DNA fragments are then loaded
onto a sheet with tiny cups and sent to the sequencers on the fifth floor. When the
machines are finished, the information is delivered electronically to the second
floor, where Liu, the bioinformatics team leader, works.

In a large, open room, more than 1,000 young scientists sit in cubicles, staring at
strings of computer code, piecing together sections of whatever genome they’ve
been assigned. Liu’s team is slightly apart from the rest. “You’re looking for
variants or parts of the genome that are hard to map,” he says. Computer programs
have difficulty identifying a new variation unless a spot on the genome has already
been pinpointed and entered into the computer program. Recently, with the orchid,
Liu’s team had problems interpreting a certain section. Liu was assembling his
species of the plant according to an orchid reference genome, and certain sections of
the code were just not lining up the way researchers (and the computer) had
expected. Trying to tie these sections to certain orchid traits was proving difficult.
Liu calls it a “weird region.”

“We had to figure out how to analyze this,” he says. “It required us to try different
solutions, look through sets of data that could be important, and figure out why we
were having trouble mapping that section.” Researchers tried different solutions and
found that some of the orchid’s traits were heterozygous—there were two spots on

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the genome responsible for their development. Weird regions of a genome, Liu
says, are the most exciting part of his job.

A decade ago young people arriving in Shenzhen would have hoped to land a job
building iPods or sewing jeans, a wholly different career track from Liu’s
colleagues. “This is the virtue of Shenzhen,” Liu says. “People are all coming from
other places, they are here trying to make money or to find some opportunities. We
all have the same kind of ambitions.” An opening salary at BGI runs around 3,000
yuan ($481) a month. “It’s not great, but it is competitive,” Deng, the
communications officer, says.

Executive Director Wang could easily disappear in the crowd of recent graduates on
BGI’s campus if it weren’t for his imposing height. He doesn’t like calling BGI a
factory—he’s more interested in creating the feel of a college campus. In addition to
encouraging dating, BGI promotes the creation of clubs and the enjoyment of free
time. “On weekends we like to climb North Mountain,” Deng says, pointing to a hill
in the distance. Wang likes to play basketball, and BGI has an annual tournament.
According to Deng, Wang’s team always wins. He has a suspicious number of tall
people on his team. “We think he might hire people just for the basketball team,”
she says, giggling.

After six o’clock, when most of BGI’s staff is done with work, a basketball court
outside the dorm quickly gets crowded. Some of Liu’s colleagues from the
bioinformatics division stick around to watch the games. One of the dorm’s oldest
residents, Tai Shuaishuai, says he’s just taking a break before heading back to work.
“For those of us who always stay in the office, the dorm is more convenient,” he
says, smiling through braces. Tai is 31, and his first name translates to “handsome
handsome.” Like Liu, he’s been at BGI since 2009, an eternity at the Shenzhen
factory, and he heads a team using sequencing to improve what he calls “molecular
breeding,” the same process responsible for BGI’s grouper. Tai is also responsible
for reviewing potential employees.

“China has a lot of universities, but we prefer candidates from the top universities,”
he says. “To be a BGIer means you have to be creative as a scientific researcher,
and you have to have team spirit. We take a lot of things into consideration—skills,
knowledge, educational background, and working style.” According to Tai, an offer
made to a potential employee is rarely turned down.

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Employee cafeteria
Photograph by Luke Casey for Bloomberg Businessweek

One reason may be that BGI offers employees the chance to study while working. If
Liu hadn’t joined BGI, he says, he probably would have pursued graduate studies
somewhere else. “I would not be getting this hands-on experience,” he says.
“Working here is basically a Ph.D. program.” Nonetheless, he’s starting at the
University of Hong Kong this year in a program that will only require that he leave
work for a day or two each week.

Most of the employees on the basketball court seem to be participating in one of

BGI’s work-study programs. One group of four says they’re still college students,
living at BGI on a full-time internship. “It’s just as comfortable as the dorms in our
universities,” one says. “And Shenzhen is a great place to be for young people.” On
weeknights, he says, karaoke halls offer a discount.

Around 6:30 it begins to rain, and the BGI basketball court empties. Tai ducks into
the entrance of the dorm, where a janitor is mopping under fluorescent lights and
BGI employees queue up to buy snacks. A couple of people from the bioinformatics
team gather around Tai and talk about their plans. “I would like to go abroad to the
U.S.,” says a team leader named Gao Zhibo. “Not to get my Ph.D. but just to
improve my language skills and my social skills.” Tai, for his part, is hard-pressed
to imagine why anyone would ever leave. “Doing scientific study is my passion,” he
says. “It’s my belief that science has no limits.”

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/chinese-company-to-acquire-dna-
sequencing-firm/?_r=0
Chinese Company to Acquire DNA Sequencing Firm
By
Andrew Pollack

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September 17, 2012 10:25 am September 17, 2012 10:25 am

Ramin Rahimian for The New York TimesBill Banyai, an optical physicist at
Complete Genomics, used his digital expertise in designing a factory that lowered
the cost of mapping the human genome.

Complete Genomics, a struggling DNA sequencing company in Silicon Valley, said

on Monday that it had agreed to be acquired for $117.6 million by BGI-Shenzhen, a
Chinese company that operates the world’s largest sequencing operation.

The price of $3.15 a share represents an 18 percent premium to Complete

Genomics’ closing price on Friday and a 54 percent premium to the closing price on
June 4, the day before the company announced that it would fire 55 employees to
save cash and that it had hired an adviser to explore strategic alternatives.

The deal, which will be carried out by a tender offer, is the latest sign of
consolidation in the rapidly changing and fiercely competitive market for DNA
sequencing. The price of determining the DNA blueprint of a person is tumbling
and sequencing is starting to be used for medical diagnosis, not just for basic
research.

In 2010, Life Technologies acquired Ion Torrent, and earlier this year, Illumina, the
leading manufacturer of sequencing machines, successfully fought off a $6.2 billion
hostile bid from Roche.

The deal will give BGI a base of operations in the United States as well as its own
sequencing technology. Included is some new technology, described in a paper in

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the journal Nature in July, that would allow for highly accurate sequencing using
tiny samples and would make sequencing more useful for medical diagnosis.

Until now, BGI has been offering sequencing using machines made by others,
mainly Illumina. But Illumina has also been offering a sequencing service, in
competition with BGI and with Complete Genomics. So it is possible that BGI
wants to reduce its dependence on Illumina’s technology.

Complete Genomics, based in Mountain View, Calif., pioneered a new model,

offering sequencing as a service instead of selling sequencing machines to
laboratories that would do the work themselves.

Ramin Rahimian for The New York TimesComplete

Genomics has produced more than 3,000 sequences at about $5,000 each this year.

While Complete Genomics gained a good reputation and charged low prices of
around $5,000 per human genome for large orders, it never was able to make money
at that price.

The company lost $39.1 million, or $1.16 per share, in the first half of 2012.
Revenue was $12.6 million, about even with the first half of 2011, owing in part to
problems Complete experienced in scaling up its operations. The stock is well
below the $9 price of its initial public offering in November 2010 and the company
said in regulatory filings that it might not be able to continue as a going concern.

The acquisition “represents the best outcome for our stockholders, offering them
liquidity and a premium value,’’ Clifford Reid, the chief executive of Complete
Genomics, said in a statement on Monday.

BGI-Shenzhen is descended from an organization started in 1999 as the Beijing

Genomics Institute to play China’s part in the international Human Genome Project.

It is believed to be the world’s largest genome sequencing operation and a symbol

of China’s ambitions to play a major role in genomics, and in biotechnology in
general. BGI shocked the industry in 2010 when it placed a record order for 128 of

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Illumina’s high-end HiSeq 2000 sequencing machines at a cost undoubtedly
reaching tens of millions of dollars.

While Complete Genomics specializes in human genomes, BGI has sequenced not
only human genomes but those of the giant panda and asparagus, not to mention
numerous pathogens. It has entered into collaborations with numerous companies,
universities and nonprofit organizations in the United States, including Merck; the
University of California, Davis; Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia; and Autism
Speaks.

Wang Jun, the chief executive of BGI-Shenzhen said that Complete Genomics,
which would continue to operate as a separate entity, would “fit well with our
research and business requirements.’’

BGI apparently has a for-profit and nonprofit part, but the entity that will buy
Complete Genomics is the for-profit part, according to a person close to BGI.

This person said BGI was not a Chinese government entity. It has apparently been
helped in the past by the government, however, including a $1.5 billion agreement
with the China Development Bank to finance the company’s expansion. In its
regulatory filings, Complete Genomics has listed BGI as a competitor that “may be
funded by the government of China.’’

The deal will need antitrust clearance as well as clearance from a national security
review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. It also
requires approval from certain governmental authorities in China.

Spokesmen for both Complete Genomics and BGI said they could not provide
information beyond what was in the news release.

Citigroup and the law firm O’Melveny & Myers advised BGI. Complete Genomics
was advised by Jefferies & Company and the law firm Latham & Watkins.

http://www.foundingfuel.com/column/dispatches-from-china/how-beijing-
genomics-institute-became-the-worlds-largest-gene-sequencer/
How Beijing Genomics Institute became the world’s largest gene sequencer

BGI's secret sauce: an endless curiosity, a unique low-cost platform and a

willingness to take on ambitious projects

Neelima Mahajan

• May 18, 2015 6:05p.m.

• Strategy and Innovation

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•
•
•
•
•
• Print this

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[Image of DNA Molecule by Christoph Bock under Creative Commons]
I stared at my laptop, my eyes transfixed on a photo of three sleeping pigs. They
were glowing in the dark. And they were real.
I promptly called the communications person at Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI),
which is headquartered in Shenzhen, the Chinese city that is home to companies

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like Tencent, Huawei and Foxconn’s largest factory (a mini-metropolis in itself
which churns out iPhones and other electronic devices by the minute).
A couple of days later, I was on my way to Shenzhen to meet the folks at BGI, and
no, I didn’t get to see the glowing pigs—they were a further two hours away from
Shenzhen and since they had grown from the time the photo was taken, I was told
“the marker” was less visible. In layman terms, the glow was a lot less than before.
Unknown to most people, BGI is the world’s largest gene sequencer. However, it
does not have the money and support enjoyed by other similar research entities like
the Broad Institute of the US or the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute of UK. But in
just 15 short years, it has gained the size and might that most scientific research
institutions can only dream about. According to The New Yorker, BGI produces at
least a quarter of the world’s genomic data, more than Harvard University, the
National Institutes of Health and any other research institute. It is careful to not call
itself a company and stresses upon calling itself an institute.
BGI has already sequenced the genomes of everything from the human gut
microbiome to silkworms, rice, potatoes, chickpeas, cucumbers, corn, yak, chicken,
the giant panda and a 700,000-year-old calcified horse bone found in Yukon,
Canada. It has mastered a technique called handmade cloning, a cheaper and
quicker cloning method involving relatively inexpensive equipment. It uses genetics
research to tackle hairy problems in bio-energy, agriculture and healthcare, and
some of its projects are already making an impact in China.
At the centre of all this research is a unique low-cost and high-throughput
platform which is effectively driving down the cost of researching and solving big
problems. As a result, BGI is able to work on interesting projects that have thus far
confounded humanity, such as the search for the intelligence gene. It has gone
global and acquired Complete Genomics in the US, one of the world’s two leading
providers of gene sequencing technology. People like Microsoft co-founder Bill
Gates are working with BGI on several projects in Africa, and eminent scientists
like James Watson sit on BGI’s advisory board. It has also published numerous
papers in science journals Nature and Science.
But I found BGI interesting for a whole set of reasons beyond its achievements in
science. Let me explain:
Be curious. All the time
Now why would anyone clone glow-in-the-dark pigs in the first place? As Yanmei
Zhu, associate director at the Strategic Planning Committee at BGI, told me, "We
did it for science."
“It's more like fun," I said.
"Yes," she smiled. "We did it for fun."
Whether it was science or fun, this points to the key driving force behind BGI: an
endless curiosity. People at BGI are encouraged to find new projects to work on, no
matter how weird or complex. The project on finding the intelligence gene is an
example: a 21-year-old wunderkind was put in charge of this major research
initiative. The point is simple: the findings or the data may not be useful now but

127
they will yield data or lessons that will help in future. As Zhu puts it, "BGI thinks
everything is useful… For the bio-economy, everything has to be backed by basic
research… If you don’t know the DNA well, you'll never know where cancer comes
from."
If you don’t know the DNA well, you’ll never know where cancer comes from.
Credentials don’t matter
BGI is all about decoding genes, complex science and solving complicated
problems. That's the domain of PhDs, right? Wrong. Most of BGI's 5,000-strong
workforce is made up of youngsters, usually 22 or 23 years old, some of whom are
dropouts. BGI operates on the philosophy that get them in young, let them live in
the on-site dorms, and train them (it has its own college) while they work. This kills
many birds with one stone: you get a low-cost workforce in big numbers (essential
for entities like BGI that deal with Big Data), you don’t have to re-train people who
come in with fancy degrees but are not industry-ready, you identify talent early on
and get a chance to groom them for bigger things. The person who was heading the
intelligence gene project, for instance, dropped out of school and joined BGI at the
age of 17. As Zhu puts it, the youngsters "stand on the shoulders" of their most
accomplished seniors, and in the end, everyone wins.
Shoot for the big wins from the beginning
Most start-ups begin small, aim for the easy wins, and then ramp up. BGI, on the
other hand, was shooting for the most respected projects from Day One. When it
started in 1999, it worked as a participant on the prestigious Human Genome
Project. Even though it got to do only 1 percent of the work, doing that was
important. It helped this small unknown entity from China (and the only one from a
developing country) rub shoulders with the Big Boys of the field, and shoot into
prominence in the global scientific community. After that, BGI has continued to
participate in other high-impact global-level research projects, further building on
its reputation.
Be flexible and adapt quickly when things change
At Shenzhen, BGI is housed in a remodelled shoe factory with linoleum flooring,
not exactly what you would associate with a typical high-tech institution. BGI, as
the full name suggests, started in Beijing under the aegis of the Chinese Academy of
Sciences. While being part of a prestigious government institution helped, it was
also a handicap as it insisted on a more conventional approach, such as emphasizing
the importance of educational credentials. So, when the government of Shenzhen
offered it space in the old shoe factory and some funding, BGI took it so that it
could operate independently. The bet paid off.
Set up your own support system
In a country like China, the field of genomics research isn't that advanced, and there
is no ecosystem to speak of, and so, BGI is on a quest to build its own. It doesn't
rely on universities to churn out industry-ready graduates. It trains them in-house.
There was a bottleneck in terms of the availability of gene sequencing technology in

128
China; so, BGI bought Complete Genomics, globally the No. 2 company in this
field. There is no gene data bank in China, so BGI is building its own.
As BGI's story shows, if you are trying to be a pioneer at something, you’ll pretty
much have to build your own road. It won't be easy. But in the end, it will be worth
all the hard work.
If you are trying to be a pioneer at something, you’ll pretty much have to build your
own road.
[This article was concurrently published in Mint]
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About the author

Neelima Mahajan

Senior Journalist

Beijing

When I landed in Beijing in 2012, I gave myself six months to either survive China
or let it overwhelm me. I hadn’t been here before, yet I jumped at the opportunity to
head the management publication of a leading Chinese business school with
decidedly global ambitions. I was, after all, intrigued by the question: "What makes
Chinese companies tick?"
Settling in wasn't easy with challenges ranging from language and food to biting
cold winters and Beijing's infamous smog.
Before I knew it, the six months had become three years. While my decade-long
experience in India, with publications like Businessworld, The Times of India and
Forbes India, familiarized me with how Indian companies behave and view
opportunity, my China stint gave me a completely different worldview. If anything,
these three years here have challenged my preconceived notions about the Middle
Kingdom.
For instance, the popular perception outside of China is that the state is dominant in
the business sector here. I found, much to my surprise, that it is not true. If anything,
China’s growth miracle owes its success to private enterprises. And Chinese

129
entrepreneurs go through the same trials and travails as their counterparts
elsewhere. So what makes them so successful? How is it that Alibaba’s Jack Ma has
built a $251 billion enterprise in just 15 years? How did Pony Ma at Tencent lead
his company to such a mammoth scale? I can’t say with certainty that I have fully
cracked that question yet, but in my observations so far, a couple of things stand
out: thinking big, relentless drive, tenacity , a difference in the way they view and
crack opportunities, and loads and loads of spunk.
The other popular notion about China is that Chinese companies are simply clones
of their Western counterparts. Once again, it is not entirely true. I have visited both
the Google headquarters in Silicon Valley and Baidu’s headquarters in Beijing, and
I can say with certainty that Baidu is not a copy of Google.
A third notion that I have seen crumble before my eyes is that China is all about
cheap, low-quality products. While I don’t deny that there are cheap, fake products
proliferating the market, I would urge you to look at the other side: Chinese
companies that are leading the game in innovation. Walk into the innovation center
of a Lenovo or a Haier, and you’ll know what I am talking about.
I have an avid interest in multinational company strategy as well as the so-called
'emerging giants'. It is fascinating to see how MNCs are navigating their way
around this hard-to-ignore country and also how homegrown giants like Lenovo,
Huawei, Alibaba, Baidu and Haier are approaching global markets.
I also have a keen interest in management thought. I have interviewed thought
leaders like C.K. Prahalad, Michael Porter, Philip Kotler, Clayton Christensen,
Henry Mintzberg, Henry Chesbrough, Marshall Goldsmith and Gary Hamel, and
Nobel Prize winners John Nash and Amartya Sen.
Before coming to China, I was an International Visiting Scholar at the University of
California Berkeley. There, I explored how publications need to evolve with
changes in technology and reader habits, and business journalism in Silicon Valley.
I was awarded a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation fellowship as part of the Africa
Reporting Project to write about coffee and climate change in Uganda, Africa.
In 2010, I received the Polestar Award for Excellence in IT and Business
Journalism. I have researched and edited two books: Leading with Conviction
(Jossey-Bass) by Shalom Saada Saar and Michael Hargrove, and Culture of the
Sepulchre (Penguin India) by Madanjeet Singh. The second book is closely linked
to my family’s personal history in East Africa.
Also by me
Deciphering the Chinese consumer Family comes first at Starbucks China The rise
of the big spenders of China Haier's quest for the perfect egg China steps towards
intelligent manufacturing
You might also like

http://www.completegenomics.com/

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http://www.bayt.com/en/company/beijing-genomics-institute-shenzhen-1454509/
BGI (formerly known as Beijing Genomics Institute) was founded in Beijing on
Sept 9th, 1999 with the mission of supporting the development of science and
technology, building strong research teams, and promoting the development of
scientific partnership in genomics field.

With a goal toward excellence, high efficiency, and accuracy, BGI has successfully
completed a large number of projects. These include sequencing 1% of the human
genome for the International Human Genome Project, contributing 10% to the
International Human HapMap Project, carrying out research to combat SARS, being
a key player in the Sino-British Chicken Genome Project, and completely
sequencing the rice genome, the silkworm genome, and, most recently, the first
Asian diploid genome. Much of this research has been published in the top
international academic journals Nature and Science, which witnessed the path of
BGI from projects participation to leading the development of genomics. In
conjunction with carrying out these projects, BGI has established its own technical
platforms based on large-scale genome sequencing, efficient bioinformatics
analyses, and innovative genetic health care initiatives. These distinguished
achievements have made a great contribution to the development of genomics in
both China and the world, and have established BGI as a world-class research
institution. In the course of attaining these goals, BGI has undergone a historic
breakthrough from the number one genomics institute in Asia to one of the leading
genomics institutes in the world.
During its development, BGI has created a unique research center that promotes
high self-worth, job satisfaction, and innovative development.
Decoding genes for a better future, BGI is leading the way!

http://www.igb.illinois.edu/news/first-bgi-igb-workshop-takes-place-shenzen-china

First BGI-IGB Workshop Takes Place in Shenzen, China

As part of an international exchange of knowledge and ideas, the Institute for
Genomic Biology and BGI (formerly known as the Beijing Genomics Institute) are
engaging in a series of learning and discussion workshops. The first workshop was
held in Shenzhen, China, from January 21st to January 25th, 2013.
Seventeen members of the IGB traveled to BGI for the week-long workshop,
arriving in Hong Kong and journeying via bus across the border to China to their
destination of the Yantian District of Shenzhen.

131
Founded in Beijing with a mission to support the development of science and
technology, build strong research teams, and promote the development of scientific
partnership in genomics, BGI’s headquarters were later relocated to Shenzhen as the
first citizen-managed, non-profit research institution in China. BGI engages in
large-scale, high-accuracy projects, such as sequencing 1% of the human genome
for the International Human Genome Project.
The first day of the workshop began with IGB members meeting with BGI
leadership to understand their vision concerning sequencing technologies, and the
impact of their pending acquisition of Complete Genomics, a company dedicated to
large-scale whole human genome sequencing and bioinformatics analysis. They
received a tour of the facilities including the Illumina HiSeq 2000 sequencing
system, which along with the other sequencers onsite are capable of producing 6
terabytes of data per day.
Lectures that day from BGI members included the application of genomics in
biodiversity analysis from Dr. Guojie Zhang, followed by a talk from Dr. Jing Zhao
on the progress and application of sequencing technology, and the capabilities of
current next-gen sequencing technologies. The day ended with a discussion from
Dr. Ruibang Luo on algorithms for alignment and assembly, and the comparison of
different assemblers and second-generation assemblers. The IGB members were
avid participants in these discussions, raising many relevant points on algorithm use
and strategies for the building of gene models and gene annotations.
The second day featured lectures on technologies and methods in metabolomics by
Dr. Hemi Luan, and plant genomics by Xin Liu, which focused mostly on BGI
strategies for denovo assembly of plant genomes. These lectures and others were
well-matched to the interests and background of the IGB members attending and
provided high quality, productive discussions and questions between the two
groups.
Day three of the workshop began with a lecture from the director of the China
National Genebank-Shenzhen, Dr. Yong Zhang. He discussed how they have
created a national biological resource bank to promote biodiversity preservation and
genomic research, which is partnered with the Smithsonian museum. Dr. Zhang
explained the vision of the China National Genebank-Shenzhen, to become a global
biorepository for all types of human, plant, animal and microbial samples.

132
The afternoon lecture on metagenomics by Dr. Wanting Chen focused on current
BGI projects, their role in the sequencing of the human gut microbiome and the
methods used for 16s rRNA and metagenomic sample preparation and
bioinformatic analysis. This was followed by a visit to the library construction
facilities. BGI houses completely separate rooms for sample QC, DNA shearing,
blunt-ending/A overhang/adaptor ligation, gel size selection (individual agarose gels
for each library), PCR, PCR cleanup and for library QC. Another facility performs
RNA extractions, with separate rooms for preparation of RNAseq libraries and
exome capture.
The final lecture of the day, from Dr. Xin Zhou, was entitled “From molecules to
ecosystems, answering macrobiology questions using DNA and genomics.” Dr.
Zhou explained the development of DNA barcoding in insects using mtDNA for
population studies, and the i5K project involving sequencing the genomes of 5,000
insects. His project, involving sequencing and assembling the transcriptomes of
1,000 insects, is known as 1KITE. The project is nearly complete and will be
initially used for phylogenetic studies.
The final day of lectures included disease analysis using GWAS by Dr. Qibin Li,
the topic of cancer genomics by Dr. Guangwu Guo, and single cell analysis by Dr.
Hou Yong, followed by some hiking in the hills surrounding the BGI building. The
following day consisted of tours of the Da Fen oil painting village, which houses
several hundred shops, and the Splendid China Folk Village, a large park featuring
miniature replicas of several Chinese provinces, and displays of the architectural
styles, cultures, and habits of different Chinese dynasties. The group also had lunch
with the president of BGI, Dr. Huanming Yang, who gave his insight into the BGI
philosophy and future plans for expansion.
After a 2-hour trip through customs at the border of Hong Kong due to a spring
festival taking place, the group boarded their flight the next day for the 13 hour trip
back to the states. The members of the workshop expressed their extreme gratitude
over the opportunity to visit BGI, and for the efforts that were made to adapt the
lectures and schedule to the diverse backgrounds of the attendees. The speakers in
the workshop were very impressive in their knowledge and scope of contributions
to the scientific community.
BGI aims to develop research collaboration and provide scientific support to
scientists all over the world, and to contribute to the advancement of innovative
biological and genomic research. The IGB shares these goals and gratefully
acknowledges BGI for joining us in this series of workshops. In May of this year,
the IGB will welcome a delegation of students from BGI to spend the week at IGB
on the Illinois campus, to engage in their own interactions with students and faculty
here.
Date Published:
Tue, 01/22/2013 - 9:00am

http://www.newsweek.com/china-rewriting-book-genome-research-66513

133
Tech & Science
China Is Rewriting the Book on Genome Research
By Lone Frank On 4/24/11 at 1:00 AM
By Lone Frank On 4/24/11 at 1:00 AM

•
•
•

Lab technicians at the Beijing Genomics Institute in Shenzhen, China. Clockwise

from upper left: Zhi Wei Luo; Wan Ling Li; Zi Long Zhang; and Yu Zhu Xu. Ian
Teh / Panos for Newsweek (4)
Tech & Science
The world’s largest genome-mapping facility is in an unlikely corner of China.
Hidden away in a gritty neighborhood in Shenzhen’s Yantian district, surrounded

134
by truck-repair shops and scrap yards prowled by chickens, Beijing’s most
ambitious biomedical project is housed in a former shoe factory.
But the modest gray exterior belies the state-of-the-art research inside. In
immaculate, glass-walled and neon-lit rooms resembling intensive care units, rows
of identical machines emit a busy hum. The Illumina HiSeq 2000 is a top-of-the-
line genome-sequencing machine that carries a price tag of $500,000. There are 128
of them here, flanked by rows of similar high-tech equipment, making it possible
for the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) to churn out more high quality DNA-
sequence data than all U.S. academic facilities put together.
“Genes build the future,” announces a poster on the wall, and there is no doubt that
China has set its eye on that future. This year, Forbes magazine estimated that the
genomics market will reach $100 billion over the next decade, with scientists
analyzing vast quantities of data to offer new ways to fight disease, feed the world,
and harness microbes for industrial purposes. “The situation in genomics resembles
the early days of the Internet,” says Harvard geneticist George Church, who advises
BGI and a number of American genomics companies. “No one knows what will
turn out to be the killer apps.” Companies such as Microsoft, Google, IBM, and
Intel have already invested in genomics, seeing the field as an extension of their
own businesses—data handling and management. “The big realization is that
biology has become an information science,” says Dr. Yang Huanming, cofounder
and president of BGI. “If we accept that [genomics] builds on the digitalization of
life, then all kinds of genetic information potentially holds value.”

Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week

BGI didn’t always seem destined for success—or even survival. “The crazy guys”
was how Chinese colleagues initially referred to the two founders, Huanming and
director Wang Jian. Refused government support, they muscled their way into the
international Human Genome Project, mapping out 1 percent of that celebrated first
full sequence before tackling the rice-plant genome on their own, beating a well-
funded international consortium, and suddenly finding political leverage. Yang and
Wang used it to set up the research center, which is nominally nonprofit but carries
out commercial activities in support of the research. With an annual grant of $3
million from the local government in exchange for moving to the shoe factory in
2007, BGI first grew modestly, generating income from fee-for-service sequencing
and conducting molecular diagnostic tests for hospitals. A $1.5 billion loan from the
Chinese Development Bank in 2009 allowed the company to catapult into a
different league, and its combination of sequencing power and advanced DNA data-
management solutions for the pharma industry are now drawing international
attention. Last year, pharmaceutical giant Merck announced plans for a research
collaboration with BGI, as the Chinese company’s revenue hit $150 million—
revenue projected to triple this year. “I admire their passion and the willingness to
take risks,” says Steven Hsu, a physicist at the University of Oregon, adding that “it
permeates the organization.”

135
Others would like to see deeper scientific reflection tempering the monumental
ambition. “A more philosophical and conceptual rather than just a technical
approach to the genome is needed to foster great discovery,” says long-time
collaborator Oluf Borbye Pedersen of the University of Copenhagen.
While other well-known genomics centers such as Boston’s Broad Institute
concentrate more narrowly on human health, the Shenzhen scientists cover a broad
biological spectrum. In one shiny lab, thousands of microbes are being scanned for
genes that might serve useful industrial purposes, while in another human stem cells
are being developed for clinical applications. Scientists have mapped the genomes
of everything from cucumbers and 40 different strains of silk worms to the giant
panda. They have also cataloged tens of thousands of genes of bacteria living in the
human gut, and pieced together the genomic puzzle of an ancient human—an
extinct paleo-Eskimo who lived in Greenland 4,500 years ago. While such academic
prestige projects are geared toward publication in scientific journals, real-world
experimentation is going on at a nearby farm where pigs are cloned to serve as
disease models. And in Laos, scientists are testing genetically enhanced plants to
feed China’s growing population. The institute has already amassed almost 250
potentially lucrative patents covering agricultural, industrial, and medical
applications.
Satellite research centers have been set up or are underway in the U.S., Europe,
Hong Kong, and four other locations in China, and the number of researchers at the
main headquarters in Shenzhen has more than doubled during the past year and a
half. The institute now employs almost 4,000 scientists and technicians—and is still
expanding.
“I’ve seen it happen but sometimes even I can’t believe how fast we are moving,”
says Luo Ruibang, a bioinformaticist, who at 23, fits perfectly within the company’s
core demographic. The average age of the research staff is 26.
Li Yingrui, 24, directs the bioinformatics department and its 1,500 computer
scientists. Having dropped out of college because it didn’t present enough of an
intellectual challenge, he firmly believes in motivating young employees with wide-
ranging freedom and responsibility. “They grow with the task and develop faster,”
he says. One of his researchers is 18-year-old Zhao Bowen. While still in high
school, Zhao joined the bioinformatics team for a summer project and blew
everyone away with his problem-solving skills. After consulting with his parents, he
took a full-time job as a researcher and finished school during his downtime.
Fittingly, he now manages a project on the genetic basis of high IQ. His team is
sampling 1,000 Chinese adults with an IQ higher than 145, comparing their
genomes with those of an equal number of randomly picked control subjects. Zhao
acknowledges that such projects linking intelligence with genes may be
controversial but “more so elsewhere than in China,” he says, adding that several
U.S. research groups have contacted him for collaboration. “Everybody is interested
in intelligence,” he says.

136
A shoe factory becoming a genomics center, scientists replacing blue-collar
workers—the Shenzhen research facility embodies the country’s economic and
social ambitions. According to a 2010 report from Monitor Group, a management
consulting firm based in Boston, China is “poised to become the global leader in
life-science discovery and innovation within the next decade.”
The Chinese government will, by next year, have spent $124 billion since 2009
building hospitals and health-care centers. Such strategic investments have lured
Chinese scientists back to China. So far, at least 80,000 Western-trained Ph.D.s
have returned, the vast majority in the past five years. With the country on track to
become the second-largest pharmaceuticals market next year, and the U.S. failing
behind, afflicted by weak—and declining—government funding of basic science as
well as anemic collaboration between private and public sectors, China could take
the lead. As George Baeder, vice president of Monitor Group Asia, says, China “has
the potential to create a more efficient model for discovering and developing new
drugs,” a prediction echoed by Caroline Wagner, a science-policy specialist and
professor at Pennsylvania State University, who argues in a forthcoming paper that
the days of American leadership will soon be gone. “After more than half a century
at the top spot, the U.S. will become one big player among several,” she says.
But, Wagner adds, “science is not a zero-sum game,” and as the pie gets bigger, so
will the opportunities for collaboration. Yang, for his part, puts it simply:
“Genomics is international,” he says. “We must collaborate to survive and
develop.” Certainly, the scientists at his Shenzhen headquarters have their view on
the world. The latest shipment of high-tech toys sits, still unpacked, on the floor; the
stamp on the sides of the crates proclaiming: Made in the USA.
Frank is author of the forthcoming book 'My Beautiful Genome.'

http://www.wow.com/wiki/Beijing_Genomics_Institute
Beijing Genomics Institute

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Genomics_Institute
Updated: 2016-04-05T04:04Z
BGI

137
 A sequencing room at BGI Hong Kong
Industry Genome sequencing
Founded September 9, 1999 (Beijing)
Headquarters
Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Wuhan,
Hangzhou, Beijing, China;
Template:Longitem
Boston, USA;
Copenhagen, Denmark
Template:Longitem Worldwide
Yang Huanming (Chairman)
Template:Longitem Wang Jian (President)
Wang Jun (CEO & Director)
BGI China (Mainland)
BGI Asia Pacific
Divisions BGI Americas (North and South
America)
BGI Europe (Europe and Africa)
List of subsidiaries:
BGI Research
BGI Tech
Subsidiaries BGI Diagnosis
BGI Agriculture
BGI College
BGI Manufacturing

138
 China National GeneBank
(Shenzhen)
Complete Genomics
GigaScience
www.bgi-international.com
Website
www.genomics.cn
BGI (), known as the Beijing Genomics Institute prior to 2008, is one of the
world's premier genome sequencing centers, headquartered in Shenzhen,
Guangdong, China.[1]

Contents

• 1 History
• 2 Key achievements
• 3 Current research projects
o 3.1 Human genetics
 3.1.1 Yan Huang Project
 3.1.2 The 1000 genomes project
 3.1.3 Diabetes-associated Genes and Variations Study
(LUCAMP) Cancer Genome Project
 3.1.4 Cognitive Research Lab
o 3.2 Animals and plants
 3.2.1 1,000 Plant and Animal Reference Project
 3.2.2 Three Extreme-Environment Animal Genomes Project
 3.2.3 International Big Cats Genome Project
 3.2.4 Symbiont Genome Project
o 3.3 Microorganisms
 3.3.1 Ten Thousand Microbial Genomes Project
• 4 Bioinformatics technology
• 5 See also
• 6 References
• 7 External links

History
Wang Jian, Yu Jun, Yang Huanming and Liu Siqi created BGI in November 1999[2]
in Beijing, China as a non-governmental independent research institute in order to
participate in the Human Genome Project as China's representative.[3][4] After the
project was completed, funding dried up. So BGI moved to Hangzhou in exchange
for funding from the Hangzhou Municipal Government.
In 2002, BGI sequenced the rice genome which was a cover story in the journal
Science. In 2003 BGI decoded the SARS virus genome and created a kit for
detection of the virus. In 2003, BGI Hangzhou and the Zhejiang University founded
a new research institute, the James D. Watson Institute of Genome Sciences,

139
Zhejiang University. The Watson Institute was intended to become a major center
for research and education in East Asia modelled after the Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory in the US.
In 2007 BGI’s headquarters relocated to Shenzhen as "the first citizen-managed,
non-profit research institution in China". Yu Jun left BGI at this time purportedly
selling his stake to the other 3 founders for a nominal sum.[2] In 2008, BGI-
Shenzhen was officially recognized as a state agency.[5] In 2008, BGI published the
first human genome of an Asian individual.[3][6]
In 2010 BGI Shenzhen was certified as meeting the requirements of ISO9001:2008
standard for the design and provision of high-throughput sequencing services,[7] The
same year BGI bought 128 sequencing machines and claimed to be the world's
largest genome center.[3]
In 2010 it was reported that BGI would receive US$1.5 billion in “collaborative
funds” over the next 10 years from the China Development Bank.[8][9] In 2010, BGI
Americas was established with its main office in Cambridge, Massachusetts[10] and
BGI Europe was established in Copenhagen.[11]
In 2011 BGI reported it employed 4,000 scientists and technicians.[1] BGI did the
genome sequencing for the deadly 2011 Germany E. coli O104:H4 outbreak in three
days under open licence.[12]
In 2013 BGI reported it had relationships with 17 out of the top 20 global
pharmaceutical companies[10][13] and advertised that it provided commercial science,
health, agricultural, and informatics services to global pharmaceutical companies.[14]
That year it bought Complete Genomics of Mountain View, California, a major
supplier of DNA sequencing technology, for US$118 million.[12]
The institute has described itself as partly private and partly public, receiving funds
both from private investors and the Chinese government. The laboratory was also
the Bioinformatics Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Key achievements

• First to de novo sequence and assemble mammalian[15] and human genomes

with short-read sequencing (so-called "next generation sequencing")[16]
• Sequenced the first ancient human’s genome[17]
• Sequenced the first diploid genome of an Asian individual,[18] as part of the
Yan Huang project
• Initiated building a sequence map of the human pan-genome, estimated to
contain 19-40 million bases not in the human reference genome[19][20]
• Contributed 10% of sequence information for the International HapMap
Project
• BGI's first project was contributing 1% of the Human Genome Project’s
reference genome and was the only institute in the developing world to
contribute

140
 • Produced proof-of-principle study for sequencing the microbiome of the
human digestive system, an estimated 150 times larger than the human
genome[21][22]
• Key sequencing center in the 1000 Genomes Project
• First Chinese institution to sequence the Severe acute respiratory syndrome
(SARS) virus, just hours after the first sequencing of the virus by
Canadians[23]
• Key player in the analysis of the 2011 E. coli O104:H4 outbreak[24]
• Sequenced 40 domesticated and wild silkworms, identifying 354 genes likely
important in domestication.[25]
• Sequenced the first giant panda genome,[15] equal in size to the human
genome, in less than 8 months[26] Sequencing revealed that the giant panda,
Ailuropoda melanoleuca, has a frameshift mutation in a gene involved in
sensing savory flavors, T1R1. The mutation might be the genetic reason why
the panda prefers bamboo over meat. However, the panda also lacks genes
expected for bamboo digestion, so its microbiome might play a key role in
metabolizing its main source of food.[15]
• Key player in the Sino-British Chicken Genome Project
• As of 2010, plant genomes sequenced include rice, cucumber, soybean, and
Sorghum. Animal genomes sequenced include silkworm, honey bee, water
flea, lizard, and giant panda. An additional 40 animal and plant species and
over 1000 bacteria had also been sequenced.[4][25][27]
• Nature in 2010 ranked BGI Shenzhen as the fourth among the ten top
institutions in China with all the others being universities and the Chinese
Academy of Sciences. The ranking was based on articles in Nature research
journals. There were similar results for other tops journals.[28]
• In 2014, BGI was reported to be producing 500 cloned pigs a year to test
new medicines.[29]

Current research projects

Human genetics
Yan Huang Project
Started in 2007 and named after two Emperors believed to have founded China’s
dominant ethnic group,[30] BGI planned in this project, to sequence at least 100
Chinese individuals to produce a high-resolution map of Chinese genetic
polymorphisms.[31][32] The first genome data was published in October 2007.[33] An
anonymous Chinese billionaire donated $10 million RMB (about US$1.4 million)
to the project and his genome was sequenced at the beginning of the project.[31][32]
The 1000 genomes project
Template:Main
Diabetes-associated Genes and Variations Study (LUCAMP) Cancer

141
 Genome Project
Nine Danish universities and institutes will collaborate with BGI in this targeted
resequencing project.
BGI explores associated genome and gene variation in complexes diseases in large-
scale studies primarily using two methods: PCR-based resequencing of candidate
genes and exon-capture-based whole exome resequencing.
Cognitive Research Lab
The Cognitive Research Lab at BGI is working with Stephen Hsu on a project to
discover the genetic basis of human intelligence.[34]
Animals and plants
1,000 Plant and Animal Reference Project
BGI is leading an international collaboration to sequence 1,000 plants and animals
of economic and scientific import within two years. It has pledged an initial
US$100 million to start the program.[35]
BGI has already sequenced genomes of 20 species of animals and 9 species of
plants—sometimes for multiple individuals, such as 40 silkworms 19713493, and
has an equal number underway as of March 2010.
Three Extreme-Environment Animal Genomes Project
In 2009 BGI-Shenzhen announced the launch of three genome projects that focus
on animals living in extreme environments. The three selected genomes are those of
two polar animals: the polar bear and emperor penguin, and one altiplano animal:
the Tibetan antelope.[36]
International Big Cats Genome Project
In 2010, BGI, Beijing University, Heilongjiang Manchurian tiger forestry zoo,
Kunming Institute of Zoology, San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research
in California, and others announced they would sequence the Amur tiger, South
China tiger, Bengal tiger, Asiatic lion, African lion, clouded leopard, snow leopard,
and other felines. BGI would also sequence the genomes and epigenoms of a liger
and tigon. Since the two reciprocal hybrids have different phenotypes, despite being
genetically identical, it was expected that the epigenome might reveal the basis of
such differences.[37] The project aim was to significantly advance conservation
research and was auspiciously announced for the Chinese year of the Tiger.[38]
Results were reported in 2013 for the genomes of the Anur tiger, the white Bengal
tiger, African lion, white African lion and snow leopard.[39]
Symbiont Genome Project
A jointly funded project announced March 19, 2010, BGI will collaborate with
Sidney K. Pierce of University of South Florida and Charles Delwiche of the
University of Maryland at College Park to sequence the genomes of the sea slug,
Elysia chlorotica, and its algal food Vaucheria litorea. The sea slug uses genes from

142
the algae to synthesize chlorophyll, the first interspecies of gene transfer discovered.
Sequencing their genomes could elucidate the mechanism of that transfer.[40]
Microorganisms
Ten Thousand Microbial Genomes Project
http://english.cas.cn/Ne/CASE/200908/t20090805_44705.shtml

Bioinformatics technology
De novo sequencing requires aligning billions of short strings of DNA sequence
into a full genome, itself three billion base pairs long for humans.
BGI’s computational biologists developed the first successful algorithm, based on
graph theory, for aligning billions of 25 to 75-base pair strings produced by next-
generation sequencers, specifically Illumina’s Genome Analyzer, during de novo
sequencing. The algorithm, called SOAPdenovo, can assemble a genome in two
days[20] and has been used to sequence an array of plant and animal genomes.
BGI’s 500-node supercomputer processes 10 terabytes of raw sequencing data
every 24 hours from its current 30 or so Genome Analyzers from Illumina. The
annual budget for the computer center is US$9 million.[41]
SOAPdenovo is part of "Short Oligonucleotide Analysis Package" (SOAP), a suite
of tools developed by BGI for de novo assembly of human-sized genomes,
alignment, SNP detection, resequencing, indel finding, and structural variation
analysis. Built for the Illumina sequencers' short reads, SOAPdenovo has been used
to assemble multiple human genomes[16][17][18] (identifying an eight kilobase
insertion not detected by mapping to the human reference genome[42]) and animals,
like the giant panda.[15]

See also

• Chinese National Human Genome Center

• Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
• Broad Institute
• European Bioinformatics Institute

References

1. ↑ a b Lone Frank, High-Quality DNA, Apr 24, 2011, The Daily Beast
2. ↑ a b Shu-Ching Jean Chen, (2 September 2013) Genomic Dreams Coming
True in China Forbes Asia, Retrieved 27 October 2014
3. ↑ a b c Kevin Davies, (27 September 2011) The Bedrock of BGI: Huanming
Yang Bio-IT World, Retrieved 14 January 2014
4. ↑ a b The dragon's DNA, Jun 17th 2010, The Economist
5. ↑ About BGI, BGI
6. ↑ Ye, Jia (2008) An Interview with a Leader in Genomics — Beijing
Genomics Institute Asia Biotech, Retrieved 14b January 2013

143
 7. ↑

https://biotechin.asia/2015/10/05/bgi-at-shenzhen-announces-that-gene-edited-
micro-pigs-will-be-sold-as-pets/
BGI, formerly known as Beijing Genomics Institute in Shenzen, China has been a
forerunner in the field of genome sequencing for sometime now, being the world’s
largest centre for gene sequencing. From sequencing the rice genome in 2002 to
sequencing genomes of giant panda, cucumber, sorghum to the genomes of more
than 1,000 species of gut bacteria, this premier institute, has been making its
presence felt in the international arena.
Last year, there were reports of China cloning pigs on an industrial scale and using
them as subjects for testing medicines. This led to BGI becoming the world’s
largest centre for the cloning of pigs. They generated these micropigs by applying a
gene-editing technique to a small breed of pigs known as Bama.
At the recently concluded Shenzhen International Biotech Leaders Summit in
China, BGI revealed that it would start selling the micropigs as pets. The animals
weighs about 15 kilograms when mature, or about the same as a medium-sized dog.
According to Yong Li, technical director of BGI’s animal-science platform, the
proposed price tag of 10,000 yuan (US$1,600) for the micropigs, would help them
“better evaluate” the market. The institute claims that in future, customers will be
offered pigs with different coat colours and patterns, which it can set through gene
editing.
Scientists world over are debating about how to better regulate the various
applications of gene editing. BGI agrees on the need to regulate gene editing in pets
as well as in the medical research applications, that make up the core of it micropig
research activities. They say that the profits from the sale of these pets will be
further invested in this research.
“We plan to take orders from customers now and see what the scale of the demand
is,” says Li.
Micropigs as animal models
Pigs are closer to humans physiologically and genetically, compared to rats or mice,
and are better suited to be model organisms for human diseases. However, the large
size and maintenance cost was a deterring factor, especially since large pigs means
large doses of pricey experimental medicines needed for testing.
So, they chose Bama pigs which were far lighter at 35-50kgs compared to the 100kg
weighing farm pigs. The small, genetically modified Micropigs were then made by
taking cells from a Bama foetus and before the cloning process, they used TALENs
(transcription activator-like effector nuclease, TALENs) to disable one of two
copies of the growth hormone receptor gene (GHR) in the fetal cells. Without the
receptor, cells do not receive the ‘grow’ signal during development, resulting in
stunted pigs.
BGI then created more micropigs by breeding stunted male clones with normal
females. Only half of the resulting, naturally conceived offspring were micropigs,
but the process is more efficient than repeating the full cloning procedure, and

144
avoids potential health problems associated with cloning. Among the 20 second-
generation gene-edited pigs, BGI has observed no adverse health effects, says Li.
These micropigs are already being used for studying about stem cells, gut
microbiota, Laron syndrome, a type of dwarfism caused by a mutation in the human
GHR gene.
Medical geneticist Lars Bound at Aarhus University, Denmark who collaborated
with BGI for the pig gene-editing programme, admits that the decision to sell these
pigs as pets took him by surprise, but admits that it undeniably stole the show at the
Shenzen summit, considering how cute the micropigs were! There is a demand in
US for porcine lap pets, and this could probably just help meet that demand.
Ethical issues
The question on many researcher’s minds is, will dogs or cats be next up for genetic
manipulation? There is a consensus though, among scientists and ethicists! They
agree that gene-edited pets are not very different from conventional breeding — the
result is just achieved more efficiently. But that doesn’t make it a great idea, says
Jeantine Lunshof, a bioethicist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who says it is
just “stretching physiological limits for the sole purpose of satisfying idiosyncratic
aesthetic preferences of humans”.
“I can certainly imagine resistance to manipulating dogs, even though all of the
current breeds are the result of selective breeding by humans,” says Dana Carroll, a
gene-editing pioneer at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Scientists are also concerned that the micro pigs may be a distraction from more
serious research!
Finally it all comes down to one thing. The need to establish a regulatory
framework for the safe and ethical use of this technology has become imminent
more than ever.
Source: Nature
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 Related

Weekly Roundup: biotechin.asia

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Categories: China, Genetics, News, Research

Tagged as: BGI, Genetics, Genome sequen

http://www.bio-itworld.com/2010/issues/sept-oct/bgi-us.html
BGI Americas Offers Sequencing the Chinese Way

The new office promotes the BGI brand and services.

By Kevin Davies
September 28, 2010 | 25 years ago, Shenzhen was a tiny fishing village in
southwest China, just one hour north of Hong Kong. Today, it is the country’s
second largest port after Shanghai, a booming technology haven and since 2007,
home to BGI, the Beijing Genomics Institute.

147
With 3,000 employees currently rising to an expected 5,000 by the end of this year,
and a fleet of more than 150 Illumina and Life Technologies next-generation
sequencing instruments, most of which are being installed in a former printing
factory in Hong Kong (see, p. 44), BGI is poised (if it isn’t already) to become the
world’s largest genome sequencing center. And it wants to share its extraordinary
resources and expertise with, well, everybody.
Last April, BGI Americas was officially incorporated in Delaware as the official
interface for BGI in North America. BGI Europe followed suit the next month (See,
“European Union”). From a small office in an incubator space overlooking Boston’s
Charles River, the husband-and-wife team of Paul Tu (president) and Julia Dan
(CEO) are reaching out to potential academic and commercial partners and
customers. By the end of 2010, BGI Americas will have as many as 20 sales
representatives in search of partners who wish to avail themselves of BGI’s
prodigious sequencing capacity.
“We’re an interface representing BGI to collaborators in America and to promote
the BGI brand,” says Tu. “That means finding collaborators working on different
interesting projects, or fee-for-service projects, to support our operations.” He
smiles: “3,000 people need to eat!”
Tu and Dan already have cause to celebrate: a landmark 5-year deal with Merck to
create value from NGS, announced at a press conference in Shenzhen in mid-
September, that is certain to grab the attention of Big Pharma.
Tu graduated from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and worked in venture
capital for ten years before meeting BGI co-founder Wang Jian and “drinking the
Kool-Aid” (see, “Drinking the Kool-Aid”). Indeed, Tu and Dan abandoned their
own start-up plans in China to sign on with BGI Americas. Tu’s wife is also his
boss; Dan previously worked in corporate development for Genzyme. She lets Tu
do most of the talking, but corrects him occasionally, just like any happily-married
couple.
Model Offering
The growth and data output at BGI is nothing short of astonishing. The institute
currently employs 3,000 staff in Shenzhen, with 1,500 working in bioinformatics,
including programmers and IT staff. When Illumina introduced its new state-of-the-
art sequencer in January 2010, BGI immediately ordered a total of 128 machines—
Tu explains that 128 is a lucky number in Chinese. (The number eight sounds like
‘wealth.’)
“God forbid it was 124,” he adds dryly. “Four would sound like ‘death!’ ”
The new facility in Hong Kong will greatly facilitate the shipment of samples from
the rest of the world. “It’s a British system: one China, two systems,” says Dan
about Hong Kong. “It’s the same thing with BGI.” For investigators leery of
sending samples to Hong Kong, Dan will give them the option of shipping to a
sample receiving lab attached to BGI Americas headquarters, which will then
handle the paperwork and shipment.

148
By the time the Hong Kong facility is fully operational at the end of 2010, BGI will
have a total sequencing output of 5 terabytes/day—the equivalent of 1500x human
genome/day (see, “Lucky Numbers”). The data center now boasts 50,000 CPUs,
200 terabytes of RAM and will reach a whopping 1,000 petabytes—1 exabyte—of
data storage within the next 2-3 years. “It’s an awesome machine to play games
on,” jokes Tu.
Such infrastructure comes at a price—BGI spends an estimated $10 million on
electricity annually. “We cannot be a non-profit organization without any external
support,” says Tu.
That is where BGI Americas and BGI Europe come in. “We’d love to work with
[principal investigators] around the world, not just the U.S., on any interesting
projects,” says Tu.
Back in China, a committee of animal, plant, and disease experts will select which
projects BGI takes on. “BGI can be flexible—give us the samples, we can fund
everything, and then we co-author the publication,” says Tu. A variant of that model
would have BGI split everything—the costs, authorship and IP—with its partners.
“Not everyone can offer that. We don’t just do human, we do animals, plants,
bacteria, complex diseases,” says Tu. “That’s the non-profit aspect. We want to
sequence 1,000 plants and animals and have set aside $100 million for this
initiative… It’s all about the science.”
But BGI is also offering a fee-for-service option. “We are a contractor,” says Tu.
“Every single profit generated by the fee-for-service division will be returned to
BGI to support the non-profit research agenda.” As a contractor, BGI will take any
specs and deliver what the client wants. “If you want your data via FTP, or hard
disk, we’ll do that. We give you a report, annotation, mapping, analysis. Not just
sequencing, we also do all the back end as well,” says Tu.
Cost and Competition
Tu turns very diplomatic when asked about potential competition to BGI’s sequence
service plans. “Personally, and throughout the organization, we don’t view anybody
as our competitor. This field is extremely nascent. In science, what we know today
may be only 2-5% of what it will be later. The science keeps advancing, we keep
discovering new things.” As an example, he cites the recent UC Berkeley/BGI
publication in Science that described a highly selected gene variant associated with
altitude adaptation.
Dan says that, unlike a commercial service provider like Complete Genomics,
BGI’s value proposition is the flexibility to offer a pure fee-for-service as well as a
collaborative model. “We don’t want to be restricted by funding for which research
we can do. That’s the reason we do fee-for-service, and we love to do
collaborations. We spend a lot on the collaboration side.”
Diplomacy turns to downright evasion when the subject is cost. “It depends,” says
Dan not unpredictably, “on coverage, analysis, volume, and so on.”
“All these players—Complete Genomics, Broad Institute, etc.—are just
collaborators for us,” says Tu. “When it comes to fee-for-service, we’re at the

149
mercy of what Illumina charges us for reagent costs. We have gigantic overheads…
We’ll eat some of the overhead, but the variables, somebody has to cover... Can we
compete head-to-head with Illumina and Complete Genomics...? They don’t even
do exomes; they only do whole genome humans? They make their own machines
and reagents, how can we compete with that?”
Tu marvels at the drop in sequencing prices over the past 12-24 months. “I’ve never
seen such price erosion! This is like, Whoosh!... We’re a service provider, how can
we compete with that? We compete with the back end, our bioinformatics. That’s
where we’re good. Who else has 1,500 staff?” BGI makes its popular software
SOAP (Short Oligonucleotide Alignment Program) freely available
(http://SOAP.genomics.org.cn). Any data or tools built for the SOAP platform
(using C++) are being donated to the public sector.
The average age of the BGI staff is just 24.7. Tu calls the legions of bioinformatics
workers “the young and the brightest,” drawn from the top tiers of mathematicians
and scientists, supplemented with operations people who have worked abroad. “If
they come to BGI, they get to work on real projects. Plus you get to program all
day, with these toys in the background! It’s like a video game; they love it!” New
recruits cannot rest on their laurels however: every month for the first six months,
there’s a test. Fail it, and it’s bye-bye BGI.
Tu and Dan have only been on the job a few months, but they too are working
pretty much around the clock. Inquiries are already flooding in—mosquito genomes
from Brazil, palm oil from Costa Rica, ancient DNA from the University of
Massachusetts Medical Center. Tu was preparing to visit researchers at the
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and is already discussing projects with partners
and clients at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, and the
Broad Institute. Two experienced American sales reps have been hired, and there is
talk of opening new offices in San Francisco, Canada, and Brazil.
“We want to be a trusted scientific partner and research collaborator,” stresses Tu,
speaking for 3,000 and counting.
Drinking the Kool-Aid
In 2007, the Beijing Genomics Institute relocated to Shenzhen, one of China’s
Special Economic Zones (SEZ) designed to attract foreign investment. The
SEZ policy was announced by former Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping, who
chose Shenzhen as the first territory in 1978. Back then, it was “just a fishing
village and rice paddies,” says BGI Americas president Paul Tu. “Now it’s
more modernized than Boston. It grows the size of an old Paris annually.”
Shenzhen boasts three Sheraton hotels, he points out.
The shift in power in genome sequencing to China follows a trend seen in
other industries, says Tu. The semiconductor industry began in the United
States in the 1950s, before shifting to Japan, then Taiwan, and now mainland
China. A similar phenomenon took place in textiles, although now Vietnam
and Cambodia are wrestling business away from China.
Tu praises the visionary role of BGI co-founders Wang Jian and Yang

150
Huanming. “They are both scientists, were never merchants,” says Tu. Wang
returned to China in 1998, encouraging the Chinese government to invest in
the Human Genome Project. As a privately held organization, Wang saw the
benefits of relocating the institute’s headquarters in Shenzhen in 2007. “He
donated all of BGI research to the local [Shenzhen] government,” says Tu. In
exchange, the local government will sponsor certain projects, while giving
BGI complete freedom in selecting its choice of projects.
Tu recalls meeting Wang Jian for the first time and listening to his desire to
help move science and advance personalized medicine, to leverage genome
sequencing data. “When we first met him, we just drank the Kool-Aid!” he
says. “For personalized medicine to materialize, sequencing is the most
fundamental basic step.” K.D.

European Union
BGI Europe was registered in Copenhagen, Denmark, in May 2010, and
officially launched in June at the European Society of Human Genetics. The
plan is to invest $10 million and to recruit 20 local staff in the organization’s
first year alone. The CEO of BGI Europe is Mason Mak, who joined BGI
earlier this year, although he is based primarily in Shenzhen.
Given BGI’s historic ties with Denmark, it is no surprise that BGI Europe
headquarters is in Copenhagen. The president of BGI, Yang Huanming,
obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Copenhagen in 1988. BGI’s
director, Wang Jun, is a visiting professor at the University of Copenhagen
and Aarhus University.
A new Copenhagen research institute on metabolic diseases, funded by a
$170-million donation from Novo Nordisk, will strengthen an ongoing
collaboration with BGI, led by diabetes researcher Oluf Pedersen. He says the
alliance with BGI will create “an international powerhouse in the field of
medical genetics.” (Diabetes and obesity are a growing health concern in
China.) “Genomics cannot be done alone,” says BGI director Wang Jun.
Danish collaboration harnesses the superb medical infrastructure in Denmark
with “Chinese genomics muscle” in the study of type 2 diabetes and obesity.
According to BGI Europe’s business development director, Danish-educated
Wang Xuegang (he prefers to go by the name ‘Greg’), BGI Europe will offer
European clients two models—collaboration or fee-for-service—just like its
American counterparts. BGI Europe has six sales people already, but will be
recruiting additional staff specializing in different fields such as agriculture,
pharmaceutical, and biotech, spread across key regions including the U.K.,
Germany, and Scandinavia.

151
As for what BGI’s key selling point is, Wang Xuegang says it is not
necessarily the cost of sequencing. “Price is not what we sell on,” he says. A
bigger selling point is BGI’s “very strong bioinformatics team,” with its
immense experience in genome data analysis and de novo sequencing.
BGI Europe has an even more ambitious agenda than its American
counterparts. The current plan is to establish a sequencing facility, probably in
Copenhagen, within a couple of years, while growing the local staff to around This
100 people. It would be futile for BGI Americas to set up a sequencing artic
operation in the Broad Institute’s backyard, but BGI Europe may see an le
advantage to establishing a local production base in Copenhagen. also
“Our vision is to make BGI Europe one of largest centers of sequencing appe
services and bioinformatics,” says BGI Europe’s Xuan Min. “We’re trying to ared
set up a sequencing lab in Copenhagen,” adds Wang Xuegang, likely in in
collaboration with a biotech partner or partners. The availability of a local the
facility might appease some potential biotech clients worried about data Sept
security and privacy. “We can set up a pipeline where everything is under emb
control by the customer,” says Wang. K.D. er-
Octo
ber 2010 issue of Bio-IT World Magazine. Subscriptions are free for qualifying
individuals. Apply today.

http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2015-09/05/content_21790163.htm

Genomics firm maps route into Europe

Updated: 2015-09-05 07:42
By Cecily Liu(China Daily Europe)

Comments() Print Mail Large Medium Small 0

Chinese company working in specialized area uses acquired technology to make
inroads into continent
Chinese genomics specialist BGI is making significant inroads into European
markets, championing its strong research and development ethos and its ambition to
achieve breakthroughs in analyzing the genomes of organisms, particularly humans.
It is an important specialty: The genome is the entire DNA content that is present
within one cell of an organism. Experts in genomics strive to determine complete
DNA sequences and perform genetic mapping to help understand disease, according
to life sciences website news-medical.net.

152
 Chinese genomics company BGI's laboratory in Denmark. Provided to China
Daily
Globally, the company is one of the three biggest genomics institutes, alongside
Sanger in Britain and Broad in the United States. BGI, known until 2008 as Beijing
Genomics Institute, is based in Shenzhen. It has grown rapidly in recent years,
especially after buying the California-based Complete Genomics Inc for $117
million (104 million euros) in 2013. BGI has projects across Asia, the US, Europe,
the Middle East and South America.
"We have two key long-term dreams to be achieved through research. One is to find
ways to reduce the incidence of human suffering and illness from birth defects, and
the second is to find ways to discover and treat tumors at earlier stages of a patient's
illness," Li Ning, CEO of BGI Europe SA, says.
To achieve these goals, BGI is working in different international markets and in the
process, taking the knowledge accumulated from each market back to China, to
create synergy with China's large market and tap the large amount of available
investment capital, Li says.
BGI was founded in 1999 in Beijing as an independent, nongovernmental research
institute to participate in the Human Genome Project as China's representative.

153
BGI has grown significantly, and in 2010, BGI Europe was founded in Denmark. In
2011, BGI Europe set up a research laboratory in Copenhagen with the goal of
working with European researchers in the fields of biological research, molecular
breeding, healthcare and related fields vital for genetic analysis. Molecular breeding
involves the application of molecular biology tools.
The Copenhagen laboratory covers 1,200 square meters and has been equipped with
advanced research tools developed by BGI in China. In the laboratory, much of the
research by BGI is carried out for its clients in Europe, such as in Denmark,
Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Norway, Finland, Germany, Spain, Turkey,
Slovenia, Italy, the Netherlands and Russia.
Li says international expansion is not new for BGI.
Rather, it is a part of the company's culture since it
was founded, as several of the major initial projects
the company participated in were all global in nature.
One example is the Human Genome Project, started in
1990 and completed in 2003, which determined the
sequence of chemical base pairs that make up human
DNA. It was the world's largest collaborative
biological project, involving a joint effort from
research centers in the US, the UK, Japan, France,
Germany and China.
Li says at the time the Human Genome Project did not
necessarily require Chinese input, but the vision of
BGI's founders including Wang Jian and Yang
Huanming made clear the importance for China of
participating in this project. They persuaded the
leaders of the Human Genome Project to let them
handle 1 percent of the work, making China the only
developing nation to play a major role.
"We realized from an early stage that international
cooperation is key for genomics research, so we
started the organization with an international
perspective," Li says.
When BGI was founded, its founders foresaw the
biotechnology industry as having an important future,
because the slowing of China's rapid industrial development and information
technology boom could be foreseen and, globally, the growth of biotechnology was
taking off.
"Because of our founders' correct vision, we managed to join the genomics research
industry at around the same time as other companies globally, so we started with a
level playing field," Li says.
After participating in the Human Genome Project, BGI then joined the International
HapMap Project, which aimed to determine common patterns of human genetic

154
variation. HapMap is used to find genetic variants affecting health, disease and
responses to drugs and environmental factors.
BGI completed about one-sixth of the work of the project. Other research centers
involved in the project are in Canada, China, Japan, Nigeria, the UK and US. The
project started in 2002 and its data was published in 2009.
Li says it is projects like the Human Genome Project and the International HapMap
Project that gave BGI a solid foundation in its early years, allowing the company to
learn best international research practices and exchange knowledge with researchers
all over the world.
Building on this knowledge, BGI then got involved in many more commercial
research collaboration projects, with hospitals, universities and individual
companies in the pharmaceutical, healthcare and food sectors. It has about 1,200
collaboration projects running worldwide.
Li says one key advantage BGI has is its hardware, which consists of high-
technology systems used in the genetic testing and clinical trials, and which helps
its partners do better research and development and implement the results in clinical
trials.
These advanced tools are developed through the expertise of BGI's strong R&D
team, as BGI's growth coincided with a large increase of highly skilled scientists in
China, he says.
Another milestone of BGI's growth was in 2010, when it bought 128 of Illumina's
state-of-the-art DNA sequencing machines, each costing $500,000, according to the
MIT Technology Review. It now owns more than 240 sequencers from several
manufacturers, which enables BGI to sequence 30,000 human genomes a year.
BGI has achieved a number of significant technology milestones. In 2003, it
decoded the SARS virus genome and created a kit for detecting the virus, and in
2011 BGI did the genome sequencing for the deadly E. coli outbreak in Germany in
three days under an open license, meaning the results of the research are freely
available.
In 2013, Li says, BGI's acquisition of Complete Genomics allowed BGI to gain
access to the technology that collects data on DNA, an area traditionally dominated
by US companies.
"It would be less efficient for us to develop this technology ourselves, because
China's technology is not yet advanced enough to achieve such technology, but
through the acquisition we are now armed with genome sequencing technology and
our service will become more integrated and cost effective for our clients," Li says.
BGI has about 4,000 employees globally. BGI Europe has about 20 employees
based in Denmark who travel across Europe to work with its partners.
BGI has participated in major government-backed projects both domestically and
internationally. It has played a key role in building the Shenzhen-based China
National Genebank, which holds data on genomics that are made available for
medical institutions and research organizations.

155
In this project, BGI worked with four Chinese government departments - the
National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Finance, the
Ministry of Science and Technology, and the Ministry of Health.
It participates in Genome Denmark, a research project that aims to map the genome
of the Danish population. Li says because the technology provided by BGI to
projects such as China National Genebank and Genome Denmark are of a uniform
standard, data users should find it very easy to compare data across the different
projects.
[email protected]
( China Daily European Weekly 09/05/2015 page8)

http://www.zmescience.com/medicine/genetic/adorable-micro-pigs-genetic-
30092015/
Adorable gene-edited micropigs to be sold as pets in China – and this is a
problem

by Mihai Andrei
TwitterFacebook
September 30, 2015
A-AA+
Chinese researchers have genetically modified pigs to grow about as big as a
medium-sized dog, and they will soon go up for sale, the Beijing Genomics Institute
(BGI) announced last week. Many researchers have expressed concerns about using
such advanced techniques for such frivolous purposes, and personally, I feel like
this could cascade onto many other problems – despite their undeniable cuteness.

156
Credit: BGI

BGI in Shenzhen, the genomics institute that is famous for a series of high-profile
breakthroughs in genomic sequencing, originally created the micropigs as models
for human disease. Unlike rats for example, pigs have much more in common to
human physiology, which makes them a much more useful model. But their large
size brings along many logistic and financial problems. Bama pigs, which weigh
35–50 kilograms, have often been used in research – but Chinese researchers
engineered them to get even smaller.
The animals grew up to 15 kilograms, and this made really attractive for the general
public – who wanted them as dog-like pets; researchers paid attention to the public
demand, and a week ago, on 23 September, at the Shenzhen International Biotech
Leaders Summit in China, BGI revealed that it would start selling the pigs, starting
at $1600. Furthermore, in the future, customers will be offered pigs with different
coat colours and patterns, which BGI says it can also genetically engineer.
But the alarm signals are already being raised.
“It’s questionable whether we should impact the life, health and well-being of other
animal species on this planet light-heartedly,” says geneticist Jens Boch at the

157
Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany. Boch helped to develop
the gene-editing technique used to create the pigs, which uses enzymes known as
TALENs (transcription activator-like effector nucleases) to disable certain genes.

BGI showcases its micropigs at a summit in Shenzhen, China.

The decision to sell these pigs as pets also surprised Lars Bolund, a medical
geneticist at Aarhus University in Denmark who helped BGI to develop its pig
gene-editing programme, and it’s easy to see where this could go extremely wrong.
First of all, micropigs will almost certainly additional medical problems, similar to
pets created by selective breeding. Many pure-breed dogs and cats suffer many
health conditions, and the growing consensus seems to be that pure-bred dogs
should be phased out for their own good. Also, if this is done on pigs, it only seems
like a matter of time before the same is done for dogs and cats. Jeantine Lunshof, a
bioethicist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts described it
as “stretching physiological limits for the sole purpose of satisfying idiosyncratic
aesthetic preferences of humans” – but then again, the same can be said about
selective breeding. Dana Carroll, a gene-editing pioneer at the University of Utah in
Salt Lake City, adds:
“I can certainly imagine resistance to manipulating dogs, even though all of the
current breeds are the result of selective breeding by humans.”

158
 Enjoyed this story? Like ZME Science on facebook:
Learn about the mos

http://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma-asia/bgi-s-latest-listing-plan-targets-a-shares-
mainland-china
BGI's latest listing plan targets A-shares in Mainland China
by EJ Lane |
Apr 14, 2016 9:56am

S
Shenzhen-based genomics powerhouse BGI is now said to be looking at
Mainland China to launch an initial public offering (IPO) by the end of
2016, FinanceAsia reports, though twists and turns for the company on raising
outside cash in the past few years have come frequently.
The latest news had Mao Mao, the recently appointed chief science officer, telling
Chinese media last week the target is an A-Share listing, after plans to list on the
more wide-open Hong Kong Stock Exchange that percolated last year fell to the
wayside.
That's a bit of a comedown for outside interest as A-shares are denominated in yuan
and bans or restrictions are put on foreign ownership, as opposed to B-shares, on the
Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges.
In any event, FinanceAsia, citing a person with knowledge of the plans, said the
current IPO doldrums in China make 2017 doubtful.
FinanceAsia also cited a preliminary prospectus BGI has filed with the China
Securities Regulatory Commission suggesting the plan in December was to sell
shares on the Nasdaq-style Chi-Next exchange in Shenzhen. That offer would be for
40 million shares, or 20% of combined core units BGI Dx and BGI Tech.
But a backlog of potential candidates for the Chi-Next means that a listing via that
route is unlikely until the middle of 2017, Finance Asia said.
Former BGI CEO Jun Wang meanwhile has gone onto a new venture in Shenzhen-
based big data healthcare startup iCarbonX. That project was last reported to be

159
seeking more than $100 million in Series A funding, according to China Money
Network in January.
iCarbonx plans to mine data from genomics and other related sources and use
artificial intelligence to link the effort to finding treatment therapies, with Shanghai-
listed Vcanbio Cell & Gene Engineering already onboard for $15 million.
Yang's departure appeared to signal a shift in focus away from big research efforts.
BGI began in 1999 as Beijing Genomics Institute with the help of government
institutions and it has since bought U.S.-based Mountain View, CA-based Complete
Genomics, where the halt of a population-scale sequencing platform late last year
led to job cuts. It has also made a series of partnership moves aimed at big data
service offerings in genomic research.
- here's the story from Finance Asia
Read More:

http://knowledge.ckgsb.edu.cn/2014/01/20/technology/genetics-research-decoding-
bgis-genes/
China’s Genetic Powerhouse
Barely 14 years old, BGI already rubs shoulders with the big boys of genetics
research—like the
Broad Institute in the US and the W ellcom e Trust Sanger Institute in the UK. It
has sequenced
m ore than 57,000 hum an genom es, m ore than 6,000 m icrobe genom es, 5,300 m
etagenom es, and
in plants and anim als, m ore than 580 species and 28,200 variation genom es.
W hile Broad and Sanger are alm ost exclusively focused on health care, BGI has
firm ly planted its
feet in three areas: health care, agriculture and bio-energy. It is also becom ing a
force to be
reckoned with in the bio-inform atics space. It has m ultiple locations in China and
has set up
entities in Japan, Hong Kong, Denm ark and Am erica.
On the top floor of BGI’s Shenzhen office is a trophy room of sorts. It was built for
form er Chinese
president Hu Jintao’s visit (he ultim ately passed up the visit because his security
personnel
deem ed the hill on which BGI stands a possible security threat). The room houses
pictures of
m any BGI collaborators and well-w ishers, such as Prem ier Li Keqiang and M
icrosoft founder Bill
Gates who visited BGI several tim es—the Bill and M elinda Gates Foundation has
tied up with BGI
for 16 projects on agriculture and they are in talks for health care projects in Africa.
There’s also a

160
wall dedicated to BGI’s publications in top journals such as Nature and Science. For
a young
institute, BGI has a fairly high publication rate—and now it even has its ow n open
access research
journal called GigaScience.
BGI’s work is already getting attention globally. People like Jam es W atson, co-
discoverer of the
DNA structure, m olecular geneticist G eorge Church and M aynard Olson, one of
the founders of
the prestigious Hum an Genom e Project, sit on its advisory board. In his latest
book, The Future:
The Six Drivers of Global Change, form er US Vice President Al Gore says that
beginning in China
(referring to BGI’s work), hum ans will “seize active control over [our ow n]
evolution”.
(Click to enlarge)
How Did BGI Get Here?
Unlike other research institutions in the sam e league, BGI isn’t funded by well-
endow ed
foundations. It gets som e funding through occasional grants or governm ent
projects, but it is not
significant. BGI m akes the bulk of its m oney by selling sequencing services,
relatively inexpensively
(for the full genom e sequencing, BGI charges around $4,000). BGI’s research
division, bio-bank
and the college are nonprofit while the technology services and the health care
division bring in
the cash.
Founded in Beijing in 1999 as Beijing Genom ics Institute (it has since changed its
nam e to
BGI-Shenzhen), in 2003 BGI m oved under the aegis of the Chinese Academ y of
Sciences (CAS), a
highly respected research institute in China. W hile the CAS affiliation had a
significant rub-off, it
was also stifling. To becom e one of the best in genom ics, BGI had to be nim ble to
spot
opportunities quickly and act on them accordingly.
CAS insisted on a traditional regim ented approach which em phasized, am ong
other things,
educational credentials and experience. BGI didn’t. Tensions grew and by 2007,
BGI’s funding and
state support had ebbed, and it had to reduce headcount to 20 people from 400. And
so when the

161
Shenzhen governm ent offered BGI the old shoe factory and RM B 90 m illion over
the next four
years, the institute jum ped at the opportunity. Independence gave BGI a fresh lease
on life— and
the ability to work on projects as it pleased.
To m ake it big in gene sequencing—BGI’s bread and butter—one needs tw o
things: high-tech
sequencing m achines and brainpow er. In 2010, BGI bought 128 DNA sequencing
m achines from
Illum ina, an Am erican com pany that develops tools for genetic analysis. This was
a very risky
m ove. Sequencers don’t com e cheap—BGI reportedly shelled out $500,000 for
each—and
technology could change, suddenly rendering the investm ent useless.
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Genetics Research: Decoding BGI's Genes
http://knowledge.ckgsb.edu.cn/2014/01/20/technology/genetics-research-...
2 of 6 5/6/2016 4:14 PM
Am ong its m any achievem ents, BGI has
cloned pigs that glow in the dark
BGI calculated that it would have at least a tw o-year opportunity with these m
achines. O vernight,
BGI got trem endous sequencing capacity. “That sort of cornered the m arket for
sequencers—they
are not like dum plings that you can increase their production overnight. There are
(only) so m any

162
that can be built in given tim e,” says a BGI w atcher. “The strategy was to becom e
the dom inant
purchaser or user of the m achine which would give them capacity and also block
others, even
though ‘blocking’ was not an intended consequence.”
In M arch this year, BGI acquired its biggest com petitor, the U S-based Com plete
Genom ics (CG),
for $117.6 m illion. This acquisition cam e under the scanner when Illum ina’s CEO
Jay Flatley
insinuated that this was like giving aw ay the form ula for Coke to the Chinese
governm ent (even
though BGI is private). Despite that, the deal went through. Now BGI has access to
CG’s
custom ers, sequencing technology as well as its genetic inform ation database.
“The Chinese
industry does not have high-level sequencers, and that has been a bottleneck for
BGI. If you don’t
have your ow n weapon, how can you fight?” says Zhu Yanm ei, Associate Director
for the Strategic
Planning Com m ittee at BGI.
BGI had already cornered 40% of the gene sequencing m arket globally. By
acquiring its num ber
tw o rival, it will now have 50% . “There is a great fit,” says Radoje D rm anac,
CG’s co-founder. “The
tw o com panies had the sam e vision to im plem ent genom ics on a m assive scale,
to sequence
m illions of hum an genom es to im prove hum an health and prevent diseases.
CG has advanced sequencing technology BGI has the ability to scale it and use it in
all
applications, access to big m arkets and funding.”
BGI’s secret weapon—like a lot of m anufacturing com panies in Shenzhen— is
com petitive costs.
“The core com petence of BGI is the low -cost and high-throughput platform ,” says
Zhu. And that’s
possible because of the scale at which BGI operates and relatively inexpensive m
anpow er. BGI
em ploys nearly 5,000 people, out of which 3,000 are based in Shenzhen. In a sense,
BGI has a
som ew hat unconventional approach to staffing.
It doesn’t care about credentials and degrees and
has hired som e college dropouts as well (it can train
them in its in-house college which can grant
degrees via affiliations with prestigious universities).

163
It takes them in young—usually at the age of 22 or
23. Som e of them live in ‘on cam pus’ dorm s. M ost of
them earn RM B 100,000 a year (about $16,500).
Despite the com paratively low pay, people tend to
stick on, and appear to be highly m otivated. Take
Zhao Bow en, who recently m ade it to M IT
Technology Review ’s list of ʻ35 Innovators under the
Age of 35’. Zhao, a high school drop-out who is now
21, is leading a m ulti-m illion dollar project to uncover the ‘intelligence gene’. Sim
ilarly Li Yingrui,
now CEO of BGI Tech Solutions, dropped out of Peking University. Yet today he
has published
nearly 30-40 papers in leading journals.
At the heart of this is flexibility, freedom and an alm ost hierarchy-less
organization—everyone,
including the president and the CEO, sits in cubicles. “This is a very different
organization. People
here are all working based on their (ow n) inner driving force, the curiosity in the
data that they are
playing with,” says Xu Xun, Deputy Director and the person leading BGI Research.
“The senior
people at BGI m ake the young guys stand on their shoulders,” adds Zhu. A case in
point are tw o of
the co-founders—Yang Huanm ing and W ang Jian—w ho voluntarily stepped aw
ay from active
m anagem ent to m ake way for younger people with new ideas.
Geek Quotient
A youngster with a thick m op of hair steps into the elevator. His T-shirt says: ‘1000
Genom e
Project’, and he wears it with a sense of pride. The 1000 Genom e Project, an am
bitious effort to
track hum an genetic variations, is one of m any m arquee projects that BGI has
actively pursued.
The idea was to sequence the genom es of 1,000 individuals from several different
ethnic groups,
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and BGI joined hands with other participating research team s from countries like
the US, the UK,
Italy, Japan and Kenya.
The 1,000 Genom e Project is just one of m any jew els in BGI’s crow n. W hen
BGI was set up in

164
Septem ber 1999, the founders som ehow m anaged to get BGI in as a participant in
the prestigious
Hum an Genom e Project (HGP), an am bitious attem pt at decoding the hum an
genom e.
BGI got to do 1% of the work in the HGP. It m ay sound insignificant to m any, but
it was a very big
deal. In m ore w ays than one, this helped BGI get a solid foothold in the world of
genom ics
research. It was the only institute from a developing country to have participated in
this project,
and suddenly it was rubbing shoulders with the U S-based National Hum an Genom
e Research
Institute, UK’s Sanger Institute, G erm any’s M ax Planck Institute for M olecular
Genetics, and
various research institutes from universities like M IT and Stanford.
For BGI the HGP was the first big hurrah. Ever since, the institute has been even m
ore agile in
spotting lucrative research opportunities. BGI w ent on to contribute 10% to the
International
H apM ap Project, the Sino-British Chicken Genom e Project, the 1,000 Plant and
Anim al Genom es
and the First Asian Genom e M ap (See ‘The M aking of a Behem oth’).
(Click to enlarge)
Doing ‘Good’ Science
In a forlorn corner of BGI’s trophy room is a sm all aquarium . One half of the
aquarium houses tw o
fish—the ‘m other’ and the ‘father’ of a rather disinterested looking hybrid grouper
that occupies
the other half.The hybrid grouper grow s three tim es faster than a norm al
grouper—and is
apparently “tastier”. A tw o-hour drive aw ay from the Shenzhen headquarters is
BGI’s cloning farm ,
which houses, am ong other things, a bunch of cloned pigs that glow in the dark.
The grouper and the glow ing pigs, in som e ways, represent BGI’s approach tow
ards science: one
that is guided by insatiable curiosity and an altruistic goal to do ‘good’ science. BGI
proclaim s that
it wants to m ake the world better by im proving health and food security, and
protecting the
environm ent.
This m eans using genetics not just for screening, prevention and treatm ent of
diseases, but also

165
using bioengineering to im prove livestock and crops. BGI has m astered a cheap
technique it calls
‘handm ade cloning’ to clone sheep, m ice and pigs, am ong other things. It is bio-
engineering
superior strains of crops designed to im prove nutrition and help alleviate hunger. It
has
sequenced the genom es of living beings, plants and organism s as varied as the
panda, potatoes,
chickpeas, rice, silkw orm s, soft shell turtles, asparagus, rock pigeons, hum an gut
bacteria,
chickens, and the frozen horse in Canada’s Yukon region. “A lot of people refuse to
sequence the
whole genom e because they think that 98% of DN A is junk and only 1-2% is
functional DNA,” says
Zhu. “But BGI thinks everything is useful… For the bio-econom y everything has
to be backed by
basic research… If you don’t know the DNA well, you’ll never know w here cancer
com es from .”
In health care, BGI has already m ade significant advances in the treatm ent and
prevention of
SARS, e-coli, autism , Down’s Syndrom e and the dreaded HPV (hum an papillom
avirus). Doing
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‘good’ science also m eans that BGI has ventured into territories w here others don’t
bother to
tread. “BG I tends to work on things that are significant, like autism ,” says Fred D
ubee, form er
Senior Advisor to the UN Global Com pact and currently advisor to BGI. “There
are also things that
BGI works on that other people are not interested in, prim arily what we call
‘orphan diseases’, the
diseases that affect people in the poorest parts of the world.” For instance, BGI
recently published
a paper on dengue fever, a disease that at this point has no cure and is not lucrative
to
pharm aceutical com panies because it is prim arily a developing world problem .
Using scale, BGI is already driving dow n the cost of diagnostics to near-im
possible low s. Take HPV
screening, in which BGI has introduced a new testing technique which has driven
the cost dow n

166
from RM B 300 to less than RM B 100 with im proved accuracy. In 2013 alone they
would have
finished over 1 m illion HPV screens in China.
Pushing the Boundaries
BGI’s sudden rise has also ruffled quite a few feathers. They have been accused of
being ‘biology’s
version of Foxconn’ and a ‘bio-G oogle’ in the m aking with access to unlim ited
am ounts of genetic
data. Often Sino-phobia com es in the way. Projects like Zhao Bow en’s attem pt at
decoding the
intelligence gene have raised concerns regarding China getting the ability to
bioengineer genius
babies. Zhu pooh-poohs such concerns. It’s not about creating ‘designer babies’, she
says, it’s
about m aking healthier babies. “BG I wants to m ake bio-inform ation very cheap
so that everybody
know s their genes and are able to control their health.”
Going forw ard, BGI is set to m ake personalized m edicine a reality. “W e are
about to, or in som e
fields we have already, entered the era of personalized m edicine,” says COO Yin
Ye. “Personalized
‘om ics’- based 4P m edicine (prevention, prediction, personalized, participatory)
will be a grow ing
trend in this field.”
BGI plans to launch a sim ple personal genom ics platform in a year’s tim e. “W e w
ant to build the
platform and the database first, and then the business. W e are not in a hurry to m
ake m oney,” says
Zhu. She adds that out of the 7,000-8,000 single gene diseases in the world, BGI
already know s
enough about 400. Next com e m ulti-gene diseases, cancer, problem s from the
environm ent, etc.
“(W e’ll m ove) from sim ple to com plex: BGI wants to do it step by step.”
In future, m aybe babies will com e into this world with a ‘gene book’, som ething
like their personal
product m anual. Chances are BGI will have som ething to do with it.
FILED UNDER: ALL ARTICLES, TECHNOLOGY
TAGGED WITH: BGI, COMPLETE GENOMICS, DNA, GENE SEQUENCING,
GENETICS, ILLUMINA, SCIENCE, SHENZHEN,
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You m ay also like:
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M oves Tow ards The

167
New Norm al
Alibaba’s Youku
Tudou stake; Xiaom i
buys m i.com ; and
http://genomea.asm.org/content/1/3/e00256-13.full
Genome Sequences of the Guillain-Barré Syndrome Outbreak-Associated
Campylobacter jejuni Strains ICDCCJ07002 and ICDCCJ07004

1. Maojun Zhanga,
2. Xianwei Yangb,
3. Hongying Liua,
4. Xiayang Liua,
5. Yufen Huangc,
6. Lihua Hea,
7. Yixin Gua,
8. Jianzhong Zhanga

+ Author Affiliations

1. State Key Laboratory for Infectious Disease Prevention and Control,

National Institute for Communicable Disease Control and Prevention,
Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing, Chinaa
2. Beijing Genomics Institute, Tianjin, Chinab
3. Beijing Genomics Institute, Shenzhen, Chinac

Next Section

ABSTRACT
The first world-known and largest outbreak of 36 cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome
caused by a preceding Campylobacter jejuni infection was reported previously in
China. During the outbreak, Campylobacter jejuni strain ICDCCJ07002 was
isolated from a patient with persistent diarrhea for 21 days, and C. jejuni strain
ICDCCJ07004 was from a healthy carrier without any clinical symptoms at the
same time. Here, we report the draft genome sequence of strain ICDCCJ07002
(1,698,407 bp, with a G+C content of 30.45%) and the genome resequencing result
of strain ICDCCJ07004 (1,701,584 bp, with a G+C content of 30.51%), and we
compared these with the completed genome of C. jejuni strain ICDCCJ07001.
Previous SectionNext Section

GENOME ANNOUNCEMENT
In 2007, an outbreak of 36 Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) cases was reported in a
township in Jilin province, China. Serologic and bacterial studies proved that an
antecedent Campylobacter jejuni infection triggered this event. Four C. jejuni

168
isolates, ICDCCJ07001, ICDCCJ07002, ICDCCJ07003, and ICDCCJ07004, were
obtained during the outbreak. The entire isolates had identical types by pulsed-field
gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and multilocus sequence typing (MLST), but the
serotype of ICDCCJ07004 is different from that of the other three isolates, which
have the same penner serotype, HS:41 (1). Besides, ICDCCJ07002 has a different
outer core structure on the lipooligosaccharide from that of ICDCCJ07001
(unpublished data). We previously finished the completed genome sequence for
ICDCCJ07001 (2). The draft genome sequence for ICDCCJ07002 and the
resequencing for ICDCCJ07004 were carried out in this study.
The genome of ICDCCJ07002 was sequenced by a whole-genome shotgun strategy
using the Illumina HiSeq 2000 at the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) in
Shenzhen, China. The genome sequences were assembled in silico using
SOAPdenovo, resulting in 14 contigs with an N50 length of 243,746 bp. The gene
prediction, the functional annotation for the predicted coding sequences (CDSs),
and the findings for tRNAs and rRNAs were accomplished as described previously
(3). The draft genome of ICDCCJ07002 includes 1,698,407 bases with a G+C
content of 30.45% and contains 1,754 CDSs. An estimated 94.0% of nucleotides are
predicted CDSs. The 1,303 CDSs annotated by Gene Ontology (GO) can be
classified into 20 GO categories, and 1,201 CDSs can be annotated in the KEGG
orthology system.
Genome resequencing of ICDCCJ07004 was also performed at BGI using the
Illumina HiSeq 2000. The completed genome sequence of ICDCCJ07001
(accession no. NC_014802) was used as the reference genome. The sequences of
ICDCCJ07004 were assembled using SOAPdenovo 1.05 (with parameter k = 31). In
total, 66 scaffolds and 238 contigs, with a G+C content of 30.51%, were obtained.
The sequence coverage and the average depth were 99.85% and 100%, respectively,
using the software SOAPaligner 2.21, compared with ICDCCJ07001. The 1,306
CDSs annotated by GO and 1,198 CDSs can be annotated in the KEGG orthology
system.
Nucleotide sequence accession numbers.This Whole-Genome Shotgun project has
been deposited at DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank under the accession no. APNP00000000
for C. jejuni ICDCCJ07002 and the accession no. APNQ00000000 for C. jejuni
ICDCCJ07004.
Previous SectionNext Section

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by the General Program of National Natural Science
Foundation of China (81071314 and 81271789) and the Major State Basic Research
Development Program (2013CB127204).
Previous SectionNext Section

FOOTNOTES

• Address correspondence to Maojun Zhang, [email protected].

169
 • Citation Zhang M, Yang X, Liu H, Liu X, Huang Y, He L, Gu Y, Zhang J.
2013. Genome sequences of the Guillain-Barré syndrome outbreak-
associated Campylobacter jejuni strains ICDCCJ07002 and ICDCCJ07004.
Genome Announc. 1(3):e00256-13. doi:10.1128/genomeA.00256-13.

• Received 1 April 2013.

• Accepted 8 April 2013.
• Published 23 May 2013.

• Copyright © 2013 Zhang et al.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
Previous Section

REFERENCES

1. 1.↵
1. Zhang M,
2. Li Q,
3. He L,
4. Meng F,
5. Gu Y,
6. Zheng M,
7. Gong Y,
8. Wang P,
9. Ruan F,
10. Zhou L,
11. Wu J,
12. Chen L,
13. Fitzgerald C,
14. Zhang J

. 2010. Association study between an outbreak of Guillain-Barre syndrome

in Jilin, China, and preceding Campylobacter jejuni infection. Foodborne
Pathog. Dis. 7:913–919.

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1. Zhang M,
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6. Y

http://www.livemint.com/Companies/53kNQFihpEyioOutqee47N/A-tale-of-
glowinthedark-pigs-and-huge-ambitions.html
A tale of glow-in-the-dark pigs and huge ambitions

How Beijing Genomics Institute became the world’s largest gene sequencer

6
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Neelima Mahajan

A file photo of researchers at the Beijing Genomics Institute. Photo: Getty Images
I stared at my laptop, my eyes transfixed on a photo of three sleeping pigs. They
were glowing in the dark. And they were real.
I promptly called the communications person at Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI),
which is headquartered in Shenzhen, the Chinese city that is home to companies
like Tencent, Huawei and Foxconn’s largest factory (a mini-metropolis in itself
which churns out iPhones and other electronic devices by the minute).

171
A couple of days later, I was on my way to Shenzhen to meet the folks at BGI, and
no, I didn’t get to see the glowing pigs—they were a further two hours away from
Shenzhen and since they had grown from the time the photo was taken, I was told
“the marker” was less visible. In layman terms, the glow was a lot less than before.
Unknown to most people, BGI is the world’s largest gene sequencer.
However, it does not have the money and support enjoyed by other similar research
entities like the Broad Institute of the US or the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute of
the UK. But in just 15 short years, it has gained the size and might that most
scientific research institutions can only dream about. According to The New Yorker,
BGI produces at least “a quarter of the world’s genomic data”, more than Harvard
University, the National Institutes of Health and any other research institute. It is
careful to not call itself a company and stresses upon calling itself an institute.
BGI has already sequenced the genomes of everything from the human gut
microbiome to silkworms, rice, potatoes, chickpeas, cucumbers, corn, yak, chicken,
the giant panda and a 700,000-year-old calcified horse bone found in Yukon,
Canada. It has mastered a technique called handmade cloning, a new way to create
genetically identical copies of animals. It is cheaper and simpler than existing
methods and appears to work better as well. It uses genetics research to tackle hairy
problems in bioenergy, agriculture and healthcare, and some of its projects are
already making an impact in China.
At the centre of all this research is a unique low-cost and high-throughput platform,
which is effectively driving down the cost of researching and solving big problems.
As a result, BGI is able to work on interesting projects that have thus far
confounded humanity, such as the search for the intelligence gene. It has gone
global and acquired US-based Complete Genomics, one of the world’s two leading
providers of gene sequencing technology. People like Microsoft Corp. co-founder
Bill Gates are working with BGI on several projects in Africa, and eminent
scientists like James Watson sit on the BGI advisory board. It has also published
numerous papers in science journals Nature and Science.
But I found BGI interesting for a whole set of reasons beyond its achievements in
science. Let me explain:
Be curious. All the time
Now why would anyone clone glow-in-the-dark pigs in the first place? As Yanmei
Zhu, associate director at the Strategic Planning Committee at BGI, told me, “We
did it for science.”
“It’s more like fun,” I said.
“Yes,” she smiled. “We did it for fun.”
Whether it was science or fun, this points to the key driving force behind BGI: an
endless curiosity. People at BGI are encouraged to find new projects to work on, no
matter how weird or complex. The project on finding the intelligence gene is an
example: a 21-year-old wunderkind was put in charge of this major initiative. The
point is simple: the findings or the data may not be useful now, but they will yield
data or lessons that will help in future. As Zhu puts it, “BGI thinks everything is

172
useful… For the bio-economy, everything has to be backed by basic research… If
you don’t know the DNA well, you’ll never know where cancer comes from.”
Credentials don’t matter
BGI is all about decoding genes, complex science and solving complicated
problems. That’s the domain of PhDs, right? Wrong. Most of BGI’s 5,000-strong
workforce is made up of youngsters, usually 22 or 23 years old, some of whom are
dropouts. BGI operates on the philosophy that get them in young, let them live in
the on-site dorms, and train them (it has its own college) while they work. This kills
many birds with one stone: you get a low-cost workforce in big numbers (essential
for entities like BGI that deal with Big Data), you don’t have to re-train people who
come in with fancy degrees but are not industry-ready, you identify talent early on
and get a chance to groom them for bigger things. The person who was heading the
intelligence gene project, for instance, dropped out of school and joined BGI at the
age of 17. As Zhu puts it, the youngsters “stand on the shoulders” of their most
accomplished seniors, and in the end, everyone wins.
Shoot for the big wins from the beginning
Most start-ups begin small, aim for the easy wins, and then ramp up. BGI, on the
other hand, was shooting for the most coveted projects from Day One. When it
started in 1999, it worked as a participant on the prestigious Human Genome
Project. Even though it got to do only 1% of the work, doing that was important. It
helped this small unknown entity from China (and the only one from a developing
country) rub shoulders with the big boys of the field, and shoot into prominence in
the global scientific community. After that, BGI has continued to participate in
other high-impact global-level research projects, further building on its reputation.
Be flexible, adapt quickly when things change
At Shenzhen, BGI is housed in a remodelled shoe factory with linoleum flooring,
not exactly what you would associate with a typical high-tech institution. BGI, as
the full name suggests, started in Beijing under the aegis of the Chinese Academy of
Sciences. While being part of a prestigious government institution helped, it was
also a handicap as it insisted on a more conventional approach, such as emphasizing
the importance of educational credentials. So, when the Shenzhen government
offered it space in the old shoe factory and some funding, BGI took it so that it
could operate independently. The bet paid off.
Set up your own support system
In a country like China, the field of genomics research isn’t that advanced, and there
is no ecosystem to speak of, and so, BGI is on a quest to build its own. It doesn’t
rely on universities to churn out industry-ready graduates. It trains them in-house.
There was a bottleneck in terms of the availability of gene sequencing technology in
China; so, BGI bought Complete Genomics, globally the No. 2 company in this
field. There is no gene data bank in China, so BGI is building its own.
As BGI’s story shows, if you are trying to be a pioneer at something, you’ll pretty
much have to build your own road. It won’t be easy. But in the end, it will be worth
all the hard work.

173
Neelima Mahajan is a senior journalist based out of Beijing. She was an
international visiting scholar at University of California, Berkeley. She has put in
stints at various newsrooms in India as well.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/215283-china-creates-gene-edited-micropigs-
to-satisfy-an-emerging-fringe-pet-market
China creates gene-edited ‘micropigs’ to satisfy an emerging fringe pet
market

• By John Hewitt on October 2, 2015 at 3:44 pm

• Comment

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By nearly any measure, the Beijing Genomics Institute in Shenzhen is the premier
genetics powerhouse. In 2010, for example, their 500-node supercomputer was
processing and analyzing over 10 terabytes of raw sequencing data every 24 hours.
They now produce a quarter of the worlds genomic data, dwarfing the output of
places like Harvard and the NIH. Whether BGI is also the undisputed champion at

174
turning this data glut into useful knowledge, on the other hand, is perhaps a matter
of opinion.
A recent report in Nature hints at a tantalizing new creation that BGI is set to
unleash on the open market: Made-to-order, programmable “micropigs.” Although
the pigs were developed by simply knocking out a receptor for growth hormones
using well-established TALEN gene-editing techniques, creating radically modified
body morphologies without compromising some essential physiology may be more
of a challenge. The law of unintended consequences becomes all the more acute
when you are simultaneously tinkering with other critical design features, like the
major pigment pathways. To that point, BGU will be offering custom pets in a
rainbow of colors, with the base model starting at 10,000 yuan (US$1,600).

When you consider that oversupply of just one of the pigments we know about, the
pheomelanin of redheads, predisposes them to a whole suite of unique
characteristics, we may have cause for concern. For example, there are ample
reports in the dental literature that gingers are much more insensitive to anesthetics
like novocaine. This is particularly intriguing if you consider that one of the more
persuasive new arguments for how anesthetics work is through increases in electron
spin content. What are the main bearers of electron spin you might ask? It seems
that the answer is mainly pigments, both in the body, and in the brain.
Many are familiar with what happens when you have too much growth hormone
action: You generally get a host of new phenomena perhaps best summarized as
professional wresting. While features like gigantism and acromegaly may be
obvious on the upside of the GH spectrum, the downside, where there is not enough,
seems to be a bit more subtle. As in many things where raw technical considerations
are inextricable from the larger social and the ethical eventualities, discussions on
Twitter have recently been at the fore. For example, in the general pipeline of
emerging scientific understanding, we now know that the overall hierarchy (at least
in genetics) can be established as follows: data > knowledge > wisdom > bacon.

175
Although the micropigs are tiny (they weigh in around 30 pounds), sooner or later,
somewhere, somebody is going to find out what they taste like. When that happens
there may no end to ways to try to enrich various bacony furans, methylpyrazines,
and methylpyridines in specific cuts. We should probably bear in mind that the field
of pig genetics has been getting a lot of attention recently. This is due, among other
things, to the many anatomic and physiologic similarities shared with humans.
Most recently, a genome-wide comparison of common repeat sequences (known as
transposons) found in primates and pigs has indicated that the two clades are much
more closely related than had formerly been appreciated. With the obvious horrors
of factory farming aside, the fetishization of these animals not just for pets, but for
food is a clear and present concern.

Without certain controls imposed by collectively enlightened minds things like the
thoughtless bear bile industry, or the live turtle necklace culture, can thrive
unquestioned. These gene-edited micropigs are not even one-step beyond anything
we have already seen. In fact they are par for the course with much that we already
now accept. The genetic sleight-of-hand used to create the famous Belgian Blues
seen in the image above is not limited to creating supercows. In fact, hypermuscled
pigs with the same ‘myostatin’ gene knockout reported earlier this summer. In the
case of these myostatin animals, both copies of the gene were knocked out. While it
is not yet proven, crippling just one of the genes would be expected to create an
animal with more intermediate features.
In the case of the mini-pigs, this is exactly what has been done. To clone their pigs,
BGI first edited cells obtained from a fetus of the Bama pig species. Male clones
established in this way were then bred with normal females to make more pigs with
just one good receptor. On the research side, it has been reported that the pigs would
be useful in various studies of things like the gut microbiota, stem cells and human
dwarfism. For the latter, particularly the variety known as Laron syndrome, the
human version of the growth hormone receptor has certain mutations or
substitutions.
These ‘side benefits’ of the work may be legitimate pursuits. However, we are not
going to offer them here as any type of endorsement for this work. It is a very short
hop from what is now widely being touted as “adorable” to what can only be seen
as “deplorable.” That said, new gene editing techniques based on variations of the
so-called CRISPR method are probably the most exciting, and potentially useful
technology we might now avail ourselves of.

176
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• bmwman91

177
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-07/bgi-bcw071111.php
Public Release: 11-Jul-2011 BGI contributes whole genome sequencing and
bioinformatics expertise to potato genome research

Also provides initial update on '1,000 Plant & Animal Reference Genomes Project'
at 2nd annual conference

BGI Shenzhen

July 11, 2011, Shenzhen, China - BGI (previously known as the Beijing Genomics
Institute), the largest genomic organization in the world, announced today that it
was among the research organizations comprising the Potato Genome Sequencing
Consortium (PGSC) that completed the genome sequence and analysis of the tuber
crop potato, published as an Advance Online Publication in Nature.
This study marks an important milestone in Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) genome
research, revealing new insights into the evolutionary history of the potato genome,
causes of inbreeding depression, and potential mechanisms of tuber initiation and
development. These insights will generate great interest among botanists and
breeders worldwide and facilitate the genetic engineering of this vital crop.
"BGI and its collaborators carried out the de novo sequencing, genome assembly
and annotation of the potato genome, elucidating the evolutionary history of the
genome and providing the foundation for biological analysis," stated Xun Xu, Vice
President of Research and Development at BGI, and co-senior author of the report.
With the advanced genome sequencing capability of BGI, the homozygous doubled-
monoploid DM1-3 516 R44 (DM) potato clone was sequenced by whole genome
shotgun sequencing (WGS) approach with high coverage depths. The genome was
then assembled by BGI's Short Oligonucleotide Analysis Package, SOAPdenovo,
and 86% of the estimated total genome (844Mb) was assembled.
Researchers from BGI also aided in the potato gene annotation, of which 39,031
protein-coding genes were predicted. It is reported that at least two genome
duplication events present in potato, indicating a paleopolyploid origin. Findings
related with haplotype diversity, tuber biology and disease resistance are also
reported.
"We found important genetic basis related to inbreeding depression and tuber
biology based on our bioinformatics analysis," said Xu Xun, who considers the
potato as one of the most important plant genomes in light of growing food
shortages due to global population growth and climate change.
BGI is the only genomic organization with an extensive focus on agricultural
genomics research. Its accomplishments include sequencing the rice genome,
silkworm genome, cucumber genome, soybean genome and maize genome, among
others. In January 2010, BGI launched the "1,000 Plant & Animal Reference
Genomes Project" with the goal of generating reference genomes for 1,000
economically and scientifically important plant/animal species. BGI's 2nd

178
International Conference on the Progress of "1000 Plant & Animal Reference
Genomes Project" is being held in Shenzhen from July 10-12, 2011.
Reporting from the conference, Dr. Bicheng Yang, Director of Global Marketing at
BGI stated, "Together with our collaborators, so far we have initiated 505 plant and
animal genome projects, completed fine or draft genome maps for over 100 species
and finished the sequencing of about 200 species. Many other genomes are
undergoing active sequencing." She congratulated the PGSC consortium on its
breakthrough in potato genome research and said BGI is proud to be a contributor to
the project.
Last week, July 6, at Bio-IT APAC Conference & Expo 2011, BGI released
SOAPdenovo 2, the latest update of BGI's SOAPdenovo package. SOAPdenovo 2
is reported to assemble genomes with improved efficiency and consistency, and can
support a broader range of analyses. SOAPdenovo 2 can be downloaded at
http://soap.genomics.org.cn/.
"BGI is making continuous efforts for the advancement of plant and animal
genomes research. We will provide the most advanced infrastructure for our
partners and look for more collaboration in this field." stated Dr. Yang. The
progress of "1000 Plant & Animal Reference Genomes Project" can be found at
http://ldl.genomics.org.cn/page/pa-research.jsp.
###
About Potato Genome Sequencing Consortium (PGSC)
The international Potato Genome Sequencing Consortium (PGSC) is a collaboration
between 29 research groups; Argentina, Brazil, China, Chile, India, Ireland, The
Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom and the
United States. The PGSC has its basis in long-standing research on the molecular
genetics of potato within the partner organizations, ranging from the construction of
genetic linkage maps in diploid and tetraploid potato.
The PGSC is sequencing two varieties:

• RH89-039-16 (RH), a diploid, heterozygous potato variety

• DM1-3 516R44 (DM), a doubled monoploid.

For more information, please visit www.potatogenome.net

About BGI
BGI (formerly known as Beijing Genomics Institute) was founded in 1999 and has
since become the largest genomic organization in the world. With a focus on
research and applications in the healthcare, agriculture, conservation and bio-energy
fields, BGI has a proven track record of innovative, high profile research, which has
generated over 178 publications in top-tier journals such as Nature and Science.
BGI's distinguished achievements have made a great contribution to the
development of genomics in both China and the world. Our goal is to make leading-
edge genomics highly accessible to the global research community by leveraging
industry's best technology, economies of scale and expert bioinformatics resources.
BGI and its affiliates, BGI Americas and BGI Europe, have established partnerships

179
and collaborations with leading academic and government research institutions, as
well as global biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. At BGI, we have built
the infrastructure and scientific expertise to enable our customers and collaborators
to quickly migrate from samples to discovery. For more information, visit
www.bgisequence.com
Contact Information:
Xun Xu
Chief Executive Officer, BGI Americas and
Vice President, Research and Development, BGI
[email protected]
+86-755-25273620
+1-617-500-2741
www.bgisequence.com
www.bgiamericas.com
Bicheng Yang
Director of Global Marketing Department
BGI
+86-755-25273450
[email protected]
www.bgisequence.com

http://singularityhub.com/2012/09/20/chinese-company-to-acquire-complete-
genomics-become-world-genomics-powerhouse/
Chinese Company To Acquire Complete Genomics, Become World
Genomics Powerhouse

• By Peter Murray
• ON Sep 20, 2012
• | Genetics, Longevity, Singularity

7,889 5

180
The acquisition of Complete Genomics by BGI-Shenzhen is a clear sign that China
plans to become a world leader in genomics research.

Complete Genomics, the whole human genome sequencing powerhouse in

Mountain View, California, is being acquired by the Chinese company BGI-
Shenzhen. The acquisition could be read as a signal to the world that China is
determined to be a major competitor in the future genome sequencing market. It
also marks the end of a bumpy road for Complete Genomics, which, unfortunately
for investors, fell far short of expectations.
For Complete Genomics, the merger couldn’t come soon enough.
Next generation sequencing continues to decrease the price of sequencing. But
while this enables Complete Genomics to increase supply, they’re sorely missing a
match in demand. With substantial drops in price – in 2011 they charged $4,200 per
genome, down from $12,000 in 2010 – Complete Genomics’ orders generate less
revenue per genome. The drop in revenue, combined with an unstable customer
base, the company’s stock prices dropped by half last summer, and it has continued
to drop steadily since.

Complete Genomics' stock dropped drastically, and has been falling steadily since.

And their financial woes continue even as the acquisition goes forward. The $3.15
per share price offered to BGI has prompted an investigation concerning “possible
breaches of fiduciary duty and other violations,” reports the Sacramento Bee. “The
transaction may undervalue the Company as Genomics' stock traded at $7.13 a
share on September 19, 2011 and at $4.12 as recently as March 5, 2012.” Complete
Genomics’ investors are already losing their shirts, but are taking steps to minimize
the damage.
Despite Complete Genomics’ troubles, BGI obviously sees the company as vital to
their future goals. The acquisition marks an important point in a trajectory that
could put BGI – and China – at the forefront of genomics research. China had
already established itself as a formidable player in genome sequencing through

181
BGI, formerly known as the Beijing Genomics Institute. Their acquisition of
Complete Genomics will certainly further bolster their global position in the field.
The move is consistent with a country set on moving beyond just specializing in
low cost human labor. China is making real strides to becoming the world leader in
highly skilled fields such as bioinformatics. In 2010 the Beijing Proteome Research
Center made a great push toward the Human Proteome Project, an international
effort to characterize the 21,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome, with
starter money totaling $30 million.
Complete Genomics has established itself over the past several years as one of the
world leaders – if not the sole leader – in whole genome sequencing. Their fleet of
next generation sequencers perform with unprecedented accuracy and at costs that
have dropped exponentially. The company’s central philosophy is that a true
understanding of the genome can only come from sequencing all of it – not just the
protein coding regions that most sequencing companies limit themselves to.
The Chinese company, BGI-Shenzhen has numerous centers located internationally
that offer sequencing and bioinformatics services for both research and commercial
entities around the world. Through medical, agricultural, and environmental
applications their customers have produced over 250 publications with the use of
BGI’s technologies. A US-based subsidiary of BGI is launching the tender offer to
purchase Complete Genomics.
According to the agreement, BGI will purchase all of Complete Genomics’
outstanding shares for $3.15 per share – a 54 percent premium to a closing price of
$2.04 on June 4th, the last day prior to Complete Genomics' announcement that it
was undertaking an evaluation of strategic alternatives. Following the acquisition,
which will cost BGI a grand total of $117.6 million, Complete Genomics will keep
operations in Mountain View and continue to operate as an independent company.
In a press release the two companies say the acquisition will “bring together
complementary scientific and technological expertise and R&D capabilities.” But
based on our recent conversation with Complete Genomics’ CEO Cliff Reid, we can
reasonably add some specifics to the statement: the merger is Complete Genomics’
and BGI-Shenzen’s attempt to position themselves for the next big sequencing
market – namely, the clinic.

182
Despite falling prices, Complete Genomics' CEO Cliff Reid has seen his company
consistently fall short of sales expectations.

Reid told Singularity Hub that he fully expects the clinical sequencing market to far
exceed the size of the research market. He surmises that whole genome sequencing
will likely be used to diagnose idiopathic children – children who are ill but the
cause of their illness is unknown. According to Reid, sequencing to fight cancer will
be an even bigger market originating from the clinic.
What makes the acquisition interesting, however, is that the day doctors incorporate
whole genome data into their routine healthcare is still years away. Despite
completing the Human Genome Project nearly a decade ago, our knowledge about
the genetic basis of disease remains poor. Excepting a small handful of diseases,
such as cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, and Down syndrome, the vast majority of
conditions aren’t associated with a clear cut marker that makes diagnosis a simple
matter of reading out the DNA. Most diseases are, at best, the result of several
genes working in a dysfunctional tandem. At worst, the disease involves several
genes and influences from the environment. The human genome numbers 3 billion
base pairs. Teasing apart the tangle of practically limitless interactions between
parts of the genome is a scientific pursuit still very much in its infancy. Advances in
sequencing technologies that continually spawn sequencers that are better, faster,
and cheaper have led to a deluge of DNA sequence data – the vast majority of
which we don’t even know how to use. In their acquisition of Complete Genomics,
it seems that BGI-Shenzhen is waging $117.6 million that, in the not too distant
future, knowledge will catch up with technology.
The fact that the medical genomics industry is still at the earliest stages, and that
they are still probably years away from capitalizing on whole genome sequences to
cure disease – and make lots of money doing it – speaks both to the intent that
China has in investing in that future, and the money it has to do it with.
[image credits: BioScholar, BGI, World News Inc, and Yahoo Finance]
images: BioScholar, BGI, World News Inc, and Yahoo Finance

• About
• Latest Posts

Peter Murray
Peter Murray was born in Boston in 1973. He earned a PhD in neuroscience at the
University of Maryland, Baltimore studying gene expression in the neocortex.
Following his dissertation work he spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at the
same university studying brain mechanisms of pain and motor control. He

183
completed a collection of short stories in 2010 and has been writing for Singularity
Hub since March 2011.
Related

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2010In "Genetics"

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2012In "Genetics"

Related topics: bgi-shenzhen China complete genomics dna DNA sequencing

Genetics genomics whole genome sequencing
Discussion — 5 Responses

sarfralogy · 4 years ago

“Recently, Huawei has come under intense scrutiny by numerous

Western world governments because of its alleged affiliation with the
Chinese military. The company has been blocked from pursuing several large
business transactions.” http://su.pr/849qFG

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Ivan Malagurski · 4 years ago

I still think CG has no viable business model…

Log in to Reply

nickmyself · 4 years ago

184
 BS, they are stealing US technology ,for chump change. Everyone in
Government is asleep.This will let them clone the best soldiers and slaves.

Log in to Reply

nickmyself nickmyself · 4 years ago

Plus ,make diseases ,we can’t combat.

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xomox · 4 years ago

just another instance of how socially “ugly” china / “the chinese” are in fact!

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http://qz.com/514139/chinese-researchers-are-selling-genetically-altered-micropigs-
as-pets/
Chinese researchers are selling genetically altered micropigs as pets
Svati Kirsten Narula
September 30, 2015

185
Now in stock: genetically altered chinese micropigs. (Reuters/China Newsphoto)

Adorable tiny genetically engineered pigs can now be purchased as house pets in
China.

A genomics research institute in Shenzhen, China, has been cloning miniature pigs
called Bamas and editing their genes to make them even smaller. These micropigs
were perfect conduits for certain experiments relevant to human medicine,
according to the science journal Nature, and the largest they’ll ever weigh is about
15 kg (33 lbs). Most Bama pigs weigh between 35-50 kg, and normal farmed pigs
are often larger than 100 kg.

Now, reports Nature, the research institute (BGI, originally known as the Beijing
Genomics Institute) is selling some of these micropigs to people who want to take
them home as pets. The announcement came last week at the Shenzhen
International Biotech Leaders Summit in China, where BGI scientists said the initial
price tag for the animals would be 10,000 yuan ($1,600). Sales profits will be
invested in the kind of research that these micropigs were cloned for in the first
place: studies of human illnesses that can be replicated in pigs.

Genetic engineering is used widely in agriculture, in plants and livestock, but it has
always been a controversial proposition—and selling such animals as house pets
adds another layer to what some see as an ethical conundrum.

186