Business Week provides Beginner’s guide to the genome sequencing factory in a nice article -
“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 1/3,000th of the entire genome, Church says. For about $4,000, BGI does the whole thing.
What next? Are they going IPO Silicon valley style? We hope not !!
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Question for readers:
In an earlier thread, we said -
Science in USA has become very hierarchical and people consider authority more important than scientific process of logical argument.
and reader Damian responded -
I agree with you, except that I think that’s science everywhere in the world. Academia seems to be becoming a kind of a ‘priesthood’.
The posted article about BGI suggests that China is an exception to the above generalization. Is that true? Does anyone have more direct experience with scientific culture in China/BGI to filter out reality from promotional writing ? We always try to maintain healthy distrust Business Week 
The success of BGI can only be manipulated in China. The bioinformatics analysis is still too laboursome, too tedious at this moment. We need clever guys to figure our combination of assemblers and ad hoc utilities for complex genomes, we need workers to tell which file is corrupted due to network transfer, we need someone that can write in Nature style.
But for guys who have all these skills, which I think is more conceptually a “scientist”, is not common in BGI. Thus safe from the hierarchy problem.
Thanks Ruibang. What amazes me is the scale of operation. If only 5% of 3000 or so of BGI employees are independent thinkers in bioinformatics (‘scientists’), then you have more bioinformaticians than most US universities.
Questions:
1) Why not IPO? BGI is a for profit company after all.
2) Who owns BGI now? The PLA? Shareholders? Who?
3) Wouldn’t “New Yorker” style writing be better than “Nature” style? Scientist complain they can’t use software or understand data formats but then write this stuff that nobody can understand.
On 3, this book is a good mixture of both -
http://www.homolog.us/blogs/2013/02/11/possibly-the-best-book-on-personal-genomics-and-personalized-medicine/
[...] earlier posted about ‘BGI Model’ here and here, and received insightful comments from Ruibang, Kevin Chen and other readers. Nature blog posted a [...]