Think you have remarkable memory traits? Share them by participating in the Harvard PGP-Lumosity Memory Challenge

Image Credit: PGP homepage It all starts with Professor George Church’s vision. Church is a core faculty member at the Wyss Institute and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. In 2005, he launched the Personal Genome Project (PGP), which collects data on a person’s DNA, environmental background, and relevant health and disease information from consenting participants. The premise of the PGP is grounded in open science, meaning that all this data is publicly available to researchers, who then study the relationship between specific DNA sequences and various displayed traits, like having an especially good memory. This openness is the hallmark of the PGP, described on their website as “a vision and coalition of projects across the world dedicated to creating public genome, health, and trait data.” The PGP seeks to share data for the “greater good” in ways that have been previously “hampered by traditional research practices.” In other ...