Yes, your comment is way off topic, but I'll briefly respond to say that I haven't seen this behavior. In grad school, I was in a small lab with no direct connection to TCGA and we had no problems getting access to the protected data. Yes, you need to state a rough research plan so that they can verify that you'll safeguard protected patient information. Yes, you also need to wait until the marker paper is published, as the people who worked so hard to generate the data get the first shot at one general paper describing the dataset. I don't feel like that's unreasonable. - Chris Miller