Last week, three teams of scientists published three massive studies in Nature on the genes behind schizophrenia. They scanned thousands of people to find variants of genes that tended to show up more in people with schizophrenia than in those without it. And they found a heap of genes. There are thousands of different variants that each may raise your risk of schizophrenia by a tiny amount. Nicholas Wade, a veteran genetics reporter at the New York Times, has been following the quest to trace diseases to genes for a long time now. And when Wade tried his hand at blogging last week, he laid down a harsh verdict.
Press releases from five American and European institutions celebrated the findings, one using epithets like “landmark,” “major step forward,” and “real scientific breakthrough.” It was the kind of hoopla you’d expect for an actual scientific advance. It seems to me the ...
