A Dissenting Voice as the Genome Is Sifted to Fight Disease

[groovedaddy]

The principal rationale for the $3 billion spent to decode the human genome was that it would enable the discovery of the variant genes that predispose people to common diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. A major expectation was that these variants had not been eliminated by natural selection because they harm people only later in life after their reproductive years are over, and hence that they would be common.

This idea, called the common disease/common variant hypothesis, drove major developments in biology over the last five years. Washington financed the HapMap, a catalog of common genetic variation in the human population. Companies like Affymetrix and Illumina developed powerful gene chips for scanning the human genome. Medical statisticians designed the genomewide association study, a robust methodology for discovering true disease genes and sidestepping the many false positives that have plagued the field.

But David B. Goldstein of Duke University, a leading young population geneticist known partly for his research into the genetic roots of Jewish ancestry, says the effort to nail down the genetics of most common diseases is not working. “There is absolutely no question,” he said, “that for the whole hope of personalized medicine, the news has been just about as bleak as it could be.”

Of the HapMap and other techniques developed to make sense of the human genome, Dr. Goldstein said, “Technically, it was a tour de force.” But in his view, this prodigious labor has produced just a handful of genes that account for very little of the overall genetic risk.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/science/16prof.html?th&emc=th

[truedelphi]

1. My own opinion of disease is that a great deal of it depends on

Environmentals factors. Things as simple as eating or not eating meat.

Not being sprayed with pesticides. Or living in an artificial environment loaded with the phenols and phenyls and formaldehydes of Glade and Lysol and Febreeze. Not having mold or fungus floating around in the air you breathe. Not having pests like strongyloids living in your brain or spinal column.

Not being stressed. Having diets free of too much salt, sugar, food additives and MSG. And of course getting a lot of exercise, and a lot of outdoor time.

I forget which Native American chieftain said to missionaries that before the White Man came, the People knew nothing of disease, unless injured in hunting accidents or in battles with other tribes.

[qazplm]

2. that chieftain

was likely lying.

Of course the native americans knew of disease. There were no food additives anywhere in ancient times or MSG, salt was at a premium, and sugar wasnt popular in Europe until nearly the Renaissance. There were no pesticides or any of the other things you describe and yet there were plenty of diseases to go around. Moreso than now.

[TZ]

3. Ummm no.

Environment is only part of it...Genetics plays a HUGE part but like many things, many diseases are influenced by both. Or have you not seen the stories about athletes who are in peak shape dying from congenital heart disease..And as for chieftan..yeah right..Tell me there weren't bacteria and viri here until the white man came? Thats utterly ridiculous..also remember..they didn't know germ theory back then so their definition of disease wasn't actually the same as now.

I could rattle off a bunch of diseases right now that are genetically based including several cancers.

[caraher]

4. No disease? Of course not. But...

the resistance to many viral and bacterial illnesses was certainly much lower among Native Americans; why would that be? Clearly the native population had not been exposed to those viri and bacteria sufficiently to have as strong a resistance as the Europeans did. I've read the claim that European animal management and agricultural practices tended to create a more fertile breeding ground for disease-causing germs than what the native population was doing; I have no idea how true that is. But it does seem like there's something more at work than just two populations swapping germs on a roughly equal basis, because unless I'm mistaken European settlers tended not to be wiped out by New World diseases to the same extent native populations fell to germs brought across the Atlantic.

So it seems at least somewhat plausible that there was a significant difference in the prevalence of disease-causing bacteria and viri in the New World prior to European colonization. I've understood it to have been a sort of inadvertent genocide; with the first settlements came epidemics, so when the Europeans pushed inland 90% or so of the pre-existing population was dead. To them, it appeared an empty land, even more than it would have otherwise.

This is all from memory of just a few books; I'd gladly accept corrections!