

In Iceland’s DNA, New Clues to Disease-Causing Genes - roye
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/science/in-icelands-dna-clues-to-what-genes-may-cause-disease.html

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tokenadult
Adding some emphasis to a key sentence from the article kindly submitted here:
"The wealth of data created in Iceland MAY enable scientists to BEGIN doing
that [shed light on these diseases and point to potential treatments]." Or
maybe not. As likely as not, many of those diseases will have different
genetic background in any person anywhere in the world who is not mostly of
Icelandic ancestry AND LIFESTYLE.

The open article from _Nature Genetics_ is linked immediately below. It is of
course conservative in its conclusions in the usual manner of a scientific
journal article.

[http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201511](http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201511)

I discuss current research papers and commentary articles on human genetics
each week during the school year with the behavior genetics researchers at the
University of Minnesota. Sometimes we read papers on medical genetics, and we
all keep aware of the latest news from the Decode project in Iceland. (Iceland
is interesting to genetics researchers because it hasn't had a large amount of
immigration since initial settlement, and because the people of Iceland have
kept detailed family genealogical records for a long time.) I can't fault the
Decode researchers for trying to mine their data set for everything they can
find there. That will have to be helpful for something, if only to exclude
hypotheses that still seem plausible until they are tested against a large
genomics dataset. But based on more than twenty years of following press
reports and scientific journal articles about the next genetic discovery that
is right around the corner, I rather doubt that we will have much by way of
new understanding of disease causes or new approaches to disease treatment
even from this impressive effort. We will still have to sample a lot of people
from a lot of other ancestral populations, and crucially we will have to
sample people of the SAME ancestry who live in different environments. (Food
for thought: west African people have very different disease profiles from
African-American people who are presumptively of mostly west African
ancestry.) I wish the researchers the best, but "new clues to disease-causing
genes" is probably wishful thinking on the part of the headline writer. (P.S.
I think Carl Zimmer is a great science journalist, and I like most of his
writings on most topics, but nearly all popular press articles on genome
research related to human disease are much more optimistic than the facts
warrant.)

AFTER EDIT: Other press accounts of this same breaking news story are
interesting. They are linked below.

[http://www.technologyreview.com/news/536096/genome-study-
pre...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/536096/genome-study-predicts-dna-
of-the-whole-of-iceland/)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2015/03/25/a-giant...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2015/03/25/a-giant-
genetic-portrait-of-iceland-gives-a-glimpse-of-medicines-future/)

[http://www.wired.com/2015/03/iceland-worlds-greatest-
genetic...](http://www.wired.com/2015/03/iceland-worlds-greatest-genetic-
laboratory/)

[http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/25/8290303/father-
humans-2390...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/25/8290303/father-
humans-239000-years-ago-iceland-genome)

