Welcome to genomics. But based on your handle, I'm guessing you already work in a genomics-related area.
Genomics has a terrible hype problem, like ML. Genomics researchers have decades of experience making their papers souond far more significant and actionable than they really are.
We've mostly moved past the "we found a gene for..." which sort of considers phenotypes as mendelian (only two alleles per gene, independent segregation, single SNP is highly penetrant, etc) to the association approach, which as you point out, isn't satisfying from a causality or mechanistic viewpoint.
In adopting the association approach we have learned (unsurprisingly IMHO) that most organismal phenotypes (I'm treating this risk as a phenotype, which is a fairly loose interpretation) are caused by the interaction of the environment and thousands of changes to thousands of genes, all of which are non-additive and non-linear.
Yes. Agreed. I think the headline is trying to make it sound like something like this was discovered, but that's far from the level of progress described in the actual research. It's the excess advertising that's ruining peoples' view of science.
Genomics has a terrible hype problem, like ML. Genomics researchers have decades of experience making their papers souond far more significant and actionable than they really are.
We've mostly moved past the "we found a gene for..." which sort of considers phenotypes as mendelian (only two alleles per gene, independent segregation, single SNP is highly penetrant, etc) to the association approach, which as you point out, isn't satisfying from a causality or mechanistic viewpoint.
In adopting the association approach we have learned (unsurprisingly IMHO) that most organismal phenotypes (I'm treating this risk as a phenotype, which is a fairly loose interpretation) are caused by the interaction of the environment and thousands of changes to thousands of genes, all of which are non-additive and non-linear.