In Iceland’s DNA, New Clues to Disease-Causing Genes

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

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.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2015/03/25/a-giant...

http://www.wired.com/2015/03/iceland-worlds-greatest-genetic...

http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/25/8290303/father-humans-2390...