The Next Big Thing? This post is from Guest Blogger, Stanley
Nelson, M.D. Dr. Nelson is the Director for the UCLA Site of the
NIH Neuroscience Microarray Consortium, and Professor of Human
Genetics and Psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine
at UCLA. Dr. Nelson was also a co-author on last week’s
collaborative Nature paper. Investments in the genetics of
autism have been substantial and the results are beginning to
come forth, with last week’s announcement of the latest findings
from our collaborative Autism Genome Project adding to
previously identified genes and copy number variations that made
last year’s Top 10 Autism Research Achievements of 2009. The
latest results, funded in large part by the tremendous efforts
of Autism Speaks, are interesting alone, and I hope that all
have learned that there are indeed novel genes being identified
that lead to autism. However, there is a perhaps more important
message from the paper which relates directly to the couple
hundred thousand families directly af